When it was revealed that the massive Equifax breach in 2017 was attributed to their failure to patch a component in their system known as ‘Apache Struts’, everyone was reaching out to their development teams and asking: “Do we use Apache Struts? Is it patched?”

And I found it interesting. In my opinion, the wrong question was being asked.

What they should be asking us (and what we should be doing) is:

When Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, died in October, I decided to read his 2011 Memoir, Idea Man. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Seven years after co-founding Microsoft with childhood friend Bill Gates, Paul was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He left Microsoft, already a very wealthy individual. A few years after successful treatment and recovery, he bought the Portland Trailblazers NBA basketball franchise.

In 1994, Paul Allen hired Bob Whitsitt as the Trailblazers general manager, to rebuild the team. Whitsitt focused solely on basketball skills in his hiring.

I recently participated in a workplace hackathon.

Here are some reflections on the experience:

• It’s hard to completely step away from day-to-day work for 2 days. Release schedules set long ago don’t change, we choose to keep customer facing meetings, incidents still need to get addressed
• Conversely, much can be deferred (many emails can wait!), and a lot can still be accomplished in two part days
• Two days of development and a 7 minute presentation are great constraints which force many decisions

It’s amazing how much you can get done when:

I’m on a roll this week - a record number of posts (3 in 7 days…).

The bar code on my library card has been worn out for a while.  My last few trips, its probably taken about a minute for me to play around with the positioning of the card on the library’s scanner to get it to read correctly.

Years ago, I’d read how my friend Chris created a custom library card with all of his family’s card numbers on it.  Although I’m sure the instructions he provided would work (I suspect the library’s barcode readers handle many formats), the bar codes his method created didn’t match the one on the card.

The Hispanic Fiesta Latin-American festival descends on Mel Lastman square in North York every labour day weekend.  The festival has lots of live music, a beer tent, and food vendors.  And every year, I buy a coconut ice pops (“Paletas”/popsicles) from Polar Real Tropical Fruit.  They’re awesome, and I never see them sold anywhere else.  Perhaps its the ambience of the festival, but I prefer them to other coconut ice pops I’ve tried.

Our 2018 balcony crop is in.

We didn’t grow corn this year.  This year, we bought our tomatoes and red peppers from Emma Biggs, co-author of Grow Gardeners. These tomatoes were the best we’ve grown so far on our balcony.