Infrequently Noted

Tim has finished our discussion of the merits of innerHTML. My hat goes off to him for all the hard work he put into the article.

My resume is now available in HTML format. The not-so-subtle inferrence here is that I'm looking for a job. If you are in need of a security engineer or web application developer with a penchant for making seemingly crazy things work (and work well), I'm your man.

My roomate mentioned to me the other day that my only problem with the hiring process is that I don't look great on paper. That may be true, so to combat that, I'm going to list a couple of reasons why you (or someone you know) should hire me:

1. The phrase "hard working" isn't even a good start.
   
2. A good way to motivate me is to tell me that it can't be done or that "it'll never work". Stand back and watch.
   
3. What I don't know I'm not afraid to learn.
   
4. I'm smart.
   
5. I'm a geek to the core, but I understand that just because something appeals to my geek side, that doesn't make it a good idea.
   
6. I listen to good music.
   
7. I try not to have opinions about things I know nothing about.
   
8. When I do have an opinion, it's for a good reason.
   
9. If you don't plan on reimbursing me for books, don't even bother calling. Educating myself isn't something I do in a classroom, it's something I do on my time because I like to do it.
   
10. Above all, I understand that technology is a means to an end. I'm passionate about what I do, and because I am I try to understand how and why people will use what I build.
    
11. I do this because I love doing it. If you're doing it for other reasons, please refrain from calling.
    
12. I am comitted to building quality software
    
13. The most important thing about a workplace to me is the people I work with. Second to that are the projects I get to work on. Everything else flows from those 2 things.
    
14. I'm available right now. Right this minute.
    

I miss Suck, however their words of wisdom are as theraputic today as when they were freshly penned, oh so many months ago.

Everybody needs a little Suck sometimes. Boy, that just sounds wrong...nevermind...forget I said anything.

A prototype of a signals and slots implementation for JavaScript. The sample page is here.

We'll make a true component framework out of netWindows yet, by golly.

I was out talking with Patrick the other night and we started talking shop (security). He's working on an interesting project which we talked about at length, trying to find mental holes in the encryption implementation that kind of thing. It's always good to exercise those neurons.

One thing we stated talking about that I can't seem to get out of my head though was some kind of replacement for IDMEF. Patrick noted that Snort's XML output might make a very good starting place to work from in designing an intrusion detection data standard that doesn't require you to read tea leaves to implement. IDMEF is/was well intentioned, but as we all know, the road to COBOL is paved with good intentions. What we need is something more lightweight that is more domain-specific (say, network IDS only). My thought was that if we did it right, we could write a definition for a network IDS data exchange format and then write a definition or XSLT conversion for it that would turn it into valid IDMEF markup. Not that anyone uses IDMEF, but at least we wouldn't be throwing away years of work in getting a spec built, and it leaves our domain-specific thinger with a migration path to a more all-inclusive language for those orginizations that need it.

Not that I have spare time to do it in.