Bit-Shift.Net

This morning, at the awful hour of 3:30 I arose to make my trip to Minnesota. Normally, a software engineers job is behind a computer. But occasionally it's not your computer you're behind and that sometimes requires travel. In this instance to Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a quick stop in Denver to ask directions (and switch places but thats beside the point). The reason I'm here is a new customer has asked for one of the developers of the product I work on to be on-site to help install and configure. My boss asked and I said sure, why not?

I've travelled for business a couple times before, once to Maryland and once to San Diego, but it happens so infrequently I never get used to it (and hope I never do). But here I am, sitting in my hotel room, wondering what the next few days will hold for me. With almost four days in a strange city and some time to kill could get a guy into a bit of trouble (but probably with a few good stories to tell later). Anyway, what is there to do in Minneapolis?

So far I've visited the Mall of America. Well the first floor anyway. I was too tired to explore the other 3 floors after spending all day travelling so I'll go explore tomorrow, which could be dangerous because I've found a few really cool shops and got some really neat souvenirs for a couple of close friends.

As a software developer for a company that supplies online banking and anti-fraud software for some of the nations largest financial institutions, quality is my main focus. But being a human being, I sometimes make mistakes and defects get introduced into my software. There are lots of reasons why defects end up in products (my software in this case), and I think the most prevalent of these reasons is bad assumptions about how a particular feature will be used.

How does my company release such high quality software you ask? By having talented quality assurance engineers like my friend Brent. No matter how well I think I've thought something through, how good a design I think I've come up with, he finds a use case I never thought and boom, my software explodes. Which is most often due to an assumption I made that he didn't.

Where am I going with this you ask? Gizmodo has a link to a YouTube video demonstrating how to trick certain model vending machines into giving you something for free. This video demonstrates how not only did the engineers make a poor assumption but the QA people that are paid to find these kind of wrong assumptions and brow beat the engineers with them missed it as well. Now I'm not condoning theft by any means, but you have to hand it to these guys. By dismissing a simple assumption that the machine would always be able to deliver the product, they were able to trick the machine into return their money after they had purchased a soda.

Watch the video here.

As I continue to collect quotes, my top 10 are constantly changing. So I'm changing this thread to be my favorite quotes. Now for your reading pleasure:

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."
- EE cummings

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
- Bill Vaughan

"A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company."
- Gian Vincenzo Gravina

"If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"
 - Tyler Derden

"All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand."
 - Elizabeth Barret Browning

I don't know how many times this has happened to me. I'm am sitting at work and suddenly I remember I have to do something online at some web site that requires a password. I have the password securely stored on my home computer. But a fat lotta good that does me sitting at work. Running home is out of thequestion because it'll take me an hour and a half round trip.

If only there was a way I could log onto my computer securely from work. If only I had a VPN at my disposal. I looked at getting a firewall that supported hardware VPNs from companies such as Sonicwall but those solutions were expensive which is not at all what I'm looking for. Recently on LifeHacker I found a post for some zero configuration VPN software from a company called Applied Networking Inc. called Hamachi.

The way the system works is really simple yet amazingly functional and secure. When you log on the first time you are given a unique IP address from Hamachi's pool of IPs. This address is guarenteed to be unique and will not collide with any IP you may already have. Also during the initial connection and on all subsequent connections a handshake is done where the server authenticates itself to the client and vice versa, then the server acts as an intermediary, negotiating sessions between peers of the VPN.

Once you are logged into Hamachi you have the option of joining an existing network or creating your own for others to join. When someone has joined your VPN it will be like they are plugged directly into the hub or switch located in your home or office. To keep random people from joining your VPN network you must specify a password (so make it a strong one, atlesat 12 character alphanumeric with mixed case and punctuation. If you don't trust any password that you make up you can use an online password generator such as WinGuides).

One of the things I like about this software when I was first researching it is their security model is open, so anybody can review it (which could be a weakness if a flaw is found and not acted upon) and make comments about its strengths and weaknesses. I like this approach because it allows people that know a great deal about applications of cryptography to make comments and give feedback about this implementation making the product much more secure.

Download the software here.