Second Half

There are two guys that have put together and are putting on what is called the Pragmatic Rails Studio. These guys are Dave Thomas, of Pragmatic Programmers and Mike Clark, of Clarkware. I would be remiss in not mentioning Nicole. Nicole is Mike's wife and has done an outstanding job of doing all, and I mean all, of the behind the scenes work to make this Pragmatic Studio on Rails, a really well-run event.

The event started on Thursday with a 1-day Ruby tutorial. Dave & Mike did a very nice job in laying the groundwork of the language and illuminating many of its most important aspects.

As we entered the "meat" of the studio, the 2-day Rails studio, Dave & Mike are delivering solidly (we're one day into the 2-day session as I write this). While based on the "depot" application as outlined in the Rails Book tutorial, Dave did a very enjoyable job of highlighting the fundamentals of Rails application development, covering everything from the Rails philosophy to Ajax-ifying a Rails application. Dave is a self-effacing, humorous and very talented teacher and presenter. The 2-man effort left loads of room to have Mike roam the room to help those of us (myself included) who were struggling to keep up with Dave's keystrokes. Mike did a masterful job in the supporting role and his style was a nice complement to Dave's.

While I was able to keep up during yesterday's Ruby session, today I made it through the first hour, before managing to run into an environment configuration problem. Tonight, I managed to recover my system to get to a working development environment in anticipation of writing our own Rails app at day-2 of the studio.

With all the hype about Rails, I do hope that these guys continue to feed the starving crowds with their wonderful educational methods.

[UPDATE: Here are some photos of the event that the team has flickr'd.]

Posted by Bob Monsour at 8:53 PM | Permalink

Ray Ozzie: V3, former leader of Iris Associates, which developed Lotus Notes, and former leader of Groove Networks, which developed Groove, and now CTO for Microsoft, takes his 3rd turn at blogging. It should be interesting to watch.

Having read his now infamous Internet Services Disruption memo, I look forward to seeing how his dialogue with the internet community develops.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I received yet another phishing email today. In the past, most of the ones I've received have been trying to get me to sign into my PayPal account. Others, a bit more obvious phishing schemes, try to get me to login to bank accounts. Fortunately, they're for banks where I hold no accounts.

Today's email (see below) appeared to originate from Amazon. It is well-written and since I've recently bought several books from Amazon, got my attention.

(Click image to enlarge)

I was "this close" (fingers held nearly together) to clicking on the link, when I thought "does this look phishy?". So, I right-clicked on the link and posted it into my browser address bar. Lo and behold, it looked like this (Clearly, not somewhere to go to do any business with Amazon.):

http://mail.rihes.cmu.ac.th/help/en_US/.amazon/index.html

If you *do* go to the site, it looks very much like a real Amazon sign-in page.

(Click image to enlarge)

Feeling a tad disturbed and expecting that this may be a new wave of phishing that Amazon might not be aware of, I put on my good net citizen hat and decided to attempt to report this to Amazon. Clearly they have a mechanism for such reporting. They seem to have thought of nearly every conceivable situation that a customer might encounter.

Sure enough, they have quite a bit of info on phishing and they even have a way to report various aspects of phishing. I chose that I wanted to "report a spoofed email" as one of their canned email subjects. I followed their instructions, providing the header as well as the body of the email and noting that the link that is shown in the email was really the link I wrote above.

(Click image to enlarge)

Regrettably, after several attempts to send the email, all I got was the following error.

(Click image to enlarge)

Being good blog fodder and hoping that this could perhaps prevent further abuses by those b*st*rds in the phishing community, I close this entry.

UPDATE: Comments have been closed due to irritating comment spam.

Technorati Tags: security

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)