acoliver's blog

I've donated my old MacBook Pro (5,2 unibody) to the mobile development team. I've replaced it with a Dell Precision M4600 with a solid state drive, 16GB of ram, core i7 and various other bells and whistles. This meant upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 and the new Unity desktop. I was prepared to hate it. Shockingly, I think it is a big step forward for Linux.

dislikes

I'm flying home from LAX tomorrow morning to hopefully make it to Raleigh in time for the IndieConf Speakers Dinner. My talk on Saturday at 2p. I'm an
experienced public speaker, however this is the first talk I've been a bit nervous about in years. I'm used to giving talks on technical talks to developers or higher level strategy talks to Directors, VPs and CxOs. However, I've never given a talk quite this raw and personal. I decided to challenge myself and "go naked". By that I mean no slides. I plan to use a very "old style" and a very "new style". I will keep some notes on index cards (or paper if I don't have time to buy some that fit in my printer) and use the notes to keep my place but otherwise talk. I've prepped for this somewhat obsessively probably to the chagrin of my neighbors in the hotel room next to me.

I am blogging this because I keep losing it and want it to come up in google exactly like this next time I search for it. You are welcome to use it and charge millions of dollars for it (or not) if someone will pay it. If you need something cryptographically
random this is not it. It will generate first/last names suitable for obscuring the real first/last name for test data purposes (for instance).

I was bummed to miss Open Software Integrators own Shawn Hartsock speaking at SpringOne 2GX, however, I had to give my ticket up to work with an important strategic client of one of our partners. Meanwhile I've been asked to give a talk of my own at IndieConf. I call this talk "The things I wished someone had told me..." In just 3 years we've gone from 1 to over 15 people. When I started there are a lot of things I didn't know that I really should have known. I did start with over 10 years in the industry and good connections....oh and I married a bookkeeper (essential).

Tomorrow at the Madison Java User Group (MadJUG):
Open Software Integrators' resident Groovy Guru, Shawn Hartsock, will illuminate us with the outcome of his successful quests for the holy Grails of cloud performance and cloud deployment. Shawn will talk about a few ways in which you can do cloud computing. He will review a project that he created in Gaelyk for observing the cloud "under load". He will compare and contrast cloud (or "Internet scale") applications from "enterprise" scale applications.

Several growlers of beer were consumed, pizzas were eaten and a good time was had by all. A few things impressed me. There is a considerable amount of interest, knowledge and talent in Home Automation among our local community. There were over 20 people here and many knew a lot about the subject already, some even knew of OpenRemote. My team could have done the entire event without me. Our newest hire, Andrew Puch could have done my part of the presentation and to some degree stole the show. Andrew Ball was in teleconference and Google Huddle from a remote location. He fielded all of the hard code questions.

Sign up for the Open Remote meetup at Open Software Integrators.

One of my favorite projects that my team works on is OpenRemote. I geek out on this stuff:

Sony was reportedly hacked by SQL injection. Protecting against SQL injection is simple. Never use string concatenation for user submitted content. Not only is query creation by string concatenation not secure, but also has performance implications. With modern computer languages and APIs there is no reason to do it this way! For Java-based technologies using JDBC use PreparedStatement and use arguments.