Romania Part II

Romania is basically on fire, they are joining EU in January and everything is sky rocketing in price. There is a lot of speculation on the real estate. Speaking with the embassy there he said predictions are that things will level off in 2007 and drop in 2008 at least in the old apartment market. The new apartments may not loose value. Reality check though, apartments that were bought four years ago in Bucharest - some are now worth 5x-6x their value, so even if they were to loose value, it would have to be quite a drop. As with any increase in housing price, every thing else is going up, salaries etc... Discussing while on the way to a meeting and stuck in traffic, there are no underground parkings in Bucharest, and ground level parking, or public parking is practically non existent - can you imagine downtown of any city with about 3M people with limited public parking and no underground - that is a serious problem for all of the drivers in Bucharest. Food wise - I thought Polenta was an Italian thing, well the Romanians have surely adopted it, in several traditional meals you will find polenta. One appetizer was polenta topped with ham, a sunny side up egg and grated cheese (bitter cow cheese, very good) - all in all very yummy! I visited another city called Cluj, where we have our team. It's a smaller city and the pace is much less frantic.

Romania Part I

When in Romania, do like the Romanians! First thing to do when taking a taxi in Bucharest - carefully look at the door where they show the taxi rates, they do not all have the same rates. Some of the taxis are plain sharks, it's outrageously expensive. A reasonably priced taxi is about 1.40 LEI, while the sharks could be 7LEI, some of them even put it in Euro instead of LEI just to trick you. Second if you drive (are you insane?) honk like a mad man all the time, light is red engage anyway, use the sidewalk as a parking spot, oh! a pedestrian crossing floor the pedal to the metal - no not really, they do allow pedestrian to cross...sometimes. Third find a pak of smokes and smoke everywhere - as bad as in Armenia, if not worst. Smoking is so ok - this morning this guy was at the breakfast buffet is cigarette between his fingers over the plates on the buffet tables dropping hashes every where. He finally noticed it and cleaned up after himself. Smoke next to food doesn't cut it for me - I can't cut through to the food odors. Bucharest is busy as hell, and has a huge club seen, this is all what people talk about - Blah is the best club in Bucharest, oh Boo is the best club in Europe. Well I didn't go, so I can't tell you what they are a like.

Second life consulting company

Techcrunch Blog Archive Crayon Claims To Be First SecondLife Company: "Crayon is launching later this week, claiming to be the first company to be launched in SecondLife." I'm amazed and happy at the same time - someone is launching a company focussed on helping other companies find a way to leverage secondlife. There is a world of possibilities litterally in SecondLife.

armenia part III

Armenia is Christian, it's the home of christian orthodox church, the first country to declare itself as such. I visited a few churches one morning. I went on to visit the equivalant of the vatican in Armenia. It's very beautiful, green and full of flowers. We got a short visit of the museum, they have very impressive artifacts in there. They have coins from the roman empire, and many religious items that are dated to be somewhere around 100BC and older. It's impressive, lots of stuff happened before our time. This country used to be the computer science region of Russia. This is where they created the first computers in Russia, mainframes, etc. The Sillicon Valley of Russia. One particularity that is driven out necessity more than anything else - by nature people here all assumes that resources are limited, and should be used wisely. In several conversations I got to understand the following metaphore - In America, we're like Arnold in his movies, big guns, with lots of bullets to shoot. Typically not really aiming well, but shooting every things dead over time, just by keeping shooting. In their case it's more the snipper approach, aim well, because you only have one bullet. So when they code, they will write the code as tight as possible, as efficient as possible, etc... This is a reflex. They are disapointed when it's not always appreciated or recognized. The bottom line is they work differently and it has to be factored in the project management one does. You can find this reflex in every thing they do - from the programming to the car they drive, they will fix it before they have to buy another part - it's very much different from the consumption culture we have in Canada/US.

Armenia part II

You know you're in a different country when - people don't speak your language, or don't dress the way you do, don't eat what you usually eat. I also realized Armenia is very different when I got off the plane, in the parking lot waiting for the taxi, I saw several souped up ladas, but also many other cars that I didn't know of, but I'm not a car expert. There was one car that didn't start up, so several people in the parking lot started pushing the car so that they could start it under compression. This is not people the driver knew, people who were there waiting for their cab, left the luggage on the sidewalk, and just started pushing. More community oriented, less individualistic. During one conversation where we were talking about people moving a lot, from city to city in North America - his first reaction was: So how do you get to know your neighbours? What I understood is - how can you create deep linkage with your entourage if people move around so often. Touché! Armenia is a very small country - 3M population - but with a large ex-pat network. If they were to leverage the ex-pat network as well as the indians do on the business side of things - they would become very successful very quickly, because they know their neighbour, or the guy down the block and they talk, this guy knows someone else, who know a guy who could help with your problem. I haven't seen a whole lot of news paper reading around. At breakfast or anytime for that matter I haven't been able to find a paper or people reading a paper. Every body smokes like a cheminee and they smoke everywhere. Often I find myself looking for air, I'm not used to it anymore. The food is excellent - very mediteranean. They have a lot of meat on the menu, and you order veggies separately. The fresh herbs, and marinades they use for BBQ or other plates are very re-freshing. I ate most of times in Armenian restaurants - I even got initiated to Beef brain on a toast, I tried it out of a dare more than anything - but I won't try it again. They have the taboule, babaganoush, and homus - which are all very good. The babaganoush especially with its smoked flavour is my favourite. The big drink is Vodka ofcourse, but it's not everybody who drinks it at lunch, but I saw some. One side note food wise, there is this nice little lebanese restaurant near my hotel - one day I was in a rush, and I asked for a shawarma. I got the best shawarma I have ever had. It was a beef shawarma, steak strips marinated in yogurt and hebs, again very simple, but so fresh.

Yerevan, Armenia part 1

I'm settling in, I like it - it's a pretty nice place. I got here and the buildings looked all the same colour to me - I'm starting to see the colours. The architecture has some Eurpoean influences, but the Russian/communist influence is obvious. The Republic sqare is a nice place, right in the middle of the city. The people do not know how to drive though, they zig zag between lanes, and suddenly there is a car coming your way at good speed in your lane, or is it that we're in his lane - beats me! Every time I get in a car I buckle up - every time the person driving tells me - you don't have to, there is no rule to buckle up - I just tell them I don't want to have to relearn the habit for when I'm back in Canada, and then we all laugh! I'm saying the driving is bad, it's nothing like what i saw in Egypt - but put more cars in the streets here and this is going to get messy.

Trip

For the next couple of weeks I will be on the road. I'm flying first to Armenia, where I'm told there is great software development talent. I will be presenting to the Enterprise Incubator Foundation in Yerevan on the state of our Outsourcing industry here in Canada, for which the Armenia IT sector is very keen on tapping. Next is Romania - where I will be visiting our crew there and meeting with several companies. Stay tuned!

using human

Have a look at this very interesting presentation on human computing. How can we tap the human brain to solve complex and large problems that the computer can't do and won't do reliably for some times to come. It's kind of like the amazon artificial artificial intelligence project on steroids in terms of concept. His idea is based on that last year 9B hours of solitaire were played - compare this to the 9M hours it took to build the Empire state building and there is quite a bit high cpu cycles, ie brain cycles going to waste! We need to break the problems such that the computers and the human works together each one complementing each other, the computer generating, compiling the data - and the human taking care of vetting the data, for example identifying what is on a picture. A symbiotic relationship in the overal process, made possible by the connectivity we have on the internet. He then goes on a converts this whole thing into a game, and we(human) end up doing real useful work for free! Pretty darn amazing. There is also this 'alledged' trick porn sites uses to crack through captcha, where they get you to enter the recognized text to see the next picture - and they use in turn the information provided to pass the test on a ligit site and get more tickets to that U2 concert you wanted to go, that they can resell 3x 4x the price.

Leaks at Google

From TechCrunch "As we pointed out in a post earlier this week about the new Google Docs and Spreadsheets product, Google is going to focus on convincing small and medium sized businesses that their internal Office documents will be secure on Google’s servers. Google needs to control its own leaks if they hope to do this - this is the second major Platypus leak this year." Everything has to be secure we all understand that. I think though that by lumping the security of an SME information with the leak of information about a feature/projects we are comparing apples and oranges. The security of applications "à la google" I believe is more controllable. Although it's impossible to have a fully secure applications, the lines of defense that will fend off the vast majority of attacks, Google/Yahoo/MS very well know what to do. One would think that it would be easier to avoid leaks of features - but this is where I think we're wrong - the lines of defenses against leaks are not as well known - employees chatting in a restaurant, postings on blogs, temporary servers etc.. are only a few of the sources, the main characteristic common to all is their spontaneousness, and processes do not jive well with spontaneity. The more people know about a secret the harder it is to keep; Once the secret is out making sure the once secretive object is secure is something an organization has planned and executed.

Macadamian 9th anniversary

Good morning everyone, yesterday we celebrated Macadamian's 9th anniversary. We had lots of fun at Biagio's Italian Kitchen. We had the evening setup so that we could do lots of mingling while tasting  some great wine with great food. To make sure we knew what we were drinking we had Groovy grapes entertaining wine education and events with us the whole time. This made for some quite interesting discussions about wine tasting, and food pairing. I was great to be able to talk to every one because it was a happy hour format - and I got to learn several things about wine too. BTW the one of the groovy grapes is also participating on this food that wine show on foodtv. Great work every one for the past 9years - Happy Anniversary Macadamian.

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Distribution of Attacks on Web apps

Here is the link I was referring to in my post on cross site scripting. Long story short, XSS attacks are now accounting for 21.5%, SQL injections are 14%, php "includes" a whopin 9.5% and buffer overflow 7.9%.  After all it's much easier to perform an XSS attack or SQL injection than figure a buffer overflow.

Scary stories

Here are some scary stories of software problems. Several aircraft problems, but also medical software that we rely on to get better or get an accurate diagnosis not living up to their promises. "Never cut down on testing effort" I remember my data processing teacher saying in first year of university.

New teams, leadership and dynamics

I was told to read  this model modeling the behaviour of newly formed teams. For anyone who gets for whatever reason to work with a new team, we get to learn the people dynamics follow a patterns. It's a quick read, go for it. The four stages are forming, storming, norming, and performing.

india's tech crunch?

Stumbled on startups.in/india They aim to track the startup activity in India - should be interesting to watch.

Cross Site Scripting

I can't remember where but I read there are now more Cross Site Scripting attacks now than SQL injections. When I read that at the time, I thought why do I just keep on reading about SQL injections, well here is one informative post on old and new forms XSS.