Jellyfish at Monterey Bay Aquarium

Jellyfish
Originally uploaded by wck

Against all odds, it's actually sunny and warm in Monterey today! Wow. I was fully expecting the weather to be the same as it was the last time I was here, in June 2000- chilly, foggy, and gray.

Let's see... I woke up early and had some coffee on our deck. Then we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, walked around for 2 hours and then took the 'behind the scenes' tour, which was very neat. Afterwards we had lunch and did the 17 mile drive. I got my toes and fingers into the Pacific, but wow- it was very very cold. I first saw the Pacific ocean about 10 years ago, in June 1998, so it seemed fitting to spend the afternoon scrambling around tide pools and lying around in the sunshine. So relaxing and wonderful, in so many ways.

It's funny, how peaceful water makes me feel. Growing up on the lake, I was basically submerged for 4 months each year, and I think I'll never outgrow the need to be near as possible to a lake or an ocean.

Repeats

This is a picture of Kate that I took in March 2006. And this is a picture of Tom that I took on Saturday and posted to my blog this morning. It's uncanny watching Tom pick up the same mannerisms that Kate had as a toddler, like watching her childhood rewind and spool forward again in slow motion. On Saturday I took two rolls of film of Tom, one outside and one inside, and he was such a dream to photograph. Like Kate, he's very natural and doesn't wiggle around much. Ana will never that be that easy to take pictures of. My sister calls her our square peg, but... well, I'm too close to her to tell. My sharpest memories of her are all the times I held her and jiggled her to sleep in my arms, just a blurred stream of memories of her teensy body curled in my arms, endless rocking her. She's two and a half now, and she's finally starting to look a little bit older. She engages a little more with people around. She's always been listening, but seeing the responses from her now feel a little startling in ways. This weekend I was holding her on my hip and attempting to find my car keys in my huge work purse. I stood by the car, in the light drizzle, for a good two minutes, fumbling around through tissues and EVDO cards and headphones and my notebooks, and then yanked them out and held them up. She broke out in a huge laugh. We had such a funny moment, standing there trying to get the car open so that I could buckle her in.

This afternoon I walked to pick up a late lunch, down Bowery, past construction site after construction site, blocks and blocks. When I reached St Marks, I remembered all of a sudden what it reminded me of. The staircases and storefronts are exactly like Newbury St in Boston. Really, this had been bugging me for months, every time I walked through there I would get this odd "I know somewhere just like this" feeling about it. St Marks is a crazy place to get that sort of feeling about, in some ways it could be anywhere.

tom

tom
Originally uploaded by wck

11 months old already!

My Pumpkin Vine

My Pumpkin Vine
Originally uploaded by wck

That's my pumpkin vine from 2 years ago. We're supposed to have decent weather this weekend, so it's time to set up the summer veggie gardens! Mmmmmm yum.

transit hubs

Seattle's new Olympic Sculpture Park has gorgeous views of Elliot Bay, but it also has a grassy elevated path which runs over some (rather heavily used) train tracks. I spent a lot of time sitting on the red chairs near that pathway, watching planes lining up overhead to land at SeaTac, and cargo ships pulling in and out of the port of Seattle, and the freight trains underneath. I loved that this one spot allowed visibility into so many transportation hubs. There's a place on the NJT rails where the M&E line runs next to the PATH rains and then splits off from the NEC line... which is also directly under the usual approach path to Newark Airport. I have a feeling that only transportation network geeks like spots like that.

Birthday Letters

Isn't it a bit weird how something can be so deeply a part of your life at one point, and then it slips away and you almost forget about it? And then the jolt when you suddenly are re-introduced to it... Marginal Revolution does a regular "what I'm reading" series, among other small series of posts, and today's contains Ted Hughes Birthday Letters, which is a book of poetry.

My sister gave the book to me for a 21st birthday present at the end of my junior year. The next year, I needed to do an indepent study project in the studio art department for my major, and I chose to do a series of digitally manipulated photographs inspired by on poem in the book. I lived in the darkroom and computer lab with that poem for months and months and so on. Then I graduated, and packed it all away.

There are two pieces from that project in my flickr stream, here and here.

On Contracts

I don't think that there has ever been a foray into legal territory on my blog, if I think about it. Which is a bit odd, because I'm not a lawyer, but my dad is, and I love talking about trials and legal things with him. The downside to having a trial attorney as a father is that I've never in my life won an argument with him, but there's a lot of upside to it in terms of dinner table conversation. All of which is a small introduction to a great WSJ article on Wal Mart's former video taping firm.

Candid Camera: Trove of Videos Vexes Wal-Mart

My dad is not terribly tech savvy, so I print out articles on legal topics that I find for him sometimes, and this one was way too good to pass up. We had a great dinner conversation about it today. Speaking of which, WSJ's Law Blog is always an excellent read. I'm not saying that because I'm thrilled that I've found another person who will admit publicly to arriving at work at 7:30 AM. Really!

Painted Powerbook 520

Painted Powerbook 520
Originally uploaded by wck

My white macbook has been looking a bit grungy recently. I wonder if I should pull out the laptop paints again?

The powerbook in the picture was my computer in college... yes, I have a Studio Art degree to go with my CS degree. Notice that the apple logo on the cover was upside down- they were all the way up through the powerbook g3s.

Amazon Web Services DCI - The Dog Computer Interface

This is Declan in early 2000 at Amazon.com:



It was an early version of the DCI - Dog Computer Interface. Here is a later version, from 2003 or so:


(notice integration with Official Amazon Door Desks in this one, enabling each web dev to have a Declan available under their work surface)

And today, the AWS group announces the official release of the DCI - The Dog Computer Interface!

"adserver on master"

I found this slip of paper in my perl cookbook a few mornings ago. It's probably from spring 2001 or so, and it was written by Brian & left on my desk.



What is it? It's a small piece of the deployment system for the first amazon ad server. Brian and I worked on it together, along with a couple other amazonians, and we all sat on one hallway on the first floor of pacmed. I was probably out walking Declan when he pushed the latest ad server software and needed a sign off before it could go out, so he wrote this note and left it on my desk. Amazon basically has three levels of deployment. First there's a test server, where all the data is from the test domain. Then there's a "master" environment that this note refers to- and finally production. Code has to be signed off on by QA (that would have been me) on the test server and then on the master server again before it can be pushed.

I'm trying to remember how I let him know that I'd given my signoff... it was probably over email. I'm not sure that the ad server got an official sign off tracking form until it was a year or two old. You'll notice that at some point over the last seven years I doodled in red in the eyes of the smiley face. I have no idea when that was- possibly while I was running the preflight, waiting for something to load. I also noticed the "please" and "thanks" in this note - despite all the protests he'll give you, Brian is really a southern gentleman at heart.

This has brought back a lot of great memories from our initial launch of the ad server and the first year that it was up. Making apricot scones the weekend before launch for our Sunday AM bug bash. Our friend Greg, who was a web dev at the time, naming the templating language that we wrote ads in. (It's called "schusteranto" after Brian. Pretty cool that he has a programming language named after him, even if it is just an tiny substitution language.) Sitting directly behind PacMed's espresso stand, which was sooo handy sometimes. Declan learning how to play frisbee, instead of running away terrified from one when you tossed it. Walking home from work at 8 PM that summer, as the dotcom crash kept going, watching the sun setting while I walked up 2nd Ave. Seems like yesterday in some ways.

cultures

I've been thinking for a long time that I should blog a couple of the more amusing culture clash exchanges that my sailor and I have shared. Let's be serious, the dotcom world and the military are... um... different. Vast chasms of different. We've gotten a lot of humor out of how each of us lives in opposite worlds over the last several years.

My favorite of all time was in August 2004, when I was sitting on the floor of the bridge of a boat that he was XO on, wearing jeans and flip flops, and working on my laptop. There were a couple sailors visiting from a nearby station and I chatted with them for a while. They were talking about how sad it was that I was usually stuck in an office on land during the day. I countered with 'yes, but I go to work in flip flops all summer.' Sadly that didn't sell them on the wonders of dotcom civilian life. I think they must have been imaging slipping on the deck wearing flip flops during a big storm and falling into the water- not something I worry so much about in my job.

This morning Brian and I were talking about annual reviews and how our career goals could kind of be summed up as 'write a lot of interesting code.' My sailor is also writing his version of annual reviews, for the LTJGs who work for him, and he didn't think 'write interesting code' was a valid career goal. I think his exact words were 'honestly, if you were in the CG, you would be kicked out for that. it doesn't show leadership.' Yes, because leadership is exactly what you need when you have a crashing webserver. Well, ok, you need some leadership, but you have a more pressing need for super sharp nerds.

Sunshine

Declan
Originally uploaded by wck

A sunny sheltie for a sunny March day.

python dictionaries

This is yet another 'putting things on my blog so that i can find them again' post. And because I remember stuff better once I've written it out.

I'm really a perl developer at heart, so I think in terms of hashes (you can see the post right tools for how nuts I am). Python, which I'm using for a little project I dreamed up to torture myself make my life easier, doesn't Do Hashes like perl does. Instead, you use "dictionaries".

I just borrowed o'reilly's python pocket reference from another developer, and here are the notes from the dictionaries reference in it.

adict = { 'info': { 42: 1, type("): 2 }, 'spam': [] } ==> adict['info'][42] is "1"

adict = dict(name='bob', age=42, job=('mg', 'dev'))

adict = dict(zip('abc', [1,2,3]))


Operations

adict.has_key(k) or k in adict

print d.get('key', 'not found')

adict.setdefault(key, []).append(number) (use value if it's in there, otherwise add to it)

adict.keys() -list of keys
adict.values() - list of values
adict.items() - list of k,v pairs

adict.clear() - wipe it

adict.copy()
adict.update(anotherdict) or adict.update(k1=v1, k2 = v2)

adict.popitem() - arbitrary item

adict.pop(k, [,x]) = get value stored at k (and remove k) if it was in there. otherwise, return x

adict.fromkeys(seq, [, value]) - new dictionary with keys from "seq" and values all initialized to "value"

adict.iteritems(), adict.iterkeys(), adict.itervalues() - go over the sets


(this is also mixed with things from the python cookbook)

xsrf nerdery

I haven't posted anything interesting webappsec related in ages, so I'll make it up with this super fun link that I just found.

"Racing to downgrade users to cookie-less authentication"

As I wrote previously; I discovered that in Firefox and Opera we can exhaust the cookie limit to delete the user's old cookies.

If we assume that we will have the user browsing both a site which degrades to cookie-less auth and our malicious site at the same time then if you think about this then you can see that there is a race condition between when the server sets the cookie and the user logs in (and in some applications between when a page is served and the next html request is made).

The question is; can we win this race?

I was hooked before I even got to that part, because this a great little article on exactly the type of security chaos and fun you create with a web browser. I'll add a note that I know that my current employer's website isn't vulnerable to this, and I know that solely because of some buggy JMeter scripts that I dealt with a few months ago. Something to play with anyway.

Enough browser silliness, here's a picture from my trip. I took this when my feet were pretty much walked off and I stuck over to a window of the Louvre to try to rest my toes by sitting on a nearby bench.



I love all the statues on the outside of the Louvre. On this trip I actually walked almost entirely around the outside of the building just to read the visible names of the ones low enough to street level.

Place Vendome

Place Vendome
Originally uploaded by wck

It's so spring like here! I'm wiped out from my long walk this afternoon and no sleep last night. If there is an "unable to sleep on airplanes" lifetime achievement award, I should really at least be in the running.

I've done nothing useful since I got here. I took the Air France bus down, and then went and vegged in the Jardin des Tuileries in one of those wonderful chairs with the semi-reclined back. Then I got a HUGE latte from Starbucks, walked for 2 hours, and returned to the tuileries to sit some more and snack on some macaroons. I had a look at the Paris-Visite pass line at the Louvre, but it freaked me out, so I'm pass-less for now.