26 Miles

Cryptography In The Database

// November 30th, 2005 // No Comments » // Security & Privacy, Technology

Slashdot has a review of Kevin Kenan’s book Cryptography in the Database : The Last Line of Defense (ISBN 0321320735).

Adequately securing corporate databases can be a daunting task, and in part for that reason it is often found near the bottom of corporate priorities, somewhere under “get more coffee for the break room” and well below “deliver the product to market”.

The reviewer points out that Kenan’s book goes far in illustrating a roadmap for:

“…designing and integrating a cryptosystem into the database to protect it against the various threats that are specifically launched against corporate database systems.”

The advent of HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and other privacy-related legislation has spurred companies in those industries to take steps to secure their information infrastructure against compromise.

Other industries not falling under the umbrella of those legislative acts but no less responsible for the storage and exchange of sensitive data would do well to consider the security of their own databases and whether encrypting their data in storage is something they should explore.

Read more at Slashdot.

“Bigger Is OK”, says Builder.

// November 28th, 2005 // No Comments » // Life

We met with our builders last night and got a lot of questions answered that had been building up over the holidays.

They think we may be able to build it out with the additional square footage and still come in under our upper budget limit. So today I met with our architect to make what we hope to be the final changes.

We’ll review the latest changes later this week and if all is OK, we’ll give the thumbs up to print the blueprints. Then our builder can take the plans and get bids on the construction cost.

If the bids come back and show we can build it as-is and on-budget, we’ll proceed. If it’s over-budget, we’ll analyze if we can just trim the finish-out budget or if it will require cutting some space, which will involve architectural changes.

With luck, all will go well so we can move past the design phase and on to bidding and building the thing.

IT Salary Guide For 2006

// November 19th, 2005 // No Comments » // Business & Politics, Technology

Robert Half Technology has published it’s annual Salary Guide. I suppose you could debate the value of such things, especially ones from IT consulting firms, but it will no doubt be used as a guide by at least some managers so it’s worth a look at least to see if you’re nearer a common wage slave or a 1-person profit factory.

View the Salary Guide at Robert Half Technology.

A Matter Of Inches

// November 19th, 2005 // No Comments » // Life

We got the AutoCad version of our home plans with the latest changes and lo and behold, it’s 400 feet bigger than we expected. It turns out the original number we had been given in fact did NOT include the bonus room we had thought it did. We think the discreapency is due in large part to, perhaps, a rounding down of all the footage measurements on the rough plans. But who knows.

So, we have some cutting to do. We’re considering letting our builders bid out the house as-is just to see where the costs fall, then we’d really know how much we need to cut. It may be even more than we think, which would be unfortunate as we’d have the architect do a pretty thorough redesign of the place, which would probably cost more money.

We’re disappointed as we were operating under the assumption that the original square footage estimate included the extra bonus room upstairs. At this point there’s little chance we’ll be able to finish that out, short of a major redesign.

We’d hoped we were nearing the end of the design process. Looks like we still have a way to go.

AJAX Drag & Drop Web Site Creator

// November 19th, 2005 // No Comments » // Technology

Another cool use of AJAX technology. This site provides a service that allows users to build websites using drag and drop page elements. It’s complete server-based technology and requires no plug-ins to use.

The site below was itself was created using the tool.

Read more at dragdropsitecreator.com.