Steve on Security

Every once in a while you need to make a life-altering decision.

Last night I sent an email to the ObjectSharp team telling them I had resigned (I had spoken to the bosses in person prior).

Boy, talk about blunt, eh?

Every once in a while you are offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to do something pretty amazing. I’ve had three of these opportunities. The first was Woodbine Entertainment where I got my start in the Toronto development world. The second was ObjectSharp where I have been able to learn so much from some of the brightest minds in the industry. The third was two weeks ago in Vancouver.

Two weeks ago I was offered a position to lead development of a product for an ISV in BC.

Me? A leader? Wait. Huh?

Well okay, not quite. Cue the screeching cut-away-from-sappy noise.

So what's the deal? I'm not saying, yet. At this point I'm sure a few people could guess though.  

Suffice to say I'll be moving to BC at the end of the year. I'll be at ObjectSharp until December 16th and then will be moving right around the new year.

I'm not sure I can really describe how excited I am about this new position. I'll be working on an awesome product with an awesome group of people.

Of course, it's a little sad leaving ObjectSharp. They have a such a great team of people, and some of the smartest people in the industry.

So it should be an interesting experience.

The Microsoft Security Intelligence Report for 2010 was released not too long ago.  It is a report on the threat landscape seen across 600 million systems worldwide.

This report has a summary for quite a number of countries (170 and counting), and Canada is in the list.  Here are the stats they found:

Microsoft detected malware on 4.2 of every 1,000 computers scanned in Canada in 4Q10 (a CCM score of 4.2, compared to the 4Q10 average worldwide CCM of 8.7).

• The most common category in Canada in 4Q10 was Adware, which affected 35.6 percent of all cleaned computers, down from 41.0 percent in 3Q10.
• The second most common category in Canada in 4Q10 was Misc. Trojans, which affected 35.3 percent of all cleaned computers, up from 29.0 percent in 3Q10.
• The third most common category in Canada in 4Q10 was Misc. Potentially Unwanted Software, which affected 26.3 percent of all cleaned computers, down from 26.1 percent in 3Q10.

Yet another presentation on the docket!  I submitted an abstract to SharePoint Summit 2011 and they accepted!  I will be presenting on SharePoint and how it manages Identity.  More specifically, how SharePoint 2010 uses WIF to handle Claims based authentication and Federation.

Here are the details

Event: SharePoint Summit 2011, January 31st 2011 – February 2nd, 2011

When: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. February 1st, 2011

Where: Four Seasons Hotel, Toronto

Abstract: Managing identities within an organization is relatively easy. However, as business changes, we need to be able to adapt quickly. Identity is something that often gets overlooked in adaptation. In this session we will discuss the Windows Identity Foundation and how SharePoint uses it to adapt easily to change.

Link: http://www.sharepointsummit2011.com/Toronto/conference_day2.htm#session_7_3

Tonight at the IT Pro Toronto we did a pre-launch of the Infrastructure 2010 project.  Have you ever been in a position where you just don’t have a clear grasp of a concept or design?  It’s not fun.  As a result, CIPS Toronto, IT Pro Toronto, and TorontoSQL banded together to create a massive event to help make things a little more clear.  To give you a clearer understanding of how corporate networks work.  Perhaps to explain why some decisions are made, and why in retrospect, some are bad decisions.

Infrastructure 2010 is about teaching you everything there is to know about a state-of-the-art, best practices compliant, corporate intranet.  We will build, from the ground up, an entire infrastructure.  We will teach you how to build, from the ground up, an entire infrastructure.

Sessions are minimum 300 level, and content-rich.  Therefore:

Well, maybe.  (P.S. if you work for Microsoft, pretend you didn’t see that picture)

October 15^th Evening SQL Server DBA Event: Disaster Recovery – Edwin Sarmiento, MVP for SQL Server

Speaker: Edwin M. Sarmiento, MVP for SQL Server

Date: Thursday, October 15^th, 2009

Time: 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM

Venue: Microsoft Ottawa Office

RSVP: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=142063

Session 1 (6:00 PM to 7:10 PM):  Understanding and communicating business-orientated disaster recovery  concepts and objectives

So you have a database maintenance plan that does a backup of your databases and you’re pretty sure that it works fine. But is that really enough? Are you sure that you will be able to meet your service level agreements if and when disaster strikes? This session will explain the need for understanding and communicating business-orientated disaster recovery concepts and objectives to the business stakeholders. This will include defining your RPO and RTO and how it affects your disaster recovery plan.

Session 2 (7:20 to 8:30 PM):  Disaster Recovery for the Paranoid DBA

In the first session, much have been said about disaster recovery in general. In this session, we will look at bringing the concepts down to SQL Server. This session will focus on dealing with a recovery situation for a SQL Server 2005/2008 database, an instance or an entire server. Topics covered will be backup schemes, partial backups and piecemeal restores, page-level recovery and a thorough understanding of how to troubleshoot a "Suspect" database.

Speaker Bio:

Edwin M. Sarmiento (MVP for SQL Server) works as a Senior SQL Server DBA/Systems Engineer for The Pythian Group in Ottawa, Canada. He is very passionate about technology but has interests in music, professional and organizational development, leadership and management matters when not working with databases. He lives up to his primary mission statement – "To help people grow and develop their full potential as God has planned for them.".

Refreshments:

Pizza and pop will be provided.

Note: No one will be admitted by building security after 5:55 PM, and the event will start promptly at 6:00 PM.

OttawaSQL.net is a community group of Ottawa area developers and IT professionals.  We share an interest in Microsoft’s data technologies especially:  SQL Server, SharePoint, PerformancePoint, Workflow Foundations, LINQ, ADO.NET and Entity Framework.

After getting my camera back from Mitch Garvis after Techdays and FailCamp in Toronto, I decided to upload photos from the events, and to my surprise there were some pretty good shots.  Here is what I came back with:

Still working out session details, but it looks like I will be presenting in Ottawa and Montreal for Techdays 2009.  I will be loitering around at the Toronto event soaking up all the techie-goodness, so come find me at any of the three events.  We can talk shop, shoot the breeze, or just mill about having a good time.

I promise I won’t embarrass anyone.  Except maybe myself.  But that’s a warning for all occasions.

Here are the dates of the events across Canada.  Buy your tickets before the early-bird deal runs out!

The Early Bird price is $299.  The regular Price is $599.

I will post more on the sessions I will be presenting at a later date when I get the full details.

See you there!

Microsoft certainly isn’t to blame here, it’s a law in Quebec that prevents contests from happening.  Better chance for me to win it though!