This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in weeks

Download the Instant Atlassian tool to your desktop PC, and at a command line, change to the directory containing the tool and run the following command (substituting the red placeholders with the credentials you obtained in step 1):

java -jar instant-atlassian-1.1.jar “Your_AWS_Access_Key_ID” “Your_AWS_Secret_Access_Key” create 10

This will create a server for you, with JIRA and Confluence pre-installed, and 10 gigabytes of space for storing your data.

This tool uses the Amazon Elastic Block Store to store your data. 10 gigabytes of space will cost you $1 per month. These charges stop once you use the tool's “delete” command (described below) to delete the data.

via Setting up JIRA and Confluence in minutes - Atlassian Developer Blog.

The Market Madness Game is quite fun. It takes the form of

an NCAA-like tournament with four regions, brackets and seeded teams. But instead of a field comprised of basketball squads, this one - dubbed “Market Madness” - was to contain 16 competitive factors contributing to the global financial meltdown of the last two years.

While light-hearted, it’s all the more interesting in the context of the revelations in the Valukas report into Lehman Brothers (here).

David Rice, author of Geekonomics, has uploaded a video of a keynote. It seems to be a decent summary of the core concepts in the book.

Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software from David Rice on Vimeo.

I saw a link to alltop this morning and decided to have a play. It’s clearly not designed for specialist areas of interest - ‘cybercrime returned no options (despite being pretty common), ‘Westpac’ returned “Cheap Flights” (no idea); both return about 1.7M hits in Google.

Looking at some of the pre-baked searches, it seems to be little more than a curated RSS aggregator. Unlike my feed reader, though, I can’t actually read the content - AllTop gives you the headlines, and a very short excerpt if you hover. While cute, therefore, as a source of new sites/blogs/feeds to read, I am pretty unexcited about it as a reading destination.

But, it is good for giggles. When I searched for fraud, it returned “AOL”, “crime”, and “Symantec”. :)

I’m spending this week at a SABSA Foundation training course led by David Lynas. Along with John Sherwood and Andrew Clark, David literally wrote the book on SABSA, after the three of them invented the methodology. Yesterday’s session was a history lesson, followed by an explanation of the 6x6 matrix and a quick workshop on requirements elicitation (not his words) at the contextual layer.

Interesting factoids:

• SABSA grew out of the SWIFT project to migrate to IP. They were each independent contractors and needed a way to organise their collective thinking in a way that allowed each to play to their strengths. SWIFT had one dominating security requirement - a US$1Bn message transaction guarantee.
• The book just doesn’t seem important to them anymore. David keeps saying “so much has happened since the book”, but there doesn’t appear to be a new, canonical source of truth available publicly. I suspect that the training now fills that role, but AU$4000 is much less palatable than US$55.
• The ‘Business Attributes’ taxonomy was hacked together while “[David] was in a *foul* mood”, and he’s consistently surprised by what gets done with it. That said, I’m surprised by a couple of applications, although the one of the better examples used the base idea but abandoned the details. I can see it being useful in encouraging BAs to provide more granular requirements, to replace the traditional non-functional requirement of “The system will be secure”.
• I wasn’t aware of it, but there’s some (presumably ancient) research from Harvard Business School showing that organisations which outperform tend to have an even balance of operational, tactical, and strategic effort; weaker companies tend to live in operations.
• David is squarely from the “the business can do whatever they want, you just have to secure it [afterwards?]” camp. He discounts both the “assurance” and “asset protection” alternative missions. I suspect he’d be really, really unimpressed with our SaaS thinking. That said, I haven’t yet seen any clear mechanism by which that approach is baked into the methodology - there’s lots of happy words, but no indication on how you actually operationalise it, yet.

Overall, I haven’t had my world-view shattered just yet, but I’m interested to see where this goes.

This article argues that ritual is at the core of any successful lifestyle [not the right word]. He cites the life of Jack LaLanne, a 94-year old “fitness guru” who lives within an inviolate fitness regime and credits it for his longevity. Bregman then proposes a routine for improving productivity at work:

STEP 1 (5 Minutes) Set Plan for Day. Before turning on your computer, sit down with a blank piece of paper and decide what will make this day highly successful. […] Now, most importantly, take your calendar and schedule those things into time slots, placing the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day.

You can never research enough This one was unfortunate. Half-way through writing my research proposal, I discovered a book. This book covered most of what I was originally intending to research. Fortunately, I managed to reposition my work. But, if I hadn’t discovered it until later, it would have cost me hours and hours and hours. So, make sure you read every paper even remotely related to your work before you write a single line. Doubly, write down every single paper you read, in a way you can find it again later.

I’m declaring Caelyx’s Second Law:

Subjectivity is a lesser sin than false rigor.

I really should expound more on the basis of this, and what triggered it, but I’m very tired (it’s 1.30 am here). So, instead, I’m just going to throw it out there. Let’s just say that my (admittedly tenuous) faith in positivist social science is all but blown away.

It’s also a law I’m battling with in my “real-world-work”, and it trips me up astonishingly often considering how sane I consider myself to be.

[A legacy blog post]

“The Coffee is what gives a Programmer his power. It’s an caffeine field created by all-knowing baristas. It surrounds us and nourishes us. It binds the galaxy together.”

Smile.

While I’m going to diplomatically disagree with a lot of this (I happen have or have had some very good lecturers), I find this amusing:

“University politics is very odd. You get a lot of people gathered together, who, if they couldn’t do this, really couldn’t do anything. They are given to think that because they are both intelligent and important because they have Ph.D.s and most people don’t. Often, though not always, the Ph.D. does indicate mastery over a subject. But that’s all it indicates, and, unfortunately, many people with Ph.D.s think it covers a wider area than it does. They think it empowers their superior insight into government and foreign policy and race relations and such. In addition these people are put into an environment where daily, they judge themselves against a standard set by eighteen- or twenty-year-old kids who know little if anything about the subject matter in which their professors are expert.” - Robert B. Parker, from his 1999 novel Hush Money.

[A legacy blog post]