What makes Engineers Grumpy?

Nicholas Zakas has the answer. What I like most about this is that he's clearly dientified the source and the solutions to the grumpy issue. While problems aren't always so simple, and organizations can have more systemic issues, a  triest like this definitely shows the perspective from the creative part of a development endeavour

http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/06/12/the-care-and-feeding-of-software-engineers-or-why-engineers-are-grumpy/

What he also presents is a note about how building software is like building a house. This might be worth making more visual.

Adventures in DUKPT-istan

Wouldn't it be awesome if we could limit the exposure of sensitive information (ok, small amounts of it) while it travels over the internet and through devices?

Wonder no further, DUKPT to the rescue. Derviced Unique Key per Transaction is a method to generate a key for each time a device is used. These all have the ability to be decrypted with a master key given only the addition of what amounts to a sequence identifier. These typically show up in swipers, and I suspect that most commercial swiper products use this when needing to exchange keys.

The trick is that a unique transaction key is derived from a base key using only non-secret data. The non-secret data can then be transmitted along with what you've encoded (for instance the CC) and the master can decode.

Making better use of this blog thingy

OK, here's the problem. I have random thoughts.

The problem really is that I don't record them. So whether it's for work or a cool technology or just an interesting thought or website.

So let's kick it off.