In the past few days the tech community has gone into a panic over a discovery that computers have been vulnerable to a specific kind of attack for over 20 years. Despite being present for a very long time, it would seem that nobody has exploited the vulnerability. The details are complicated, but let’s consider a part of their discovery in more simple terms:
The problem is in the processor (CPU), the thing that does calculations using information in the computer’s main memory (RAM). Decades ago, CPU designers from companies like Intel, AMD and others, decided that they could speed up a computer if they could get it to do some calculations ahead of time, even if the results of [click title to read more…]
My “day job” as a tech consultant brings me into contact with a lot of software companies, but occasionally I encounter an enterprise that is in the process of becoming a software company. This happens when the company determines that their traditional line of business not only needs to incorporate a software/online strategy, but actually needs to make this the new focus. Motivations range from survival in the face of tech-savvy competitors to expansion into a previously untapped market.
While I enjoy helping these companies explore technology options, it is equally rewarding to help them establish a development process, being a formal approach to the creation of their new products or services. The processes that we in the software world [click title to read more…]
We’ve all heard of “back door” access. This refers to a situation where some kind of access to the system is available that does not go through the normal procedures, and is sometimes present during the early stages of development to provide convenient and efficient ways to interact with a partially complete system.
Obviously, it is essential that the final version of the solution is built without these back doors present, otherwise you have a major hole in your security.
Then there is the front door, and that will be present in the final version you put into the hands of your customers.
During development it is tempting to make the front door as “convenient” as the back door, just [click title to read more…]
Migrating MySQL from local servers to AWS RDS has its ups and downs…
Several of my clients, and a few of my own projects, have local instances of relational databases, usually MySQL (or MariaDB/Percona derivatives) and there is growing interest in moving these into the cloud. Amazon’s almost-drop-in replacement is the obvious candidate. You can find plenty of detailed information online about AWS RDS, typically addressing matters that concern large database installations. Maybe such matters sound more exciting than moving a small database that has probably been ticking away nicely on that small box in the corner for years. So what about the small scale cases? Most of my consultancy clients would be using single database instances with just a [click title to read more…]
A few years back I blogged about the RPM Hell (TreeTops, Jan 2012) that came about because of ineffective dependency checking. Needless to say, this reminded a lot of people about the infamous DLL Hell from many years prior. DLL and RPM dependency issues have generally been overcome with a variety of approaches and improvements in the tools and operating environments. Pushing functionality onto the Web or into the Cloud can help move the problem away from your local machine. After all, if the functionality is now just some JavaScript on a Web page then this shouldn’t be affected by whatever mess of libraries are installed on your local machine.
That worked for a while. Eventually the JavaScript workload grew [click title to read more…]