A Weblog…Again

Another Sydney Dinner

Last night, the account manager for the client that I’m working with took the client and myself out to dinner.  We went to a restaurant called Meat and Wine in Darling Harbour.  As the name implies, it primarily focuses on steaks and wine.  Like most decent steak places, it wasn’t cheap.  I had a pumpkin soup, which wasn’t very good at all.  It was just pureed pumpkin with some cream.  For my main dish, I had a filet cooked Medium.  I am no steak expert, but it was jusk okay.  What is interesting here is that they also give you side sauces (I chose a creamy garlic) to go with your steak.  This would be sacrilege at a US steak house.  We also went through 3 bottles of various Australian Shiraz’.  These were all very heavy and thick wines that had a lot of character and depth.  These certainly were not sipping wines.  The bill for the six of us must have been close to $1000.  Oh well, I guess that is the cost of doing business.

Sydney Views

A couple of nights ago the local SE took me to the bar on the 36th floor of the Shangri-La hotel.  The view from there is stunning.  It has a great view of Darling Harbour as well as the Opera House.  If you can stomach the outrageous prices for cocktails ($20), I would highly recommend it.

After we had a couple of drinks at th Shangri-la, we wanted to grab a bite to eat.  There is also a restaurant called Altitude on the top floor.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a table since we didn’t have reservations.  We then went to a rather pricey and famous restaurant on The Rocks called Rockpool.  Apparently, the chef is a celebrity.  The menu was primarily geared towards seafood.  I had a sashimi appetizer, which in Australia is correctly called an "entree".  For my main course, I had a bass filet in a Indian coconut curry sauce.  The sashimi was fresh, but a bit boring.  The bass was excellent and spicy, which of course is more suitable to my palate.

Sydney – Day 3

Today was my first day meeting with the client.  Like many engagements where I come onsite, not everything was set up, so it was slow going.  Since the AXG is an integration product, it obviously has a lot of dependencies on other systems.  Therefore, to test AXG, it is required that other systems also be configured correctly. 

For lunch, we went to a German brewery.  This was the first business luncheon where everyone was drinking.  In the US, that would simply never happen.  The day lasted longer than I would have liked.  By 6:30, I was getting tired.  I got back to the hotel and was famished, but the weather was cold and wet, but eating over-priced hotel food didn’t appeal to me.  I remembered that there was a decent looking pizza joint on George St.  Luckily, I was able to get a table quickly and ordered a half bottle of red.  I ate my pizza and drank my wine and was sufficiently buzzed.  By the time, I got to the hotel, I simply just crashed for 2 hours with the lights and TV on.  At around 10:30, I managed to turn the lights off and crash until 6:00 am. 

Sydney – Day 2

After a pretty successful night’s sleep on Saturday, I woke up early Sunday morning and went for a jog on the pier from my hotel, the Park Hyatt, to the Opera House.  It was a chilly morning, but the views were amazing and the sun felt good.  Once I got back to the hotel, I warmed myself up by spending about 20 minutes in the wet and dry saunas at the hotel.  On weekends in The Rocks, they have an open air market where they close off part of George St.  I managed to find a nice, silver bracelet for myself.  I then met my sister-in-law and her kids and we walked from the hotel to Woolloomooloo, which is a wharf that has a number of high-end restaurants.  After some looking around, we settled on going to a Mediterranean restaurant called Manta.  The food was decent, but pricey.  In particular, I had a white cod that was sprinkled with truffles in a butter sauce.  After a leisurely lunch, we walked to the Centerpoint Tower where we had dessert at a chocolate bar called Max Brenner.  At that point, the weather took a turn for the worse and it started pouring and getting colder.  Luckily, it cleared up a bit and we were able to walk back to the hotel.  I skipped dinner and called it an early night at 10:00 pm, because I wanted to get up early and work out.  All in all, a relaxing day in Sydney.

Living for the Future

On the flight from Chicago to San Francisco, I was watching a movie, which reminded me of my 4 year old son.  The movie takes place in New York City, which got me to thinking that after my son finishes college/grad school, I want him to live in NYC.  There are just some things that one should do before getting old and living in NYC is one of those things.  I was then thinking about all of the other things that I want him to do before he gets old, like live in Paris, travel the world, be fluent in other languages, be comfortable in his own skin wherever he is in the whole world, and so on.  And then it dawned on.  Everything that I want him to do are things that I wanted to do and haven’t been able to do.  And those are things that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do. 

Has my youth slipped me by so quickly and completely?  But wait, is it yet still possible for the 3 of us to pack up and, for example, move to Sydney?  What is it that is keeping me where I am and doing what I am doing?  Well, that is also simple.  In order for my son to be enabled to do the things that I wish he can do, I need to make the sacrifices.  This is what my mother and father did for their children when they were eating in instead of dining out, when they were taking out loans for our expensive, private colleges.  So, yes, fulfilling those aspirations have come and gone for me.  It is time to live for the future instead of the present.

Off to Sydney

On the flight from Chicago to San Francisco right now.  Man, this is going to be a long trip.  Another hour before we land and then a 2 hour layover in SFO before the very, very looong flight to Sydney.  I’m glad that I decided to get to Sydney on Saturday morning.  I’ll really need some time to get used to the time change. 

Aside from visiting with my sister-in-law and her kids, I’m at somewhat of a loss as to what I want to do while I’m there.  With a high temperature in the 60s and lows in the 40s, it really dampens my desire to walk around and explore.  Especially since I was there with my wife and son last November for 3 weeks.  We saw a fair amount of Sydney and some of the surrounding environs.  Since I’m staying at the Park Hyatt, I’ll be right across the way from the Opera House, which will be a treat.  Plus, I’m sure I’ll be able to frequent some of the pubs in The Rocks.  It seems to me that Sydney offers more natural beauty than museums and other sites.  I think I would like to go see a beach or something even though it will be freezing cold.  Anyway, business first and then some pleasure…

Nextar T30 – Portable Media Player

For our upcoming trip to India, I was debating whether to get yet another portable DVD player for my son or something else.  So far, we have gone through 2 DVD players on past trips to India and Australia, respectively.  Either the DVDs go bad or my son just abuses them and they stop working.  Also, since we are taking the direct flight to India, it will be a 15 hour ride, so a 2 hour battery just won’t cut it.

So what I wanted was a portable media player that uses solid state memory and has long battery life and has a decent size screen.  And of course, it shouldn’t be too pricey.

I thought about the IPod Nano, but that screen is just way too small and I don’t think the battery life is that long.  I then looked at the Sony PSP.  This has a good battery life (nearly 4 hours), supports flash memory, plays movies, etc.  A big plus of the PSP is that it also plays games and supports WiFI.  The screen size is about 3 inches, which isn’t bad.  I was about to pull the trigger on this one when two issues came up.  On first thought, I thought that this would be a great device for me, but who am I kidding, I just don’t play games and I would rather watch a movie on my laptop than on this device.  Also, it cost $170 for the base package, which is rather steep.  If anything, the device that makes the most sense for me is the Kindle.  So with 2 strikes against it, bye bye PSP.

I then came across the recently released Nextar T30.  It has a 3.5 inch screen, comes with 4 GB of built-in memory and has support for an additional 2 GB memory card.  It’s battery life is rated at 4 hours.  And the clincher is that I saw it for a whopping $90.  Okay I’m sold.

After getting it home, I converted some cartoon movies and used the provided AVI converter to downsize the video to 320×240.  A one hour video was about 400KB.  At that rate, I should be able to get nearly 15 hours of movies on the 6 GB of memory, which is exceptional.  I tested it out at home and it works as expected.  It is a very small device that looks sleek and has an orange neoprene casing around the edge.  I’ve loaded it up with a couple of movies that I want to see and will have more to write about it either on my way to Sydney or on the return trip.

In any case, I think my son will enjoy this device and hopefuly it will keep him somewhat occupied during those long flights.

VMWare Hypervisor for Free

Looks like I won’t have to worry about getting a license for VMWare ESX, cause it is now free.  Will have to download/playaround with this soon.  I wonder if the hardware specs are compatible with my Dell server….hmm.

Hash, MAC, and Signatures – The Differences Explained

This is a very informative article describing the differences between a hash, MAC, and signature.  Specifically, I was a little bit unclear about the meaning of a MAC.  Basically, a MAC is calculated by first generating a hash value and then applying a symmetric/session key to encrypt the hash.  This will insure that the hash value has not been modified.  Because, even if there were a man-in-the-middle attack where the content and hash were modified, the MAC would prevent this from happening.  I’m quoting this at length for future reference:

One of the problems with hashing is its wide open to man in the middle attacks. Without doubt hashing has its uses but in terms of sending data there is nothing stopping someone from intercepting the data, modifying it, and then resending the new message with a new hash. What the receiver gets is a message where the hash code matches the data, even though the data has been modified.

Message Authentication Codes are a way to prevent this. MACs use symmetric encryption methods to protect the sent hash. Symmetric encryption uses one private session key and both the sender and receiver require to have a copy of this key.

The process is as follows. Bob sends Alice some data. He generates a hash of the data and encrypts the hash using the symmetric key. Both the data and the encrypted hash are sent to Alice.

Alice, who also has the session key, generates her own hash from the data and encrypts it using the session key. She then checks her encrypted hash against the encrypted hash Bob sent. If they match the data is unchanged. Any man in the middle attacks no longer work as the middle man does not have the session key and therefore cannot generate a valid encrypted hash for the message.

Essentially a MAC is just an encrypted hash. It’s a combination of an encryption session key and a hashing algorithm.

Some example methods available in .NET include HMACMD5 a MAC algorithm based on MD5 hashing, and HMACSHA1 a MAC algorithm based on SHA1 hashing.

Example code for generating a random session key, this key is required to encrypt the hash code.

IE8 & XSSFilter

Looks like IE8 will have built in support to prevent "cross-site scripting" (XSS) attacks in the form of XSSFilter.  Though it won’t address all of the varieties of XSS, it will certainly mitigate the need for server-side solutions (i.e., web application firewalls).  I don’t think Firefox has a built-in solution for this, but the NoScript plugin certainly addresses this as well.