Crazy Or Genius?: Category Reviews

The Sushi Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

Sean — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:58:00 +0100

This is the Sushi Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
Good rolls, bad rolls, and assorted pieces of sashimi
and only one will survive, I wonder who it will be
this is the Sushi Showdown…
this is the Sushi Showdown…
this is the Sushi Showdown…
of Ultimate Destiny

It really just started off as a joke. Kate was torn between going to two restaurants (she had a gift certificate for one, but liked the other better), when I suggested the obvious solution: eat at both and compare the tastes! Better yet, eat at other sushi restaurants too and do a comparison across all of them! And thus the event ‘Sushi Crawl 2008’ was born.

Quickly, however, people began to think that a sushi analog to a pub crawl was not the greatest of ideas, due to amount of time sitting around for food preparation, and the fact that we would be ordering very little from each place in the grand scheme of things (you don’t want the sushi places you will potentially populate in the future to be mad at you). The event quickly evolved into a sushi potluck. Everyone would be responsible for a take out order from a restaurant, which would consist of no fewer than 4 items; spicy salmon roll, tuna sashimi, house roll, and whatever other item you wanted. Targets were selected, participants gathered, and we went off to do battle.

The original roll of opponents:

Hamachi House (Eventually skipped)
I Love Sushi
Sushi Nami
Dharma Sushi
Sushi Shige
Ichiban Sushi (Eventually skipped)
Minato Sushi
Doraku
Momoya (Dismissed due to ‘suckitude’ long before the day of the event)

The day of the event, we ran into a few minor problems, such as a torrential downpour, last minute decision of who goes where, dead phones (which hampered ordering), power losses (Hamachi lost power due to the storm), restaurant closures (Ichiban doesn’t do dinner in March), and potentially sick people. Despite these issues, the event was oh so good. 10 participants * ~4 items * ~6 pieces per item = ~240 pieces of sushi to be delectably savored and compared. Long ago, friends of mine told me that the best way to eat sushi is to gather a group of people and all order various things on the menu and share, and I have to say, it certainly has its benefits. A healthy amount of ‘safe’ selection (that is, items you have tried and enjoyed previously), along with a variety of new stuff without the disadvantage of being stuck with additional rolls if you don’t like it.

At the end of the night, Sushi Shige was declared the overall winner. The sashimi was moist and rich in flavor, the spicy rolls weren’t overly spicy, the pieces were all well proportioned. Of course, Sushi Shige was also the most expensive overall, so you are paying for what you are getting. For more budget concious sushi goers, it was generally agreed that Doraku was also a very solid choice for a reasonable price. Ironically, the two places are just a block a part.

The overall loser of the night was I Love Sushi, which was generally below the quality of everything else. Whether it is the worst of all in Halifax is debatable, however, since Momoya is apparently so bad that it wasn’t even worthy of ordering from, and since Hamachi House (from my own experience in the last year) has been more of a hit or miss situation.

Obviously, this event needs to be repeated (for a proper data comparison set of course) and I am already looking forward to the next one.

Google Analytics

Sean — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:45:00 +0100

Like other people I know, I have been testing Google Analytics. There are some good things about it, but overall I am not really impressed.

The Good:

Content Summary. Specifically the percentages that content get for a time range. I love easily seeing how traffic is growing or subsiding for individual (well, the top 5 anyway) articles. Hey! Recently my TurnItIn.com article traffic was up 50%! Instant, easy to read feedback like that is awesome.

Variable time range. I like being able to see data for time ranges other than a month (which is the standard for things like Webalizer). Google makes this simple to do.

Date Storage. Some free web site statistics programs only keep data for a certain amount of time, and only show you a limited range of that. For example, the free version of StatCounter only tracks 2 weeks. Analytics stores….... probably all information it has ever received, which really ties in with the variable time range above.

It IS powerful. If you have the time and desire, I am sure you can massage the data to give you tons of information (to bad I don’t care about most of it).

The Bad:

Does not integrate with other Google products. Google Sitemaps integration seems like a no-brainer, given that it is for related data. Google Maps for the map overlay would seem to make sense as well, so that I could actually zoom in on an area, rather than seeing a large grouping of dots along the east coast.

All the Ad related stuff. Ok, I understand that a lot of people want to track their ad revenue, $ index, whatever. But what about those who don’t? I personally find all the ad related stuff clutters the interface I am trying to use.

Unintuitive. The breakdown into Executive, Marker, and Webmaster sections makes finding things difficult. For a while, I couldn’t find a simple referring pages list. More recently I found it under Marketing Optimization -> Visitor Segment Performance -> Referring Source. I couldn’t figure out filtering for a while. Clicking a graphic to change it from exclude a filtered item, rather than filter by it didn’t seem obvious.

Flexible in some ways, obtuse in others. A lot of places, you can display up to 500 records. For the content summary, you only have the top 5. Sure, you can get most of the same information under Content Optimization -> Content Performance, but that section is missing the percentage changes over time (you know, what I thought was GOOD) that the summary has. Also, the referrer information only gives me the domain name, not which page the user came from.

The (Possibly) Ugly:

Google stores all this information, and uses it for their own purposes. ome individuals understandably have privacy concerns regarding this. As Ian said, it’s basically a toss up. Decide if its right for you.

Conclusion:

For something free, Analytics is better than some packages. I personally feel that I am presented with way more information than I really want. For something more revenue related, your milage may very.

Review - Metroid Prime: Hunters

Sean — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 19:48:29 +0200

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine showed off Metroid Prime: Hunters on his Nintendo DS. Playing it for a few minutes, I have to admit I was hooked. Using the stylus to aim and select things just seemed so SIMPLE, the gameplay itself was good, and it has multiplayer capability!

I picked up my own copy shortly after finishing up Compiler Construction, and I beat the game today. A few things of note:

Short game – 7 hours game time got me to the end (66% of items/lore/etc)
Hand cramps – Stylus good, holding the DS with other hand not so good (I suppose this is one of the reasons the DS Lite was created).
?? – That is an actual column in the ‘Records’ section. Yep, there is the regular bout of Nintendo unlockables. Awesome (and at least with the short game time, I don’t have to rewind through 20+ hours of gameplay
Missiles – Really, I know they are in all the other games, but I felt that they were useless here. USELESS.

Haven’t really had a chance to try out multiplayer (don’t have wireless), so I can’t really comment on that. Overall, I am really liking the game though. Nice amount of exploration with some fast and furios bounty hunter on bountry hunter action. Now all I have to do is figure out what ???? is …....

Nintendo DS: First Thoughts

Sean — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 03:58:55 +0100

A few weeks back I bought myself a Nintendo DS for my birthday. Now, normally it is usually hard for me to play anything more than ‘twitch’ games on my main PC, due to my regular busy schedule. However, I noticed that I generally have down time between tasks that is spent just sitting around or aimlessly surfing the web. I figured I could use this time to play games with one of the current gen portable consoles. But why the DS and not the PSP? Several reasons really: I have fond memories of my old Nintendo products. Nintendo seems to innovate in gameplay more than the competitors (and dual screens seem cool). Oh, and Final Fantasy and Shining Force (in various incarnations) are/will be available for it. Coincidentally, the Mario Kart/DS bundle came out shortly before my birthday, and my friend has been going on about how awesome that game is, so I got that too. <!~~-more~~-> Initial impressions:

Right now the dual screen doesn’t do much (in Mario Kart). Then again, I used to hate pausing to view a map, so we will see how future games handle it.

I hate the fact that there is no battery indication. I hate playing a game and all of a sudden my DS going dead. I mean, they have a flashing light for testing Wi-fi connectivity, why not have one of them flash steadily when the battery is low? At least then I would know that I need to wrap things up, maybe save, and then exit gracefully.

Range of the Wi-fi connection seems a little slow, and I have had some problems getting connectivity over the internet, but some of that might have to do with the set up of the access points I have been connecting to over the DS itself.

Doesn’t support the GBA link mode. For example, in Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced you could link two GBA units and do co-operative and competitive missions and get extra stuff. Not so with the DS. The rest of the backward compatibility works fine, but I thought doing this for the DS over WiFi for GBA games would have been a no brainer. I suppose the most likely cause is hard coded hardware information in the GBA cartridged, but it still would have been nice to have.

All in all I am enjoying my purchase. Mario Kart is a blast and I am loving going retro and playing some of my favorite older games. The fact that Final Fantasy 3-6 are coming out (4 is already out) only strengthens my decision in my own mind. Suddenly, waiting doesn’t seem as boring any more…......

Review - Applied Software Project Management

Sean — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 18:39:00 +0100

O’Reilly has recently begun a new line of books called ”/Theory/In/Practice” (and no, I don’t know why it isn’t listed on their web page). These books cover such topics as “Essential Business Process Modeling” and “Applied Software Project Management”. It was my pleasure to secure a copy of “Applied Software Project Management” right before I left for the holidays. Since I am doing some project management now, I figured doing some reading certainly couldn’t hurt, right?

“Applied Software Project Management” is a generalist book. It is modular; no chapter really relying on any other. It covers the whole range of software project and management topics from planning, to managing people, to software testing and everything in between. While a lot of the ideas covered are really only effective for larger teams than the ones I am usually involved with, there are a lot of useful ideas for smaller teams as well. Perhaps the most valuable – Part 2: Using Project Management Effectively. It focuses more on understanding and incorporating changes into an already existing system.

This book reminds me somewhat of Code Complete (a good technical book in my opinion). The fact that it is general enough to be useful to a wide variety of people, yet specific enough to get its points across makes it extremely valuable. Also enjoyable is the fact that it very rarely focuses on specific tools (the only major case of this being the use of Subversion), and when it mentions one specific tool, it always refers to several specific instances (such as mentioning Perforce, Arch, CVS, etc. after mentioning Subversion).

“Applied Software Project Management” is one of the better books I have read from O’Reilly. At no point was I bogged down in technical concepts I couldn’t understand. It was actually quite difficult to put down until I finished whatever section I was reading at any given time. I recommend this book to anyone involved in software project management.

Final Rating: 4.5/5

“Applied Software Project Management�? is available from O’Reilly Media, Inc. for CAN $55.95. Sample chapters can be obtained @ The O’Reilly Catalog

Scientific Linux - Distro Updates Done Right?

Sean — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 09:10:00 +0200

For my trip to New Jersey, my boss dropped off an old Dell Inspiron 2500 and a set of Scientific Linux 4.0 CDs. Since I didn’t have any other install CDs except Fedora Core 3, I figured I would give this new distro a try. The first thing I noticed is that it appears to be based on Fedora (a deeper inspection seems to indicate it is actually based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The second thing I noticed is that it had zero problems installing on this laptop. Some small problems have been encountered, such as not initially being able to set resolution to 1024×768 (fixed by changing the default monitor to a Dell 1024×768 Laptop Display Panel), not being able to put the laptop into hibernate or standby, and the media buttons not working (though do any of those special buttons work properly out of the box on any distro?). So far so good.

Going to their site, I noticed that Scientific Linux 4.1 has been released. Also, they have instructions (though kinda out of date) of how to upgrade from one minor revision to another. This I must try. Step 1) Set up proxy access at work. Step 2) Realize that the proxy is screwing up the compressed yum metadata files. Step 3) Hey, it’s a laptop, I can take it home. Step 4) Start updating.

Final verdict: After rebooting, I have an updated system behaving as expected! A big difference over my botched Fedora upgrades. If only more distros had such a well defined, documented, and tested transition between minor revisions, instead of primarily through downloading the latest 4 (and becoming 5) CDs, I am sure a lot of users would be happy.

Buskers - Part 1

Sean — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 10:46:00 +0200

Halifax International Buskerfest is once again in motion. Quite a few interesting shows were performed this year. On the first day I went down, I basically ended up watching a series of finales, so I really don’t know how good the entire acts were. As always, the waterfront areas were PACKED with people.

Chaulkmaster Dave

Everyone in Halifax knows of Chaulkmaster Dave. Chances are you have seen his work in front of the Library on Spring Garden. As always, he was down at thje Buskerfest, showing off his talent. His renditions of Spiderman and Batman are simply amazing, as usual.

Matty Blade

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to wait around 10 minutes while you are saying you are going to swallow a sword, before you actually swallow the sword. Also, I am getting tired of finales where you get 4 guys to hold a pole while you climb it and perform your 30 second performance.

Scot Free

One of two escape artists that I managed to see, Scot Free managed a constant stream of jokes, puns, and wit while being wrapped in a roll of saran wrap for his grand finale. That’s right, not the traditional straight jacket escape, but sarran wrap. His non-traditional approach, and constant humor made him one of the better shows I managed to see.

According to his website, he is also an extreme skateboarder, and a chainsaw juggler….... while the chainsaw is on.

Stephen Elway

Another escape artist act, this time with the traditional straight jacket. The performer came across as eccentric, and since he escaped while ‘I’m Too Sexy’ was playing, and turned it into a dance routine, it was quite entertaining. The setup to the event, where he had two members of the audience tie him up, was filled with the busker wit I enjoy so much.

USA Breakdancers

This was the best performance of the day, in my opinion. Despite the fact that I couldn’t see some of the breakdancing, due to the sheer number of people watching, the moves that I did see were spectacular. At one point, they pulled some people from the crowd and got them to dance for the crowd. To my (and I am sure the crowd’s amusement), one of these people actually did some breakdancing himself. The look on the face of the leader was amusing. I swear, he was thinking “Off all the people in the crowd and at this festival, I had to pick the one white dude in Halifax that can actually breakdance to a degree”. The famous busker wit was also present here, with such lines as “We will accept any donations, so if you can pull out your wallet, take out 5 or 10 dollars…........ and give us the rest….” and “We are trying to pay for our educations, so if you could give us 5 or 10 dollers, that would help a lot. On the other hand, if you give us 20 or 50, we won’t have to go at all!”

Jeff Collins

Take Matty Blade, have him eat fire instead of swords, and you have Jeff Collins. I liked (or disliked) there shows the same amount in the same way. After 10 minutes, I was thinking “Eat the damn fire already!!!”

Review - Security Warrior

Sean — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:32:00 +0200

Security Warrior labels itself as the “most comprehensive, up-to-date book covering the art of computer war�?. Having been on my To-Read list since it was initially released a year and a half ago, I was interested to see how accurate this claim remains.

Obviously, some topics you might expect to be covered in a comprehensive security handbook are missing. No where to be seen is discussion of vulnerabilities in MD5 and SHA, as these hadn’t been published yet. Also missing is any reference to the Linux 2.6 kernel, as the first version of that was released barely a month before the first publishing.

However, this items discussed in this book are general enough that they are still valid and highly valuable. Discussion is platform neutral where possible, with further discussion on platform dependencies where needed. There are some very nice examples and case studies, which make the book a more interesting read than strict discussion. The Advanced Defense subsection is spectacular and well deserving of the designation Advanced. A lot of the ideas there, while simple in nature, are things that I haven’t come across before, or even thought of, especially their discussion on intrusion detection and log aggregation.

There are, however, a few problems with the book. First and foremost, I have a problem with the Social Engineering section. While I agree that social engineering is an important aspect of network security, 10 pages does not even begin to scratch the surface on the topic. Thankfully, this is offset by an amazing set of references at the end of the chapter, including the excellent “Art Of Deception�? by Kevin Mitnick. Another problem that ties into this, is the fact that the Reconnaissance chapter comes AFTER the Social Engineering chapter, when reconnaissance is usually a precursor to a social engineering attack. I felt that the logical order would have created a smoother reading process here. Finally, the author’s repeatedly mentioned that some tools were standard on Linux distributions, but not commercial unix systems, and as a result might have to be installed manually. I felt this repetition for most of the tools discussed was distracting from the core information I was trying to read.

One area that deserves its own discussion is the section on Reverse Engineering. This section was highly interesting, showing a wide variety of techniques for not only the Unix operating system, but Windows CE as well. A plethora of information regarding techniques, tips and tools are contained in these chapters….... but really only for the Unix and Windows CE environments. Out of 175 pages, only 20 of those discusses reverse engineering on the actual windows platform. With 2/5 of the book actually being devoted towards this topic, I feel that this section might have been better off being an entire book of its own, with expanded discussion for all environments and additional examples.

Overall, Security Warrior was quite an interesting read. I fully plan to take many concepts I have learned here and incorporate them into both current and future plans. If you want a detailed look at network security concepts, this book is a very solid starting point, before branching out into other works.

Final Rating: 3.5/5

“Security Warrior�? is available from O’Reilly Media, Inc. for CAN $65.95. Sample chapters can be obtained @ The O’Reilly Catalog