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let me quote book i’m reading now: A quick hypothesis: say one million monkeys speculate on the stock market. They buy and sell stocks like crazy and, of course, completely at random. What happens? After one week, about half of the monkeys will have made a profit and the other half a loss. The ones that made a profit stay; the ones that made a loss you send home. In the second week, one half of the monkeys will still be riding high, while the other half will have made a loss and are sent home. And so on. After ten weeks, about 1000 monkeys will be left - those who have always invested their money well. After twenty weeks, just one monkey will remain - this one always, without fail, chose the right stocks and is now a bilionaire. Let’s call him the success monkey. ...

it will be unique opportunity in Poland and in this part of Europe. with group of my dear friends and design masters - Piotr Jabłoński, Sebastian Pasternacki and Piotr Matusiak i’ll be delivering bootcamp-type of training for CCDE. we’re starting on 5th of may - and you can find more details here.

…workstation requires two! ;) i had some time over Christmas to finally build myself following beast: Asus Z9PE-D8 WS (BIOS 5304, original 3304 had some interesting bugs Xeon E5 2660 (Sandy Bridge EP/EX) - 16 cores, 32 HT Corsair H80i for CPU cooling 64GB RAMu (8x 8GB DDR3 1600 ECC) OWC 480GB PCIe - has two 240GB blades in RAID0 Corsair Obsidian 900D 2x Seagate 4TB HDD [6x Samsung 2TB] LSI 9261-8i to drive those mechanical disks in RAID5 Creative SB ZX AMD Radeon 7970 connected to three Dell U2412 monitors Intel x520 NIC connected to Catalyst 2960S and to other workstation - Xeon 5670, 48GB RAMu, OWC 240GB as boot and two 2TB RAID0 disks as RAID0 for ESXi 5.5 as we sometimes laugh with each other - ‘it opens Total Commander pretty bloody fast’. VMware Workstation 10 orchestrates number of VMs running at the same time and i can still use workstation as normal desktop. Visual Studio 2013 is able to compile whole projects in a blink of an eye. ...

don’t start your php upgrade at 2:40 in the morning. as you’ll stay awake until 5am :)

Jennifer Lawrence phenomenon (i can’t quite get Hunger Games popularity, but i love Silver Linings Playbook. how you should do proper conference badges (oh yeah, we’re learning!), Department of Defense outsources to private company management of their own images and movies archive for 10 years, RSA accepted 10M$ of bribe from NSA to promote weaker encryption algorithm and last but not least - DARPA vision of autonomic SkyNet network from eightees. and to sum it up - how to deal with the fact that what you do in your daily job, may not be the thing you love. from my own experience i can attest, that you should strive to find job you’ll love and treat it as a hobby (while this may lead to blurring time between work and private life, and in effect - turning into workaholic). ...

it seems that GPUs can be reasonably well tasked to handle additional work that x86 CPUs simply can’t. i’m talking about network monitoring and NetFlow processing - good reading when travelling or before sleep.

Christmas are coming, and traditionally that means good time of the year to push people to buy things they don’t need. in Poland, companies generally don’t care what Customer wants. and don’t listed in the process of ignoring him/her. why are companies selling services choose not to listen? they don’t care? i was talking about this paradox during Cisco Connect, but in reality i was just repeating what everyone sane enough to think shouts left and right - we want customized offer, not something off the shelf. true value that people appreciate and will be loyal is created by listening to what customer wants - and giving to her/him what they really need (it’s actually pretty complex, but that’s basic intro to subject). ...

you spend a lot of time preparing OVA to save time in future and enable cloning. then, during importing to remote ESXi you get following error message: Failed to deploy OVF package: The task was canceled by a user.. i didnt’ cancel anything! it’s frustrating, and it seems its a small problem on import format side, not on user side. OVA is simple ZIP file that can be unpacked, so you should do so. then, remove file with checksums (*.mf) and in the virtual machine definition file (*.vmx) change vmware.cdrom.iso to vmware.cdrom.atapi. ...

…so I decided to use youtube to find my favorite Monty Python series, Program will resume soon (quite specific Polish series - BTW, never published on DVD!). i was also able to find archive of our old polish IT magazines - Bajtek, Top Secret and Secret Service. my own archive, collected over years and protected from everyone fell prey one day to suprise ‘cleaning’ organized in the basement where it was stored. i’m still looking for Gambler and Komputer magazines. i strongly believe that there’s no comparision between those articles and magazines that you’ve read from first to last page and todays worthless ‘magazines’ that compete with number of colorful photos and zero interesting content. ...

i just got hold of interesting document. let me quote it: As remarked in this table the Windows version of TrueCrypt 7.0a deviates from the Linux version in that it fills the last 65024 bytes of the header with random values whereas the Linux version fills this with encrypted zero bytes. From the point of view of a security analysis the behavior of the Windows version is problematic. By an analysis of the decrypted header data it can’t be distinguished whether these are indeed random values or a second encryption of the master and XTS key with a back door password. From the analysis of the source code we could preclude that this is a back door. For the readability of the source code this duplication of code which does the same thing in slightly different ways was however a great impediment. It certainly must also hamper the maintainability of the code. ...