IPoAC (IP over Avian Carriers) #offbeat #fun

In computer networking, IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) is a proposal to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons. IP over Avian Carriers was initially described in RFC 1149, a Request for Comments (RFC) issued by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) written by D. Waitzman and released on 1 April 1990. It is one of several April 1 RFCs.

However, in September 2009, a South African IT company, based in Durban, pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a data packed 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest internet service provider, Telkom. The pigeon named Winston took an hour and eight minutes to carry the data 80 km (50 mi). Including transfering, it took two hours, six minutes, and 57 seconds for the data to arrive, the same amount of time it took to transfer 4% of the data over the ADSL.

Picture: Pigeon

An alternative to the ubiquitous standup/daily/morning meeting. #scrum #projectmanagement

Almost all the software teams I've worked with have used daily standup meetings to share information about where each member of the project stands with regard to work completed, planned, or blocked. And I think standups are fantastic for this, but they have a major flaw; everyone needs to be in the same room at the same time. I currently work for a distributed, home working company that believe in working the hours that suit your creativity. Core hours are non-existent, and staff are actively encouraged to find a rhythm that works for them. For instance, one of my coworkers takes a "workout break" each afternoon, and another (now sadly moved on to pastures new) wouldn't dream of starting the day until an espresso has been drunk slowly, and with measured care. But even here the standup still exists. 9:30am every morning we all join a group Skype chat to share our updates. Yes, it flies in the face of "set your own working hours", but I can sympathise with why it's done, we all need the information. My question however, is does it need to be synchronous?

I don't think it does. And nor do Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dispatch, and others. The idea goes by many names; Snippets, Show and Tell, etc, but the theory is broadly the same in all cases...

"Instead of reporting in at a meeting, every member of the team sends an email to everyone else with an update on their work. It's got the usual stand-up stuff: yesterday's work, today's work, and any blockers. We tend to send them as we begin to dive into the day. This means that Mike can send his update at 7am when he starts work and Nick can send his at 10:30 a.m. when he dives in. No one's flow gets broken and we can work whenever we feel most productive. Should something come up that has to be taken care of synchronously, we're on instant messenger all day. We can talk frictionlessly about what's going on. On top of this, if I ever have a question about what someone has been working on I can always glance back at their updates. No need to take notes in a stand-up or bother someone with questions, it's all right there."

I'm a CSM, and I can't see any reason why this method of checking in each morning shouldn't work for a distributed team, an asynchronous team (perhaps split by timezones), or even an everyday co-located team. But I'm keen to hear other points of view. So please, if you have an opinion, comment below or tweet me.

Picture: Clocks

How to avoid the three big problems of telecommuting. #telecommuting #wfh #timemanagement

"You work from home? Oh, you are sooooo lucky!" 

I hear this a lot, and don't get me wrong, it's true; I did hit the commuting jackpot. However, it's not without it's pitfalls for the unsuspecting. The following is what I like to call 'The Big Three Problems'...

Problem 1: Where does work time end and personal time begin?
Problem 2: Lack of communication with the world outside your window.
Problem 3: Sedentary no longer adequately describes your lifestyle.

Let's look at each problem a little more closely. I'll then give my personal solution and/or the solution that makeuseof.com helpfully suggests.

Where does work time end and personal time begin?

Working from home full time makes it ludicrously simple to bleed work into your evening (as Mrs the Geek will readily attest to!). The thought process goes like this "It's 6 o'clock and Mrs the Geek is cooking. I'd better finish up now." So far, so good... "But this sprint test report isn't going to write itself and Johnson is going to need it for the client meeting tomorrow. I'd better take my laptop downstairs with me. I can talk to the missus while I type." Hmmm. Not so good, but the report is almost finished. 30 minutes later, just as the report is finished and Mrs the Geek hands you a glass of wine... *ping* "Oh, Skype message. Smith just finished that new piece of functionality and wants me to run some automation against it before he goes to the pub. Why not? It's only running a few commands and leaving the laptop open on the coffee table." Before you know it, it's 12:30, Mrs the Geek is already in bed and you realise the Blue Ray player has looped the menu music so many times you are mindlessly humming it while hacking out that new page object.

Solution: Create a work schedule. Set time periods that are dedicated to work and work only. You don’t have to work the typical 9-5 job because telecommuters have the freedom to set their own schedules, so if you’re most productive at midnight, go ahead and set your work hours at that time. But either way, set work hours. Also, telecommuting is a real job, so treat it like one! When you wake up, go take a shower and get dressed. You don’t have to wear a suit and tie but you’ll feel a huge difference just by slipping into a pair of jeans and a comfortable shirt – wear anything but your pajamas.

Lack of communication with the world outside your window

I'm a man that enjoys his own company, and sometimes solitude allows me to really focus. But telecommuting can be a lonely world, a really lonely world. Cabin fever is alive and well and strikes without warning after the third day where your only contact with the outside world was 15 minutes of technical updates from coworkers at the standup. But even worse than that is how easy it is to lose touch with your friends. It's devilishly simple to slip into an insular daily routine without even realising it; Wake up, radio on, shower, dress, eat cereal, turn on laptop, work until falling asleep, eat and drink occasionally, turn off laptop and radio, sleep. Repeat ad infinitum. As you can see, there was no social time in that routine. No 'drinks with Martinez from DevOps'. No 'lunch with Yvette from HR'. Not even 'meet up with Tom for a run after work' (more on this is in problem 3). You'll soon find that weeks have passed by and you didn't even notice. This is bad and needs to be rectified, hopefully before you consider the Amazon delivery man your best friend.

Solution: Video calls (Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, etc), social media (Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, etc), texting, picture messaging, phone calls. Anything that involves contact with another human being, preferably involving seeing their face, is key here. I'm lucky that my current employer has a policy of "No matter what you're trying to communicate, a video call is almost certainly the right way to do it". And work extra hard to keep in touch with your friends through social media and your phone, as the usual channels of communication are limited to you when you only leave your house to buy more coffee.

Sedentary no longer adequately describes your lifestyle

The definition of being sedentary or physically inactive is;

Expending less than 1.5 kcal/kg/day in leisure physical activities, according to the National Population Health Surveys of Canada. This is the equivalent of walking a little over two kilometers or 1.3 miles, or approximately 3000 steps. For most people, that is a walk of 25 minutes or less.

3000 steps a day! There have been times when I could have walked less than that in a week! And it's easy to see how this happens. I wake up and walk to the bathroom (11 steps), I then walk to the kitchen and make coffee and toast (24 steps), back to the bedroom to get dressed (35 steps), walk to the office (7 steps), and that's where I could stay for upwards of 8 hours sat in my office chair, Mrs the Geek occasionally bringing me hot drinks and snacks. Finish work and walk to the sofa (20 steps), hire a movie from Netflix, order a pizza using the phone in my pocket, and that's my day done. I could have walked as little as 97 steps that day, a mere 3.2% of what is considered medical inactivity.

Solution: I have a standing desk at home. Not only will your back thank you 1000 times over, you can combine it with walking on the spot or a treadmill to hit your daily steps. I go for a long walk to the other side of my village and back on 2 of my 5 weekday lunches, I do my best to fit in a 30 minute workout everyday (I use my Wii for this, so it hardly seems like a workout at all) and I Geocache and hike with the family on the weekend. These are just a few things I do personally, all of which I got the inspiration for from Nerd Fitness, a site I cannot recommend highly enough for anything fitness or diet related.

I hope this article helps anyone out there suffering from the Big Three Problems of telecommuting, and maybe helps people to understand that while working from home full time is an amazing benefit, and one I would fight tooth and nail to retain, there are very real pitfalls to it unless you are careful.

Post inspired by: 5 Tips & Advice To Help You Become A Successful Telecommuter

Pictures: Bed Working, Window Man

My musings on the 'perfect' password. #security #passwords

A quick search on the internet for "password security" and a few clicks will get you the following conflicting advice...

Helpful website 1: “Think of a song title or memorable phrase, take the first letter of each word and combine that with the first three letters of the website. For instance ‘I want you back’ becomes ‘iwyb’, you’re logging into GMail, so add ‘gma’ and you’ve got ‘iwybgma’. Perfect.”

Helpful website 2: “Never use a song title or memorable phrase, first lettered or not in your password. There are password crackers that can detect this.”

Helpful website 1: “Ok, well replace letters with symbols or numbers, for instance @ for a, 3 for E, etc. so you can’t tell. ‘1wybgm@’ Wow, look at that! Best password ever, eh?”

Helpful website 2: “Symbol replacement is useless nowadays as those same password crackers will take this into account.” 

Helpful website 1: “Ah ha! Well, instead of typing those keys, type one key to the right instead. So now it’s... hang on... I can get this... ‘2eunh,£’ is that right? I think so, yeah. Beat that!”

Helpful website 2: “Shifting keys up, down, left or right, can totally be accounted for too. Also, looks like you’re starting to forget how to translate that password. How many different logins do you have again?”

I'm sure you'll agree, this is pretty unhelpful. So I decided to break down my advice into the two facts I know to be correct...

1. The best password for you is the one you’ll remember
2. The only secure password is the one you don’t even know

These facts aren't mutually exclusive, in fact they are complementary and easy to implement. Let’s take a look at them one at a time.

1. The best password for you is the one you’ll remember

I’m certain at this point that we’ve all seen the following XKCD webcomic...

And it’s undeniable, unrelated phrases enjoy better entropy. Even when made up of common dictionary words. Allow me to demonstrate; according to howsecureismypassword.net our seemingly secure password from earlier ‘2eunh,£’ would take a mere 9 days to crack. Whereas a four unrelated word phrase ‘weird winter mass publicity’ would take 3 octillion years to crack brute force style, and is eminently more memorable. 

But you don’t want to have to remember a random four word phrase for every password you use, and didn’t I say that...

2. The only secure password is the one you don’t even know

Password managers are a godsend. I personally use 1Password, but I’ve heard great things about LastPass and KeePass too. With a few clicks I can generate the following password; ‘78/e^6HY2B+}V3nCEt&n’ for 2 nonillion years of brute force protection, save it in an encrypted file store, have it automatically submitted next time I browse to the associated web page, and even sync these details securely across my devices. And all without having to remember a thing, other than the one master password that decrypts the rest of my unknown saved passwords in the file store, and that’s where we loop back to point one (I told you they were complimentary didn’t I?), a simple to remember, four unrelated word passphrase.

TL;DR

No, the perfect password doesn’t exist. But we can get pretty close by:

1. Installing a password manager
2. Making the master password a four unrelated word passphrase

And finally; let us not forget that no matter how entropic our passwords are, this will always be true…

Pictures: Password Strength, Security

100,000 Scoville homemade salsa. #cooking #delicious #keepabeerhandy

Cooking the finest chilli con carne this side of New Mexico in bulk for 13 people means having to cater to the person with the lowest capsaicin resistance in the group. So, how does one ensure the hot heads in the group remain satisfied? Well, with lashings of 100,000 Scoville homemade salsa to smother their meal with of course!

I'd describe the taste as fresh and fruity, leaving a herby aftertaste and 'refreshing' heat on the tongue. Delicioso!

Inspiring video on how to reduce noise and deliver quality. #inspiring #video #creativemornings

My friend Lloyd sent me a link to this video today. After some fairly shocking statistics about the shear volume of data we (as human beings) create on a daily basis, the presenter Brad Frost goes on to deliver an inspiring message on how we as the creative, impassioned minority of content creators on the internet can help to reduce the noise that people are bombarded with on a daily basis. Well worth 20 minutes of your day. 

Video link: http://vimeo.com/63437853 (Warning: Naughty language)

Want to stay abreast of updates to your project's Gems? Then look no further. #ruby #development @bundlewatcher

I recently discovered BundleWatcher, a fantastic new service that tracks releases of your project's dependant gems and gives you a heads up regarding updates when you need it.

By simply pointing at your gemfile.lock in GitHub (or uploading it), it will create a bespoke RSS feed for you to subscribe to. Simple and useful, thanks @bundlewatcher.

Picture: RSS