I’ve uploaded the photos from my trip to Orlando.
There aren’t that many but I’ve divided them into two separate albums and they can be found under USA/Kissimee & USA/Epcot Center.
About the trip all I can say is it was wonderful. The weather was great and we did spend a few enjoyable days off before the conference started.
The trip to Disneys Epcot Center was an experience. We tried a few of the attractions where Mission: Space was the most fun. The World Showcase was very impressive. They’ve built up a block or two of different countries and have restaurants, bars and a few exhibitions of each country. IT almost felt like being back in Vegas again.
Down town Orlando wasn’t much to see. For some reason I was expecting more from Orlando but after seeing it I don’t think I’ll be going back there again. We lived just outside of Orlando in a town called Kissimmee. We stayed at an inn, a typical American establishment. It wasn’t luxurious but it had everything we needed. The breakfast was very American and barely eatable: Coffee, Orange Juice and donuts. Need I say I only tried it once?
The conference was better. I didn’t really know what to expect from it other than that I’d hopefully have a few ideas about how we can improve the way we work. I got all that with me and then some. It was a very interesting couple of days and I got to meet and see some of the most respected Scrum people in the business. I must say that it is very inspiring to hear Jim Coplien, Mike Cohn, Ken Schwaber and more talk about there experiences and views on the world of Scrum.
The conference has started so I finally have an internet connection.
I’ve been here in Orlando for about 4 days and I must say I’m really enjoying myself. It’s partly cloudy and with about 30C that’s perfect. The pool is warm and the food is just as unhealthy and good as I remembered it.
We haven’t spent all our time by the pool, we’ve been to Epcot Center at Disney World and took a trip to down town Orlando the other day. Right now I’m standing in the conference lobby after a great lunch.
It’s all work and no play from now on with the conference ending just a few hours before the plane leaves for home again. I’ll write more about Epcot, Orlando & the conference when I have a bit of spare time on my hands, you’ll have to wait until I get home for pictures though
I sincerely hope you are not suffering too much from the cold back home.
The Scrum Alliance is hosting a conference in Orlando. I am going there with a colleague to, hopefully, learn a bit more about scrum and get some inspiration that we can bring back to the office.
Now, when you get a paid trip to the US you can’t just go to the conference and head back home, that would be stupid. We will land in Orlando three days ahead of the conference and go to Disney World and The Kennedy Space Centre. Happy Days!
Before all this I have a huge release on work which will most likely exhaust me completely so I’m really looking forward to this trip as a chance to get away from the office for just a few days to recharge.
The taxi will come and pick me up in just 6 hours to take me to the airport from which I will go to Vienna for a 3 day workshop.I’ll be back on Thursday evening again just to leave for Dublin on friday morning.
On September 22nd Ongame Network, one of the worlds largest online poker networks, announced that they will showcase their new Poker Platform Engine called P5.
“We decided to go to the very heart of our platform and rethink every line of code – and re-write it if necessary. P5 represents a shift in mentality as much as it represents a shift in technology. We are already very excited about what P5 enables us to – but this is nothing compared to what you will see in the months to come.” says Kevin O’Neal, Press Officer at bwin.
Day one of SEC-T is over and done with with mixed feelings.
First of all I want to say that I think the organisation surrounding the conference is good so far. It’s quite obvious that this is the first SEC-T ever and there’s a lot to improve for the coming years but I’m still very satisfied with how the day turned out.
The speaker list for day 1didn’t lok that exciting to me at first glance and after the first session I wasn’t impressed. It was about VMWare’s VMSafe component which is used to make Virtual Machines more secure. All in all it was a topic that didn’t really intrest me and it somewhat felt like a sell pitch. I guess the lack of interest on the topic was the real downer for me on this one though. Oded Horovitz talked very fast but at least it seemed like he knew what he was going on about.
The next speaker, Mikko Hyppönen from F-Secure, was on Organized Online Crime. Again I wasn’t expecting much but it turned out I should have. This was a really intresting talk which focused on how hackers work and how they make their money. Ofcourse Mikko talked a lot about what F-Secure do and how they fight “the enemy” but even with the product pitch this was a very intresting and rewarding talk that really uncovered a lot of new information to me. Good job!
After lunch it was time for Bosse Norgren from the Swedish IT Crime Lab. His talk focused on how the police work and what they look for during IT-Forensics. This was very intresting as he went into details about Live Forensics (on site) and what precautions they have to take at all time to ensure that they don’t compromise the evidence. You almost felt like applying for a job when he was done
Next it was time for a real sales pitch from Outpost24 delivered by Robert E. Lee & Jack C. Louis. Surprisingly enough it was interesting. They started out by talking a bit about the TCP/IP protocol. Basically the good old stuff you learned in school but a nice re-cap of what has been and what still is. After this introduction it was time for them to show their application Sockstress. Unfortunately they couldn’t disclose any technical details about it but they ran two demos and it was quite amazing.
Exploiting a vulnerability they showed us how they brought down port 80 on a web server (or actually the presentation laptop) in a matter of seconds. A typical Denial of Service attack. The next demo was even better. The started playing music on the very same laptop and then started Sockstress. After about two minutes the music wouldn’t play the way it was supposed to. It was slowed down, the CPU was at 100% etc. They then stopped sockstress but the machine never came back. It kept misbehaving even though the attack was over. What was really interesting was that both these attacks only sent 4 packages each second to the server machine. That’s nothing and could be done on a 56k modem. Scary but cool
The fainl talk of the day came from Svante Nygren, KBM (KrisBeredskapsMyndigheten). He worked with Information Security. The talk could have been very interesting but only about 15 minutes of the hour really was. There was a bit too much about KBM and not enough about IS. He did talk about the incident in Estonia last year and the similar incident in Georgia last month and that was interesting.
Time for day 2 now. Currently listening to Torbjörn Pettersson who is talking about root-kits on MAC OSX.Good stuff but I’ll get back on that topic tomorrow.
It’s hot here in Vienna. And the office is extreme. We have 27.5C in the conference room and I’m starting to feel a bit tired. Anywy, the workshop is over and I have about one more hour until we have to leave for the airport. I’ve managed to see the airport and one block around Wien Mitte., the office is literally across the street from CAT (Vienna’s version of Arlanda Express).
I didn’t bring a cam unfortunately so there won’t be any pics but I have a feeling I’ll be going down here again… They acctually asked if I wanted to move down here for a couple of months for a project. It was a joke but you could still sense that it’s a valid option if I want to. Intresting I say…
I’m off for a coffy and a glass of water now before I head back to the cold. Did I mention that it’s very sunny and roughly 25C here? Nice
I’m up early today. I’m waiting for a cab to pick me up for the airport for my very first trip to our office in Vienna. I’m going down for a workshop and will be heading back home at 5pm today again. A very short trip where I will spend an equal amount of time travveling as I will working but atleast it’ll be fun to see the office and meet some new co-workers.
The rest of the work week is occupied by SEC-T here in Stockholm. It’s two day conference and the topic is security, the technical kind. It’ll be intresting and I’ll let you know more about it later on.
Most of you probably know that I work with online poker, not playing but providing it, at bwin Games AB.
What you might not know is that there’s a new competition starting on Wednesday and I’d say it’s something quite new in this world of online poker: Poker Island.
Basically this is another one of those documentary real life shows but the twist this time is poker. You qualify to the island via our online games and once there you get a shot at the big final if you’re good enough. Standard rules apply so people will get knocked out, new players will join and all in all we’ll probably get to see a lot of poker but also a lot of strange, fun and weird things going on in the house. I’m personally not a big fan of these shows but with it being us creating it I’ll probably keep an eye on it anyway
Yay for me! I’ve just spent two days attending a course and now I am a Certified Scrum Master!
I’ve been to a bunch of Scrum courses in the past year and I had already heard most of the things that were discussed during the course but it’s always good to hear things more than once. It was two very good sessions and I really feel I have some new ideas that I will bring back to work and try out.
For those of you that don’t know what scrum is it’s an agile process framework (not a method/process) where the core is communication and team work unlike some ofther procesess out there. Very nice indeed once you get it to work.
