UPDATE 2: My Captivate powered down this morning twice of its own accord (in a span of about 2 hours, which is a new record for me). The internets suggest that the JH7 software update fixes the power down issue for some, unfortunately not me. I’ll be backing up my data and attempting to get a replacement from AT&T very soon. If that continues to exhibit the issue (and probably even if it doesn’t), I root the device and install a custom ROM, because I’m fairly certain this is a software issue. I say this because searches for Fascinate and other Galaxy S device power downs yield insubstantial results, and they presumably have very similar hardware when it comes to anything unrelated to the 3G networks.

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Prepare for disappointment; you can not hot-swap memory on a running EC2 instance. But since I get a lot of requests for this action, I thought I would title the post this way, and highlight what you can do to handle this situation. The way to upgrade memory on an EC2 instance is to generate a new instance using the same AMI and storage with a larger amount of memory. I’ll detail the steps for an EBS backed instance (if you’re using an S3 backed instance, you should already be pretty familiar with backup and mounting procedures. Hence the upgrade is just generating a new instance, and performing the same mounts, and moving data from a backup).

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To be honest, I have not been in a position to hire anyone for at least a couple years. Nonetheless, I have always been frustrated with how ineffective the resume, screen, interview, aptitude test, etc. process really is. In light of recent posts about hack challenges for job applicants, un-resumes, and other general rants, I thought I would post my two cents (apologies for not digging up example links, there are several available from Hacker News, for the truly interested). In particular, I was motivated by two posts. Today’s coding interview game, regarding the newfound difficulties that tech interviews sometimes pose, and hinting at the worth (or lack thereof) of these coding challenges. And this self-professed rant, which is (as the author admits) nothing new, but he did relay it eloquently.

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When it comes to software development, I am passionate about quality. I admit that I don’t always put my blog posts through a rigorous spelling, grammar, and formatting check, but I’ll claim to be the ever-popular ‘plumber with leaky pipes’ regarding this blog. I genuinely like finding bugs. More explicitly, I like finding out when a bug occurs, and why. And as both a Quality Assurance snob, and a software developer, I don’t care, nor do I have time for bugs like:

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To be blunt, you should be familiar with Firesheep. If you are not, check out the first few results here. Basically, the utility was a last-straw, final effort to highlight how insecure most of the sites we use really are (those are my words, read the author’s at codebutler.com). A simple browser plugin, able to sniff out cookies and login requests on the local network, and store appropriate data. And for those of you who are just reading about Firesheep, or are not familiar with its techniques, don’t be fooled by the sites highlighting that it only happens on public WiFi, there’s no reason that you can’t sniff network traffic on your non-wireless, work network. In fact, if you have admin access to your machine, you should download Wireshark and start listening on IM conversations that people are having (How do you feel about privacy now?).

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