Tool Building

Darren raises a good point about the benefits of just jumping in and building tooling. One of the examples he uses is Grant’s TfsBlame utility which extends some of the functionality found in the Team Foundation Server Power Toy (tfpt.exe).

It’s all about leverage!

Tools get you leverage, and its something that can be calculated or at least predicted. My suggestion is if you ever have a discussion with someone who argues whether building a tool is worth building or not during the course of a project, whip out an Excel spreadsheet and just prove what kind of impact it will have. I’ve taken a stab at doing that below!

File Attachment: Tool Leverage Calculator.xls (49 KB)

Interestingly I can use this spreadsheet to justify the time I’ve taken writing this blog post. For example, if I argue that having a discussion about whether to build a tool or not will take about an hour, and that over the course of the next year I have that discussion ten times (conservative estimate), and that it cost me five minutes to write this blog post (and the spreadsheet), and that it will cut the unit cost in half (30 minute argument), then I predict that I’ve got myself a leverage of 1.9. That is to say I’ve saved myself about five hours!

P.S. Hope my calculations are right!

The Bus Metaphor

I read this great post on Escape from Cubicle Nation where you can use a bus as a metaphor for life – some questions:

• Are you even driving? 
• Do people get on and off at random stops, or do you go to a specific place and pick up the right person at the right time?
• What is the atmosphere like inside the bus?  Is it like a Cheech and Chong movie or a ride to school with a strict teacher?
• Who do you wish would get off?
• Who do you wish would get on?

Where is the queue?

BBC: Brain sensor allows mind-control (via change is good).

I thought that the head-line was a bit alarmist, but all is good. Basically they are plugging into the brain to pick up motor cell activity and using that to control things like limbs. This is an exciting development (we’ve seen some things moving this direction in the past but nothing to this extent I don’t think). I would think the transhumanists are thinking there day is getting closer as well.

Brute force attacks are silly, but . . .

Darren points to a great article over on Coding Horror (Jeff Attwood) about the folly of trying brute force attack keys. While I agree that this is true – especially for keys, I would like to point out that this is not true for relatively short passwords. For example, if someone gave me a SHA1 hashed password my laptop would probably be able to crack it in about three or four days (assuming a six character alpha numeric password which lots of web-sites use these days). If I had a network of a thousand or so machines I could have the answer in about five minutes.

Mind you, I’d have to first get my hands on an unsalted password to commence the attack which means I would had to have punched a hole through into someones data centre to rip the password out of their database. It would normally be easier to mug someone to steal their credit card