The parallels between Joel Bukiewicz's passion and many startups are striking. Some people understand that extreme amounts of money isn't what makes them happy, rather being able to completely explore their own medium in the ways they choose is where the love is.
I sent an email to the freshmeat team a really long time ago (around 2001?) asking them what the image was in the background of it. If I remember correctly, they said it was an image at Lollapalooza. Unfortunately I don't have the original email.
I created a little mini site that lets you check if your server is vulnerable, along with some information about the exploit:
http://apache-range-exploit.com/
"When using a third party attack tool to verify vulnerability - know that most
of the versions in the wild currently check for the presence of mod_deflate;
and will (mis)report that your server is not vulnerable if this module is not
present. This vulnerability is not dependent on presence or absence of
that module."
Not sure if that's how you are checking for vulnerability, however it was reporting that my site was "not vulnerable" when it was very much so.
I recently fixed an issue where the server wouldn't follow redirects which was causing some false negatives. If your site still shows as a no would you mind letting me know what the domain is so I can fix any other issue?
The way I check for the vulnerability is based on the original perl script in the OP link. I submit 20 byte range requests and check for a Partial string in the response, if I see that I assume that the server is vulnerable. It's more of an educated guess, but I've been using it myself to fix misc servers I have running.
I've used it for a recent one-off project and it's great and meant for that kind of things: good looking pages even if they were thrown together quickly.
After creating http://qktract.com I found about EchoSign from a few of my customers. I've taken a completely different approach to online contracts/signing than they have but it's nice to know that there is a good business model here and plenty of room for competition. Congratulations to the EchoSign team.
I think the problem here is that not all employers will challenge you. In my mind, the key to finding enjoyment in your work if it's not challenging is to challenge yourself. Unless your job is oppressive to self direction there is nothing stopping you or anyone else from creating or doing something that is positive for the business and challenging for you. As a few examples you could find ways to optimize a system that is inefficient (it doesn't even need to be at the software level), analyze information about your customers, find ways to save money, research ways to get new clients, etc. A side benefit to challenging yourself is that you will find it quite rewarding. I can highly recommend Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book on "flow" in regards to the phenomenon around it.
I think what I'm trying to say is by challenging yourself to be more than what it is your employer expects out of you results in a net win for both you and your company.
This is a nice idea, but unfortunately in many cases getting the information and power you require to solve the problems is blocked by seniority. You have to keep in mind, outside of development many many industries are still essentially seniority not performance based. For instance, if I work in HR and there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we are recruiting, it's not as simple as whip up a prototype, in many cases you'll actually need for someone (ie: a superior) to be fired in order to really affect change. It's not easy to address important inefficiencies within the company without pointing out that someone is fucking up their job.
As for the inefficiencies you CAN fix, this seems like a standard part of any job (and life to be honest). If you see problems in your job that you actually can and know how to improve and you aren't improving them, that's an entirely different issue.
I agree completely. I work at a company that is small about 25 people, but I engage in this quite often. The company is rather open about everything. I have access to just about everything I need except for the company bank accounts, which I do not want. This provides with a lot access to do a lot of this flow analysis. However the two greatest challenges I still have to overcome are 1)Buy-In from the higher ups to actually use the data/analysis and 2)the time to keep it up. I often feel, for multiple reasons, that I shouldn't be spending time on these endeavors. However, I still seem to always have a 'project'.
I also agree with the grandparent post. There's always something to do, and something more that could be done to make a project interesting.
However, I've often been frustrated by the effort required to get buy-in or recognition from higher-ups. I often found myself wanting to contribute more, but sometimes it seemed like a sisyphean task and not worth the effort (especially once you start balancing compensation and effort).
Amazing film, very well done.