I've been researching one of those “odd project bits” that has been stuck in my head over the past few days. But, instead of filling up a notepad full of notes and sleeping on it, I decided to make a blog post about it instead.
Recently, I had an opportunity to become a part of a closed beta test for Atmosphir. Atmosphir is a new, multi-platform game for Windows, Mac, or Linux computers which allows you to have control over a little clever fellow in a world full of platforms to jump to, things to climb up, and all sorts of entertaining traps to escape to reach the end flag.
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Like all really interesting ideas I come up with and want to follow up on, this one happened last thing on a Sunday night when I'm at my sleepiest. Basic tenet is that transmitting credit card information across the internet for offsite processing is a huge security concern. The fix is, don't send it at all, but send a one way hash of information from point A to point B.
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Earlier today, I was searching today for some article or advice on how best to provide security and courtesy at the same time. I was somewhat startled to find that virtually no one - no one - is writing about the topic. In a security-conscious world, we seem to have forgotten that ultimately, security serves human beings. It's a customer service industry.
A friend of mine once said that his typical experience with network security professionals was that if he had hired them to secure a grocery store, they would proceed to install barbed wire fences, attack dogs, searchlights, metal detectors, and perhaps a helicopter or two before finally saying, 'Yep, no one will be shoplifting from here now!' And not only would they have discouraged any sort of legitimate customer from buying from the store, they'd completely ignore the possibility of a teenager with a forged ID buying beer.
Manners, politeness, and respect for fellow human beings as a whole seems to be something that have fallen by the wayside in popular culture. Being rude has been developed into something approaching an art form - an entire genre of comedy is devoted to just this facet of our society.
Combine this with the fact that we, as human beings, are no longer instinctively equipped to judge risks, and you arrive at the modern airline terminal - please take off your shoes and throw away your water, because out of the two billion airline travelers a year, we know you could be one of the few hundred terrorists.
Security isn't a destination, but a process. It's an ideal that will never be attained, not a product packaged into a box. And while there are always tradeoffs, there's no reason we can't combine good security with good customer service.
Went out to this store this afternoon to pick up daughter's graduation present. As things ended up, a new 1.83 GHz Intel Mac Mini managed to tag on the ride back home.
After some futzing with a fire wire cable, and hitting the “migrate from my old mac” bit during setup, I ended up with pretty much everything I had before, except faster. The new mac setup was probably the single easiest computer migration that I've ever had in my life. All my links, programs, tweaks, and everything in between has ended up on the new box with no observed issues. I think the most strenuous thing I ended up doing was pointing the new mac to the wireless network- since wireless is built-in now.
Since I just run benchmarks with FileScanner on the old mac just last night, I decided to give things a shot on the new computer to see where things were at. According to things, the scan took a hair under 5 minutes to complete against around 18,000 files.
real 4m57.133s
user 0m39.023s
sys 0m30.061s
sqlite> select count(*) from system;
18676
So, according to my guesstimates,
Old Computer:
20063 entries / 1274 seconds == 15.74 entries made per second.
New Computer:
18676 entries / 297 seconds == 62.88 entries made per second.
So, I think I ended up pretty much quadrupled my script performance overnight.
Yeah, I think it's a keeper.
Cheers,
tom