Development : Simple Versus Complex

I have been reading some of Alan Turings works, specifically some of his work for the NPL in the late 40's and early 50's, before he went to Manchester in frustration with the NPL's lack of progress with his ideas.

One of the ideas Turing was pressing at the time was to do as much as he could in software, don't jump to hardware solutions; which at the time fixed the functionality of the machine to a single purpose; instead he wanted a general computing device he could put to any uses he desired.

Today the average programmer, hobbyist or indeed employed software worker, such as myself, don't have the opportunity to define new hardware for a bespoke task, indeed the machines we are driving are far more powerful than Turing ever imagined and we can do as Turing suggested, we can write software to get around an issue.

You need encryption, why pay to plug in a dongle doing this, when the processor you have is equipped to do the task for you, indeed some processors even have encryption instructions and powerful parallelism built into assist in such work!

So today's lesson is, take on board Turing's ideas, do in software as much as you can, even if you want to later move to real hardware emulate your idea now.  Here's a very good example:

nVidia's emulation lab is an extreme example, however, it is indicative of the kind of problems we are meeting today as older engineers are coming away from dedicated hardware devices (because their machines were too slow in the 1990's) and we have today's extremely powerful machines right there at our finger tips.

Why does this exist?

Last week I set about looking at a quite old system (circa 2008 it was last attended to) it contains a message passing system, which allows passing of messages (events if you will) between producers in any process to consumers in any other process subscribed to the service.  It did this with a windows service driver, which called down into a USB dongle to queue the message.

The consumers then polled the USB device (round robin style) to determine if the next message was for that consumer... You might imagine this was extremely slow.

It was also very complex, the code within the USB dongles was not mutable; being set in silicon; and the consumers could end up locked out of the service queue by a message being present for a consumer which was not able to consume the message.

This clearly needed replacing.... So, I had to look at it, a single afternoon, it was just extremely complex inside, so one had to take a step back, don't look at the contents of the code, look at the API, the functions being used....

The producer code relies on just three functions and the consumer relied on a thread safe queue which was woken up from a spin wait to call the registered consuming function... Not rocket science.

I set about writing new code with a very simple UDP server and clients, taking the message in, converting it to XML and posting it to the loopback IP Address of the master UDP listening port which then sent it out to the listening consumers on their loopback IP and port number.

Voila, in an afternoon, I had replaced five years (ish) of complex, hard to maintain code, with a working prototype of a solution.  And it dropped straight into place.  The dedicated, slow, old, hardware could be unplugged and the system just carried on as it always had.

The customer for this product is delighted to see it running faster, and the overhead of the hardware costs being removed.  All by simply doing in software something which was being offloaded to hardware in yester-year.

Administrator : Friend Still in Failure

Can you  hear a banging noise?... No... Are you sure?... I can.. Oh no wait, that's my head slamming into the desk.

A few weeks ago I posted about a friend for whom I uncovered a security loop hole for, the python script being run as root...

Well, it seems the same person, on their main "enterprise windows server" has been similarly hacked by the same chap, but the trick was this one.... http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/windoze-security-loop-hole.html

Yes, a loophole I had mentioned and blogged about.

The loophole was exposed by a C# program the chap had written for them, I'm not sure what it did, but it was run as a service, and could spawn other programs under the same user, he'd written it so that it ran any program in a sub-folder then before he'd left he made it run a VLC remote desktop and another small program which opened a "Save As" dialog.

It opened this way way off screen, at something like location 20000 x 4500.  So the only indication it was there was a small twitch to the task bar, but he used the mouse to the browse the dialogue to the command executable and opened himself  a prompt as the administrator user.

I didn't spot this, I didn't even look at this machine for my mate, instead over the weekend I had a machine at home I was using as a network routing test, and I asked for some space on a remote server with a fat pipe to do a slow-loris type attack on my software.

I set up my end and set up their end, expecting to get something like 200mb/sec attacking me and swamping my little 64K buffer (I could then scale and tune my software to defeat this kind of attack, was the plan).

What I noticed was that I only got around 8mb/sec coming to me, so with my remote session I did a little digging and saw the disk activity was around 34%, with no-one in the office?!??!

The developer they'd let go was running a torrent service from the machine!  He was downloading and seeding several video streams of dubious merit and origin.

I didn't change anything, I just called my friend and explained... And I left it there, I'm yet to hear what was going on.

However, I think my friend will be having a word with the IT Admin he's had in place for nearing a month for not spotting that out of hours and weekends this persistent idiot is still infiltrating and using their systems as his own repository.

I've told them three times now to unplug everything and to put a secure router between their switch and the outside world, something brand new and only set up by them, pfSense perhaps, but they've not listened.

People : Email too Old?

Today I had the issue of someone calling me, repeatedly, and I asked them to simply drop the information in an e-mail (my well published e-mail - it's right there on the right of this page, and they had it right in front of them).

Their reply however stunned me.... "Don't you have twitter?"

My reply... "Yes, but not for this, email it me."

"Can't I send it you over whatsapp?" They persisted.

"No, just e-mail it me, it's a PDF or something yes?"....

They continued "So, how about through the cloud?"

"Just e-mail it me, as an attachment!" I was getting exacerbated with them at this point.

"But" they began "but e-mail is so old".

I felt like ripping my hair out, there were reasons for this request, firstly I could get their return information, second the attachment was over 35mb and finally I didn't want to have any complications about where to send the information.  They had my e-mail address right there, right in front of them.

The net result, so far, however is nothing has arrived, no sign of it... I'm tempted to phone them back and point this out, but I can't be bothered... Phones, like me, are so last century after all!

Health : Burnt Toast

Catching this one in the news this morning...

And I already know this... I already know Burnt Toast is a health risk, I remember being told by an Oncologist when I was about 15 that burnt toast was, in his professional opinion, responsible for the spontaneous occurrence of stomach cancer in some of his patients.

I remembered this, I remember when I worked for Boots mentioning this to some folks and their laughing.

I remember telling a house mate at uni and his sceptical look; but then I was rather odd, especially in the final year of uni... I used to cool my toast in the fridge for example (I like cold toast, okay.. nothing too strange about that!).

So, as far as I can remember this isn't news, it was news about twenty three years ago, but since then I've known this, about coffee too... I still drink it, as the oncologist I knew said, it either gets you or it doesn't, don't worry about a slice of toast; worry more about first and second hand smoke, diesel fumes and UV light.

People : Swearing Developers

I have to be honest, I swear... A lot... I sometimes do it knowingly, but there's also a little swearing leprechaun inside me.  My grand parents never really swore a lot at all, but my mother used to swear like a drunken sailor (i.e. a lot).  She thoroughly denies this now, but I assure you she swore a lot...

Consequently, I can swear a lot.

But this may not be a bad thing... For example, working with a development team as long as I have, you get to know people and you can express yourself, as I expect them to express their selves to me, if that needs a suitably short four letter inflection, so be it.

And it seems somewhere, someone, has decided this is not a bad thing...

This is lifted from BBC's Quiz of the week for 20th Januaryt 2017, and I have to agree, I am a straight honest person... But if you're being an arse, I'll tell you.

People : Donald Trump

This afternoon, in a few tens of minutes actually (by the time I schedule this post) there will be a new President of the United States of America.  A controversial figure, whom some might argue didn't win the election in a 100% clear cut fashion (his opponent - Hilary Clinton - won the popular vote, and then there's a little grey area with foreign involvement in the whole process).

But, I'm British, so I'm not too invested in who the man is, I am more interested in his politics, he's a half Scottish, through his Mother and has close ties to Britain.

We ourselves are not enamoured with the whole EU affair, and so trade avenues with the US may now open back up.  I certainly have a vested interest in the US economy as one of my pensions is tied up over there in a US fund, but for the tiny amount I put into that pension it's paying for itself, and depending on how things look in a years time, I may have to jolt things around.

However, we're left guessing about the next steps he will take, we can not tell whether he'll stick to all his pledges or promises.  He is however a business man, rather than a dyed in the wold politician, so he may have more rancur than previous presidents elect.

But politics aside the question today then is what will happen with the man?  Will, with protesters, detractors and so many unhappy voters in the US, both foreign and domestic, will the man survive?

This is a very serious question, one of the major points of out going president Obama's calls was for gun reform, however, everyone and their granny is seemingly still packing a piece in the US, even in liberal New York City & Washington DC.

So, will he survive the day?  The week?  The Year or his whole term?  I think that is an important question to ask.

As for the politics, we can but wait and see, though I believe the markets will heave this afternoon and though the seas may not boil and the sky may not fall, Donald Trump will be sworn in.

Development : Microsoft Tools Troll the Office

Today, I've been working on a brand new project, which literally I thought was parked just yesterday... My mistake it seems this project was expected to be being worked on.. A coworker is currently slogging through the same API but for a different (embedded platform) and it's taken him quite a while.

So the product owner for this new piece of software from me (which is to call XML Web Services through SOAP up stream and a hardware device over USB or serial down stream) was quite upset when they arrived at my desk and asked how their product was coming, and my reply was "Doesn't exists, waiting for the hardware".

After a short, and shirty, moment with them I assured them I would do all I could with the interface, implement ALL the XML Web Service calls through the published ASMX tomorrow... Which is today... They looked sceptical, gave me that long stare saying "no, no you won't"....

And of course I have!... Microsoft Visual Studio Troll tool award of the day, it is so simple to work with a published ASMX, just add a service reference to the URL and it generated everything for you, then tell C# you're using that name space and voila there it all is laid out for you on a platter.

I just finished this project, less than 5 hours after starting it, so have dished it back to the product owner to find the hardware, I know they're not going to believe how quickly I've completed this cycle on the development, not least because the other chap has been on it weeks and has only done about 60% of the calls so far... Yeah, I say... But he's not using troll Tools.

Sometimes, times like this in fact, I quite like C#... Don't let on, it's my dirty secret.