We added a Sony Playstation 4 (PS4) to the house in May, 2014. After a little over a year, here is a long term perspective as a Sony customer and PS4 user.
Analyses and Responses
Analysis and / or Response on various topics
When an employee or contractor leaves the company, it’s best practice to immediately disable their access to company resources.
In the digital and online world, it’s easy to miss some forms of access, and remember off-hand every single system where the employee’s access should be revoked.
The level of risk increases when the employee separation occurs involuntarily, which might create a situation where the former employee is disgruntled, and increases exponentially if the employee has administrative privileges to sensitive systems.
In this article, I will attempt to outline best practices for a policies and processes around identity and access management, enumerate specific forms of access, many of which might be overlooked, and share some anecdotes resulting from the failure to properly revoke a terminated employee’s privileges.
Or,
The Customer Value Chain is Only As Strong as its Weakest Link
This is an epic tale about my electric broom, but more importantly, it’s story about:
- How your company can do everything right, and still fail to deliver on the promise of customer value
- How a lack of aligned priority and perception between you and your vendor can break the value chain
- How a failure to recognize opportunities for creating value, creates opportunities for failure.
Read on…
“Serious flaw found in Internet Explorer”. That’s like saying, “garbage found in the dumpster”. Although I don’t disagree that the flaw is serious, I DO question the utility and value of using Internet Explorer, as well as the ongoing expectation that IE is useful for anything other than downloading a competent browser.
I was working on a project that required simple arithmetic for very large integers, a set of algorithms called “Arbitrary Precision Math”.
Thinking back to elementary school, simple algorithms exist for addition, subtraction, and multiplication of two numbers with any number of digits.
To my surprise, every algorithm for division either relies on logarithms, which are difficult to implement in arbitrary precision, or the first instruction was “guess the first number, then guess the second number” etc…
Update: 10/2015: I’ve put together a YouTube video for this post. Check it out, here:
Read on, for a simple, reliable, repeatable algorithm for dividing integers of any length.
Most professionally-developed websites are simple, fast, and easy to use.
However, there is nothing in the world more frustrating than a website or web application that is poorly-designed or hard to use.
Here are some common mistakes that Web Designers might not think about, but make a huge impact to the customer
How to guestimate peak volume, and volume at any arbitrary time using total volume with an elliptical distribution curve.
Someone says, “we have 10,000 hits per day on our website”, but what does that mean from an instantaneous demand standpoint?
A distribution curve can help you figure that out.
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks took down both Sony’s Playstation Network (PSN) and Microsoft’s XBox Live (XBL) on Christmas day – turning the joy of Christmas in to frustration and disappointment for anyone who received a new game for Christmas. As of 12/26, XBox was largely restored, while Playstation was still at least partially offline, with PS3 access intermittent at best, the Playstation Network website “unavailable due to scheduled maintenance”, and PS4 access completely unavailable.
Knowing in advance that threats had been made of a DoS attack on Christmas day, both companies had plenty of time to prepare, yet they either chose to ignore the threats or take insufficient precautions, leaving their staff scrambling, and their customers frustrated.
Here is a simple method that could have been used to prevent the whole fiasco.
Part 1 can be found here: https://justinparrtech.com/JustinParr-Tech/top-developer-mistakes/
Security issues and design flaws can be costly to fix, once an application has already been written.
In spite of everyone’s best efforts and intentions, these are some additional, common mistakes that can be made during the application design / development process.
Background: Like the undead, Windows XP’s installed base continues to live, even after the Microsoft-published End-Of-Life (EOL) date of 4/8/2014.
What “End of Life” means, is that Microsoft no longer provides free updates, namely security updates, for the operating system.
Unlike other Microsoft operating systems, and due to many factors, Windows XP has a huge installed base.
This article details the XP EOL event, including the good, the bad, and how Microsoft could have handled this better.