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  • Moving from an IT department to a proper technology company

    - by user2434
    I have been working with Java/web applications in an IT department of a retail company. As much as work goes, there is nothing much to say. Fixing couple of if/else loops, writing some simple business logic etc., is all what I have been doing. Having said that, I feel I have a good technical knowledge, and I am willing to move to companies like Microsoft/Google/Amazon etc., [I want to work in these places, because I feel I am a technical guy, and I am working in a place where most people freak out when the words like 'algorithm' are heard] I can of course prepare algorithms/computer science fundamentals etc.,(I hold a 4 year degree in computer science program) but beyond that, will my experience hold against me ? I doubt I'll even get a call from them seeing my work experience. What kind of questions(apart from the algorithm types) can I expect ?

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  • Business Analyst vs. Architect [closed]

    - by suslik
    I'm a developer of a few years in the financial industry and will soon need to decide what career path to try and row towards. Broadly speaking I have two options: something more 'people' oriented like BAs, or keep coding and try to make more technical decisions like the Architects do where I currently work. Here are my perceptions right now: Business Analysts: get paid way more than devs once they do their job, it seems like they usually have no worries more likely to go REALLY high up in the organization (VPs, etc) Architects: things like certification matters (I see this as a con) called in when things go wrong more than anyone else (weekends & overtime) long career path to get to (dev - senior dev - team lead - architect) I would find the latter more intellectually rewarding, but when I look at it I just can't justify it in terms of lifestyle. Am I wrong / what am I missing? Can you really make a lot of money in a technical role or must you really get out of coding? Thank you for any constructive input.

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  • Am I unhireable?

    - by DrSammyD
    I've received my B.S. in Software Engineering in August 2010 and I've been looking for a job since. I've gotten two interviews since that went up to the technical phone interview and then they were no longer interested. One of the recruiters mentioned to me that they thought my fundamentals weren't strong enough. What do I need to brush up on in order to get past the technical phone interview. My language of most experience is C#. I know Object Oriented Programming. I know what the difference between an interface and an abstract class is. I've applied to positions from game programming to WPF/Silverlight. I have a portfolio website www.samarmstrong.me. It also has my resume on there. I never had real internship. Am I unhireable?

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  • Exim rejects recipient address on my domain

    - by Nicolas
    Hi, I have a dedicated server (debian) on which I have installed Exim and Dovecot. Everything worked fine until around a month ago. I tried to reinstall and reconfigure exim but I keep having all the incoming emails rejected. Outlook says: A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [email protected] SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:: host mail.mydomain.com [94.76.##.##]: 550 relay not permitted GMAIL: Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: [email protected] Technical details of permanent failure: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 relay not permitted (state 14). On the server side, my rejectlog file shows: 2011-01-04 17:09:21 H=mail-qw0-f53.google.com [209.85.216.53] F=<####@gmail.com rejected RCPT : relay not permitted ... and the mainlog file: 2011-01-04 17:00:01 1PaAEr-0007vN-DX <= root@ETC_MAILNAME U=root P=local S=869 2011-01-04 17:00:01 1PaAEr-0007vN-DX ** root@etc_mailname: Unrouteable address 2011-01-04 17:00:01 1PaAEr-0007vY-Kn Error while reading message with no usable sender address (R=1PaAEr-0007vN-DX): at least one malformed recipient address: root@ETC_MAILNAME - malformed address: _MAILNAME may not follow root@ETC 2011-01-04 17:00:01 1PaAEr-0007vN-DX Process failed (1) when writing error message to root@ETC_MAILNAME (frozen) 2011-01-04 17:09:21 no IP address found for host MAIN_RELAY_NETS (during SMTP connection from mail-qw0-f53.google.com [209.85.216.53]) 2011-01-04 17:09:21 H=mail-qw0-f53.google.com [209.85.216.53] F=<####@gmail.com rejected RCPT : relay not permitted then after the message becomes frozen: 2011-01-04 17:28:44 1PaAEr-0007vN-DX Message is frozen Thank you for your help, any idea/comment is welcomed as I am really running out of idea to fix this issue, Nicolas. Oh and the PHP mail() function does not do anything as well, would it be linked to? I think mail() uses sendmail from my php.ini.

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  • Active Directory: how to be SURE users can change their own passwords?

    - by Latro
    Working on some project where a tool we have has to authenticate against AD connecting via LDAPS and perform password changes if required or requested. IN THEORY, the tool does that, and we have seen it work in other projects. IN PRACTICE, against this particular directory, it fails. Been driving me crazy. The particulars of the situation: Windows 2003 AD Defined a "technical user" for the LDAP connection with rights to change users passwords When password change is required - in this case, because pwdLastSet is 0 - the tool uses the technical account to go, bind to the controller and change the user password. If password change is not required but the user request it, then the bind is done with the user account. That last condition is the one that doesnt work. With the technical user the password change is possible, but with the user itself, it isnt. We get an error like this: LDAP access failed: javax.naming.directory.InvalidAttributeValueException: [LDAP: error code 19 - 0000052D: AtrErr: DSID-03190F00, #1: 0: 0000052D: DSID-03190F00, problem 1005 (CONSTRAINT_ATT_TYPE), data 0, Att 9005a (unicodePwd) no idea what DSID-03190F00 means cause it doesnt seem to be anywhere in google :-/ Been looking at several MS documentation pages and frankly, I'm not understanding one bit of it. There is some "control access right" called User-Change-Password that may, or may not, control what objects have the right to change their own password, which may, or may not, have to do with ACE and ACLs... There is GPO. There is maybe the password policy but it is only set to ask for passwords of 6 chars or more... Can anybody explain to me in easy-to-check steps how can I go and tell the AD admin guy (who is as lost as me) what to do to ensure that users in the AD directory (objectClass top,person,organizationalPerson and user) are able to change their own passwords by themselves? Thanks in advance

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  • R and version control for the solo data analyst

    - by Jeromy Anglim
    Many data analysts that I respect use version control. For example: http://github.com/hadley/ See comments on http://permut.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/revision-control-statistics-bleg/ However, I'm evaluating whether adopting a version control system such as git would be worthwhile. A brief overview: I'm a social scientist who uses R to analyse data for research publications. I don't currently produce R packages. My R code for a project typically includes a few thousand lines of code for data input, cleaning, manipulation, analyses, and output generation. Publications are typically written using LaTeX. With regards to version control there are many benefits which I have read about, yet they seem to be less relevant to the solo data analyst. Backup: I have a backup system already in place. Forking and rewinding: I've never felt the need to do this, but I can see how it could be useful (e.g., you are preparing multiple journal articles based on the same dataset; you are preparing a report that is updated monthly, etc) Collaboration: Most of the time I am analysing data myself, thus, I woudln't get the collaboration benefits of version control. There are also several potential costs involved with adopting version control: Time to evaluate and learn a version control system A possible increase in complexity over my current file management system However, I still have the feeling that I'm missing something. General guides on version control seem to be addressed more towards computer scientists than data analysts. Thus, specifically in relation to data analysts in circumstances similar to those listed above: Is version control worth the effort? What are the main pros and cons of adopting version control? What is a good strategy for getting started with version control for data analysis with R (e.g., examples, workflow ideas, software, links to guides)?

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  • drupal - override form action?

    - by n00b0101
    I originally started this question in another thread, but that thread was sorta, kinda answered, and now I primarily want to know how to specify another form action... I tried using the code below, but the form action, when output, remains unchanged, although looking at the print_r($form), it's correctly changed... Why isn't it picking up? function mytheme_user_profile_form($form) { global $user; $uid = $user->uid; //print '<pre>'; print_r($form); print '</pre>'; $category = $form['_category']['#value']; switch($category) { case 'account': $form['#action'] = '/user/'.$uid.'/edit?destination=user/'.$uid; break; case 'education': $form['#action'] = '/user/'.$uid.'/edit/education?destination=user/'.$uid; break; case 'experience': $form['#action'] = '/user/'.$uid.'/edit/experience?destination=user/'.$uid; break; case 'publications': $form['#action'] = '/user/'.$uid.'/edit/publications?destination=user/'.$uid; break; case 'conflicts': $form['#action'] = '/user/'.$uid.'/edit/conflicts?destination=user/'.$uid; break; } //print '<pre>'; print_r($form); print '</pre>'; //print $form['#action']; $output .= drupal_render($form); return $output;

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  • Update mapping table in Linq

    - by Gary McGill
    I have a table Customers with a CustomerId field, and a table of Publications with a PublicationId field. Finally, I have a mapping table CustomersPublications that records which publications a customer can access - it has two fields: CustomerId field PublicationId. For a given customer, I want to update the CustomersPublications table based on a list of publication ids. I want to remove records in CustomersPublications where the PublicationId is not in the list, and add new records where the PublicationId is in the list but not already in the table. This would be easy in SQL, but I can't figure out how to do it in Linq. For the delete part, I tried: var recordsToDelete = dataContext.CustomersPublications.Where ( cp => (cp.CustomerId == customerId) && ! publicationIds.Contains(cp.PublicationId) ); dataContext.CustomersPublications.DeleteAllOnSubmit(recordsToDelete); ... but that didn't work. I got an error: System.NotSupportedException: Method 'Boolean Contains(Int32)' has no supported translation to SQL So, I tried using Any(), as follows: var recordsToDelete = dataContext.CustomersPublications.Where ( cp => (cp.CustomerId == customerId) && ! publicationIds.Any(p => p == cp.PublicationId) ); ... and this just gives me another error: System.NotSupportedException: Local sequence cannot be used in LINQ to SQL implementation of query operators except the Contains() operator Any pointers? [I have to say, I find Linq baffling (and frustrating) for all but the simplest queries. Better error messages would help!]

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  • Sanitizing user input that will later be e-mailed - what should I be worried about?

    - by Kevin Burke
    I'm interning for an NGO in India (Seva Mandir, http://sevamandir.org) and trying to fix their broken "subscribe to newsletter" box. Because the staff isn't very sophisticated and our web host isn't great, I decided to send the relevant data to the publications person via mail() instead of storing it in a MySQL database. I know that it's best to treat user input as malicious, and I've searched the SO forums for posts relevant to escaping user data for sending in a mail message. I know the data should be escaped; what should I be worried about and what's the best way to sanitize the input before emailing it? Form flow: 1. User enters email on homepage and clicks Submit 2. User enters name, address, more information on second page (bad usability, I know, but my boss asked me to) and clicks "Submit" 3. Collect the data via $_POST and email it to the publications editor (and possibly send a confirmation to the subscriber). I am going to sanitize the email in step 2 and the other data in step 3. I appreciate your help, Kevin

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  • CMIS vs. WebDAV

    - by Nicolas Raoul
    What are the main technical differences between CMIS and WebDAV? If applicable, what exactly does CMIS improves over WebDAV? I am not asking about adoption rates or number of implementations, just about the technical differences between each of those standards.

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  • interview questions for a 7 year Exp Guy?

    - by harigm
    What kind of approach I(5 Years Exp In Java J2ee Platform) need to follow to interview 8 years exp Guy in Java and J2ee technology. I am asking all the basic questions, where he is able to answer, if he is atleast the bookish knowledge. I want to ask some thing different where we can check his actual skills in technical. Can any one help me with some thoughts where i can use to get some good and technical challenging questions to ask?

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  • Create a Session in Django

    - by Reznor
    So far the Documentation for Django has been too technical. How do I create a session and store variables in it or get variables from it? I'm new to the Django framework, hence why the Documentation is too technical. Sessions are my 'last step'.

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  • What are the limitations of assembler? (NASM)

    - by citronas
    Is there a technical limitation of what kind of programs I can write with assembler (NASM)? For now I've only seem some program that do arithmetic operations, like adding two numbers. Is it possible to write complex assembler programs, that provide a GUI, access the file system, plays sounds et cetera? I know I wouldn't write such programs, but I'm curious, if there are technical limitations on what kind of programs I can write with assembler.

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  • how to start learning Java scripting

    - by antriksh
    Dear All, I am experienced in the technical support like Linux, oracle, sunos etc and but if i say scripting i know little bit of bash. Now i promoted to manage technical engineers inuding some java script developers, so i want to learn java scripting so that i can understand engineers. Hope you understand. Can you please advise me how can i start java scripting and point me to some simple docs and examples.

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  • how to start learning JavaScript

    - by antriksh
    Dear All, I am experienced in the technical support like Linux, oracle, sunos etc and but if i say scripting i know little bit of bash. Now i promoted to manage technical engineers including some JavaScript developers, so i want to learn JavaScripting so that i can understand engineers. Hope you understand. Can you please advise me how can i start JavaScripting and point me to some simple docs and examples.

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  • Why doesn't Java allow for the creaton of generic arrays?

    - by byte
    There are plenty of questions on stackoverflow from people who have attempted to create an array of generics like so: ArrayList<Foo>[] poo = new ArrayList<Foo>[5]; And the answer of course is that the Java specification doesn't allow you to declare an array of generics. My question however is why ? What is the technical reason underlying this restriction in the java language or java vm? It's a technical curiosity I've always wondered about.

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  • What reasons are there NOT to use OpenID?

    - by cletus
    You see a fair bit (in the Geek community anyway) about OpenID. It seems like a good idea. I'm developing a website that will be targeted at a somewhat less geeky audience (but not quite Mom and Pops either) so I have to wonder if OpenID is going to be "too hard" for some audiences. What do you think? That aside, are there any other technical or non-technical reasons NOT to use OpenID?

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  • Chroot for Mysql running on Ubuntu 10.10?

    - by Calvin Froedge
    Prompted from a question about MySQL server security best practices, I've been running through this list (with a few minor alterations) to properly secure my server database server: http://www.greensql.net/publications/mysql-security-best-practices On step 10, I'm told to change the root directory for the mysql user using chroot, but very few specifics are provided and I'm not sure where to start. Does anyone know of a good resource for walking me through the steps to properly create a chrooted environment for Ubuntu 10.10?

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  • The Product Owner

    - by Robert May
    In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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  • Pain Comes Instantly

    - by user701213
    When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

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  • Conversation as User Assistance

    - by ultan o'broin
    Applications User Experience members (Erika Web, Laurie Pattison, and I) attended the User Assistance Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. We were impressed with the thought leadership and practical application of ideas in Anne Gentle's keynote address "Social Web Strategies for Documentation". After the conference, we spoke with Anne to explore the ideas further. Anne Gentle (left) with Applications User Experience Senior Director Laurie Pattison In Anne's book called Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, she explains how user assistance is undergoing a seismic shift. The direction is away from the old print manuals and online help concept towards a web-based, user community-driven solution using social media tools. User experience professionals now have a vast range of such tools to start and nurture this "conversation": blogs, wikis, forums, social networking sites, microblogging systems, image and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, podcasts, instant messaging, mashups, and so on. That user communities are a rich source of user assistance is not a surprise, but the extent of available assistance is. For example, we know from the Consortium for Service Innovation that there has been an 'explosion' of user-generated content on the web. User-initiated community conversations provide as much as 30 times the number of official help desk solutions for consortium members! The growing reliance on user community solutions is clearly a user experience issue. Anne says that user assistance as conversation "means getting closer to users and helping them perform well. User-centered design has been touted as one of the most important ideas developed in the last 20 years of workplace writing. Now writers can take the idea of user-centered design a step further by starting conversations with users and enabling user assistance in interactions." Some of Anne's favorite examples of this paradigm shift from the world of traditional documentation to community conversation include: Writer Bob Bringhurst's blog about Adobe InDesign and InCopy products and Adobe's community help The Microsoft Development Network Community Center ·The former Sun (now Oracle) OpenDS wiki, NetBeans Ruby and other community approaches to engage diverse audiences using screencasts, wikis, and blogs. Cisco's customer support wiki, EMC's community, as well as Symantec and Intuit's approaches The efforts of Ubuntu, Mozilla, and the FLOSS community generally Adobe Writer Bob Bringhurst's Blog Oracle is not without a user community conversation too. Besides the community discussions and blogs around documentation offerings, we have the My Oracle Support Community forums, Oracle Technology Network (OTN) communities, wiki, blogs, and so on. We have the great work done by our user groups and customer councils. Employees like David Haimes reach out, and enthusiastic non-employee gurus like Chet Justice (OracleNerd), Floyd Teter and Eddie Awad provide great "how-to" information too. But what does this paradigm shift mean for existing technical writers as users turn away from the traditional printable PDF manual deliverables? We asked Anne after the conference. The writer role becomes one of conversation initiator or enabler. The role evolves, along with the process, as the users define their concept of user assistance and terms of engagement with the product instead of having it pre-determined. It is largely a case now of "inventing the job while you're doing it, instead of being hired for it" Anne said. There is less emphasis on formal titles. Anne mentions that her own title "Content Stacker" at OpenStack; others use titles such as "Content Curator" or "Community Lead". However, the role remains one essentially about communications, "but of a new type--interacting with users, moderating, curating content, instead of sitting down to write a manual from start to finish." Clearly then, this role is open to more than professional technical writers. Product managers who write blogs, developers who moderate forums, support professionals who update wikis, rock star programmers with a penchant for YouTube are ideal. Anyone with the product knowledge, empathy for the user, and flair for relationships on the social web can join in. Some even perform these roles already but do not realize it. Anne feels the technical communicator space will move from hiring new community conversation professionals (who are already active in the space through blogging, tweets, wikis, and so on) to retraining some existing writers over time. Our own research reveals that the established proponents of community user assistance even set employee performance objectives for internal content curators about the amount of community content delivered by people outside the organization! To take advantage of the conversations on the web as user assistance, enterprises must first establish where on the spectrum their community lies. "What is the line between community willingness to contribute and the enterprise objectives?" Anne asked. "The relationship with users must be managed and also measured." Anne believes that the process can start with a "just do it" approach. Begin by reaching out to existing user groups, individual bloggers and tweeters, forum posters, early adopter program participants, conference attendees, customer advisory board members, and so on. Use analytical tools to measure the level of conversation about your products and services to show a return on investment (ROI), winning management support. Anne emphasized that success with the community model is dependent on lowering the technical and motivational barriers so that users can readily contribute to the conversation. Simple tools must be provided, and guidelines, if any, must be straightforward but not mandatory. The conversational approach is one where traditional style and branding guides do not necessarily apply. Tools and infrastructure help users to create content easily, to search and find the information online, read it, rate it, translate it, and participate further in the content's evolution. Recognizing contributors by using ratings on forums, giving out Twitter kudos, conference invitations, visits to headquarters, free products, preview releases, and so on, also encourages the adoption of the conversation model. The move to conversation as user assistance is not free, but there is a business ROI. The conversational model means that customer service is enhanced, as user experience moves from a functional to a valued, emotional level. Studies show a positive correlation between loyalty and financial performance (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2010), and as customer experience and loyalty become key differentiators, user experience professionals cannot explore the model's possibilities. The digital universe (measured at 1.2 million petabytes in 2010) is doubling every 12 to 18 months, and 70 percent of that universe consists of user-generated content (IDC, 2010). Conversation as user assistance cannot be ignored but must be embraced. It is a time to manage for abundance, not scarcity. Besides, the conversation approach certainly sounds more interesting, rewarding, and fun than the traditional model! I would like to thank Anne for her time and thoughts, and recommend that all user assistance professionals read her book. You can follow Anne on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/annegentle. Oracle's Acrolinx IQ deployment was used to author this article.

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