UnlinkedIn and Jobs' Quotes

My only social network is LinkedIn. I am not a fan of Facebook and I fail at Twitter. LinkedIn, though, has a different purpose. It's a near necessity for the "I may want a job/client/investment in the future" crowd. By and large, I have fun with it. I post technical material too - you look at my blog from LinkedIn; I have the data. I get a nice pretty map of all of the countries where your IPs originate. Do you think I want to configure that crap myself? Hell no. I have fake Steve Jobs quotes to post. Ain't nobody got time for that. However, I like to be funny from time to time. If I were a pretentious butthole, I would say I am trying to contribute to the Zeitgeist.

Steve Jobs image macros, complete with inspirational quotes, are the adult equivalent of when you would put a phrase or vague allusion on your AIM away message or profile. Do you honestly think someone is going to see "your" Jobs quote and go, "Holy shit. Apparently everyone is innovating. I better start doing that." This is an update that requires absolutely no thought at all other than purloining someone else's idiotic sentiment via Google Image Search. You may as well go find a picture of Artie Lange and plaster on it some spew from your Marketing 101 course. Since I am a huge Artie Lange fan, I will support your efforts in spite of my previous statements. My blog, so I get to be a hypocrite when I want to.

The macro-calypse (trademark, vesh's Shenanigans Inc.) is just barely better than the "Like" deluge. I make a post which requires feedback, and then oodles of you only hit the "Like" button!?! I want your opinion, dammit! This is the one point in my life I am taking time out to care what you actually think and all I get is a bunch of "I like that you asked" BS? If you do not care, just ignore the post. Move, along. Nothing to see here. It is a very simple process. At least hit the Dislike button to tell me to go screw. The Dislike button is a stance against something. It runs the risk of confrontation, which can also be awesome.

Taking the thoughts of someone else, quotes or otherwise, is some Facebook-type garbage. I wouldn't support it there either though. There are times that a FB repost of something hilarious is called for. I have yet to see a need for inspirational-business quote reposts. There are infinite combinations of things which make a good joke, but there are about 5 decent re-phrasings of "Think Different" in the world.

If you feel the urge to post the quotes of someone else, using a macro that you didn't make, just remember the following. The morons who use Meme Generator are wittier and more original than you. Yes, the guy who takes a "Scumbag Steve" picture and puts on it remarks about his mooching neighbor is more clever than you. So, the next time you decide to post, please "Think Different". Make your own contribution. Put your own flavor to it. Be a Louis CK, not a Carlos Mencia.

JNI Fuzzing

These are slides from my SAHA! (satxhackers.org) JNI Presentation. I'll post source once I find it and a github link...I swear.


 

Recruiter Emails...sigh

Today was the day of recruiter emails. I selected a pair of the best ones, for different reasons. Our first email is not the fault of the company with billets to fill. I blame it on the headhunting firm. Note to businesses hiring recruiters, you can tell them not to do this type of activity.

This arrived in my work email, which I will also count as a strike against them. Not even my name in the "Hello" portion...just a lonely dash.

I sent the company who retained this firm a very nice reply indicating that this recruiter was not quite cutting it. They may want to go a different way next time.

This next gem is brought to us by "Monica". Her name actually is Monica so the quotes are superfluous...as is this sentence. I feel this is a better effort, but it is more annoying due to the tactics employed to get it here using RE: in the subject line. This one ALSO came in my work email.

....aaaaannnnnnd  here is this thoughtful reply. I decided to be less helpful here.

What have we learned today kids? We have learned some basic netiquette when it comes to recruiter emails. Even though it is just an email, you should treat it as a face-to-face, especially if you are trying to get something you want from the recipient. 

...or at least LEARN MY DAMN NAME!!!!

TOR+IRC

If one were to design and IRC bot that uses TOR over freenode, here is how one might do it...

PDF Injection Techniques

As part of the semi-weekly document dump I have been able to do lately, here are my slides for PDF Injection methods. XOXO

Federal innovation, and other contradictory terms

I am going to preface this with a gigantic “I make all of these statements of my own accord, and with my own opinions”. Now, let’s get to the sticky bit here.

I believe we have a particular problem here in San Antonio caused by the heavy influence of military rank and structure in the region. The area is so saturated with government money at multiple levels, that businesses are started by and upper-level positions are filled with outgoing senior officials due to their spread/depth of contacts rather than real business acumen or entrepreneurial insight. I’m thinking about calling this “vesh’s Theory of Regional Directorships” due to a series of incidents I saw early in my career. Swaths of O-5s and O-6s were getting out and immediately being made something called a “regional director”. I think this means, “put them in charge of a set of contracts where their Rolodex can be useful”. It seems that the more successful entrepreneurs I have encountered rolled out at a lower rank (if any). They actually have to learn how to manage a real business to even begin to see success. These people have to be solid from the get-go, or else there is nothing there to catch them. The graph below shows my very unscientific analysis of various anecdotes I have heard throughout the years on this subject. The drop-offs represent natural attrition of high-ranking officials from their posts of influence.

The private sector has the profit motive to encourage cost-cutting and efficiency. This motive simply does not exist in the bureaucratic world. Think about the last time someone was promoted for cutting back their budget. Expanding a corporate bottom line is a far different task than growing your Federal fiefdom. However, the enterprising individuals at the top of these contracting companies, who actually are true businessmen, realize there are short-term gains to be had by farming this level. Just drop a big contract on JBSA, then watch the courting begin. If the guy or gal you pick up not only wins the contract, but actually grows business, great. Although, this growth is almost always not through innovation or product development. It is through yet another contact with someone who has some money to spend at FY-end. So, we perpetuate this contract-heavy Federal-money laden cycle which shows great income for the the local area, but does nothing to uplift innovation. Try to ponder what would happen if JBSA were to close shop tomorrow. Would we be able to respond with private enterprise? How intertwined is our city's fate to a constant stream of public funding?

San Antonio wants to be Cyber-City, USA and it earns this moniker handily. While other areas discuss research and entrepreneurship in the computing realm, we get “cyber-this and cyber-that”. We get a new "Cyber-Center of Excellence" or another "Innovation Partnership". Where is our Apple? Why isn't the latest device from Google created here? You can’t just say, “We have capital here; massive amounts of capital. Why aren’t we accomplishing what Cupertino, Palo Alto, and Austin have accomplished?”. I think there is a perfect analog to old Soviet market adjustments, where they pegged their commodity prices to ours. Instead of actually performing true free-market actions, they simply took our figures and applied those as a basis. Of course this never worked. They never got it right, but they still tried until the Iron Curtain fell. Factories were built based on political expediency and placed where unemployment concerns existed, not upon where it made the most business-sense. This political expediency has a similar effect in our city when funding is allocated

There is so much nonprofit and Federal income in this area we are taking all of the market incentive out of our technical sector. It is easier to hire a senior official and snag a contract than it is to engage in true innovation. 24th Air Force is not going to create the next Facebook, no matter what the RFI on FedBizOps says. Contracting is fine, and there is nothing wrong with responding to requests for proposals. I think we delude ourselves, though, by not addressing the multi-billion dollar elephant in the room. Continuing to deliberate over why we have all these resources surrounding us, but we can’t create the same climate like other cities, is useless. We have to foster private capital investment and wean ourselves from the government cow.

Like most other people in this city, I want to create sustainable capital markets. We can grow past the government sector being such a large center of gravity in our midst. If we foster private innovation here and now, other cities would be hard pressed to offer a better business climate.

Memory and Binary Comparison using Computer Vision - a Visual Walkthrough

I started doing some work a bit ago that dealt with how to check the level of similarity between two email headers with Lance James. This led to an overall look at how to compare memory and running binaries. I have embedded the PDF I created for your pleasure.