My buddy Keith Dawson did. And so did I from his malware encounter.

I’ve known and worked with Keith for many years. He is a fellow tech writer, who has worked for some of the same IT pubs that I have. In his blog post this week,  aptly called Pwned, he writes about discovering his first exploit. It was a piece of malware that lodged itself into several of his Web servers.

The malware took advantage of a vulnerability in Plesk, a popular website control panel that is used by many hosting providers. Plesk patched the vulnerability within a few days of its discovery back in February, but Dawson didn’t get the memo.

It turns out he wasn’t on the proverbial list to get the warning. He isn’t the actual customer  of Plesk – it’s his hosting provider who is the customer. And it was his hosting provider that ran the systems that were exploited.

Dawson was lucky. His pwned servers were part of a DDoS botnet for 71 days, but they never got called up.

This brings up a very important point. If you are using hosted services, be aware of what various bits of code are running on them. A Web server could have more than the vendor’s code running on it. Make sure you bring these bits of code, such as Dawson’s Plesk control panel, up to date.

Related Links

• Pwned [A Recovering Physicist]

­Good news for software developers: Your job prospects should grow through at least 2020… New York is becoming a tech job hotbed… and in-memory databases are reaching a tipping point… All on this week’s DiceTV.

In March, T-Mobile said it would pare its 24 call centers to 17. That left roughly 1,000 people with pink slips, after some workers moved to different centers and other jobs were created. On Tuesday, CEO Philipp Humm sent out a company memo alerting employees that another round of layoffs is imminent.

A company representative told GeekWire, “With these changes, some jobs will be eliminated, some outsourced and some created.”

More details of the restructuring and job cuts are expected to be released later in the week. The Verge has the full memo, a part of which says:

Our rebuilt structure enables T-Mobile to realize significant savings, allowing us to invest in future growth — in particular modernizing our network to LTE, repositioning the T-Mobile brand, and aggressively pursuing the B2B segment where we plan to add 1,000 positions over the next few years. We gain the agility to put resources where the current opportunities are, grow in areas where potential is greatest, and act on emerging opportunities quickly and rationally.

It’s not clear whether the 1,000 new jobs Humm’s memo refers to will include IT positions, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they did. The carrier is running behind its competitors in modernizing its LTE network and needs plenty of engineers to carry it off.

Additionally, a second memo, from T-Mobile Chief Operations Officer Jim Alling, says the changes won’t affect call center staff, technicians in engineering and employees at the company’s retail stores.

After AT&T’s failed $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile, both parties were left looking for options. AT&T was left still needing spectrum and T-Mobile was left with spectrum, but without cash to build it out – and a sinking market share.

Related Links:

• T-Mobile USA plans 900 job cuts as ‘rebuilding’ continues [GeekWire]
• T-Mobile USA’s Philipp Humm announces restructuring, ‘difficult decisions’ to staff [The Verge]
• T-Mobile Announces Future Job Cuts, Front-Line Staff Won’t Be Affected [TMO News]

A key change is a photo-sharing feature, which would allow iCloud users to share photos and comments with each other and extend current use beyond just syncing photos, according to The Wall Street Journal. Apple is also reportedly nose-to-the-grindstone in developing a way to allow users to sync videos.

iCloud Strategy Here to Stay

Apple’s committed to iCloud. CEO Tim Cook recently told Wall Street that the service would set the company’s strategy over the next decade. That makes total sense, given that it has all those snazzy mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone and MacBook Air. They all need help with storage and a way to communicate with each other.

Another reason wanna-be iCloud engineers should feel safe is that Cook’s not likely going anywhere for a long time. Handpicked by Steve Jobs as his successor, he has the support of both the company’s board and its employees.

In other words, he’s not like a short-timer CEO like Scott Thompson at Yahoo, whose ecommerce and data mining plans are now in question after his ousting. Nor is he a short-timer Leo Apotheker, the former HP CEO who planned to dump the PC division, only to have the company do a 180-degree turnaround when it kicked him out and brought in Meg Whitman.

Related Links

• Apple to Launch iCloud on October 12 [Apple]
• Apple Plans iCloud Upgrade [Wall Street Journal]
• Apple Looking to build out iCloud engineering team with a dozen openings [AppleInsider]

My presentation was due and my computer choked. Ever have your settings get so far off, it’s hard to know if it’s a problem with your configuration or a bad hardware component?

In my case, my dual-screen mode was acting up during my Xubuntu notebook installation, preventing me from using the presenter’s console for an upcoming LibreOffice slide show. My quick fix was to run a diagnostic test using a stock Linux installation from a USB stick.

No Compiz, no alpha/beta applications, no performance tweaks, no nothing.

Install Xubuntu Linux On A USB Stick

You can run almost any version of Linux from a USB stick. Here’s how you do it:

• Download your distribution of choice as an .iso file. I used the Xubuntu 64-bit version. Make note of the downloaded file location.

• Plug in a blank 2 GB or larger USB stick.

• Run the “startup-disk-creator” application. You may have to start it from the command line with temporary root privileges, if you get an error writing to the USB stick. Use: gksudo usb-creator-gtk.

• Look for your stick under the “Disk To Use” dropdown box. Highlight the correct stick and press the “Erase” button.

• If your distribution .iso doesn’t appear in the “Source Disk Image (.iso) Or CD” dropdown menu, push the “Other” button and locate your file.

• Leave the “Stored In Reserved Extra Space” at the default value.

• Press the “Make Startup Disk” button.

The startup-disk-creator will download the software to the stick and set up a temporary file system and bootloader. Make sure it goes through all those steps. The process should take a couple of minutes. If it finishes in a few seconds, something is wrong and the stick will never boot. USB sticks can be kind of finicky, so you may have to restart the disk creator process once or twice.

After the process completes, restart your notebook and boot using the USB stick. My Asus requires hitting the escape key a few times when restarting, just to get the boot menu.

USB sticks are notoriously slow to boot. However, they’re considerably faster than booting from a CD. Be patient and follow the prompts, selecting “Try” Xubuntu.

Within a few minutes, you should have a fully functional Xubuntu Linux running on your notebook. Another thing to note is USB sticks also don’t require a hard-drive. You can actually remove the disk, and Linux will run completely in memory and from the stick. Can you think of any interesting applications for this functionality?

Fixing My Dual-Screen Issues

In the end, my hardware turned out to be OK. I just needed to adjust the Nvidia settings to “twinview” and set the external projector (monitor) to “primary”. LibreOffice immediately started the presenter’s console on my notebook screen and put the slides on the external projector screen. Perfect!

I rebooted from the hard drive, made the adjustments and everything was set for my next presentation.

Related Links

• Xubuntu [Xubuntu.org]
• LibreOffice [LibreOffice.org]
• Compiz [Compiz.org]

Consider these recent events:

• March – A European trade market office registers Zynga’s “Ville” suffix, despite initial opposition from a community called Deauville that later withdrew its opposition.

•  May – Zynga sues Kobojo, the French developer of PyramidVille, a Facebook game.

• May – U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) suspends Zynga’s Trademark application for “Ville” in the US.  Personally, I think the U.S. is only waiting for a copy of the European Registration certificate before they sign off on a similar trademark in the U.S. I’m not a lawyer, but if you look at U.S. Trademark Application Suspension Notice, I’m guessing that having a European registration makes it a lot easier to get the US one.

The Long and The Short

If you have a game that ends in Ville and it’s making money, there’s a chance that Zynga may come knocking. I really hope someone who can afford it would take this issue to court, because it’s not certain that Zynga would win on the similarity of the “Ville” names alone.

Zynga has trademarks on each of its Ville games (CityVille, FishVille, FarmVille, etc.) and they are claiming that PyramidVille can be mistaken for a Zynga game, which would dilute their trademark. As a result, they’re claiming damages.

PyramidVille

Kobojo’s graphics for PyramidVille did look quite like Zynga’s, in my opinion, and with a similar sounding name that may be enough to sway the court.

But the corollary to this is that there are plenty of non-Zynga games with a “Ville” suffix that existed before Zynga’s games. I would hope a lawyer in any ZyngaVille litigation would definitely call out paragraphs 57 and 58 in the USPTO’s PDF, which is included in the link below. It does, however, require a little digging around once you open the link to find the PDF.

AdviceVille

Until the court rules on the Kobojo PyramidVille case, developers should be very careful that your “Ville” game doesn’t look similar to any of Zynga’s games. It’s worth reading the USPTO PDF.

I’m affected as well! My domain Glitzville.com has been around for many years (well before Zynga existed) and after a few false starts, I have finally gotten round to doing serious development on the game, which has yet to be finished. As a precaution to the ZyngaVille controversy, I’ve now registered a suitable alternative domain to avoid this issue.

As a general tip for anyone developing a Web-based game, make sure you’ve registered the domain you want before you develop the game – not afterwards. There are many people out there who will spot an opportunity, register the domain, show ads on it and hope to sell it to you for a few hundred or thousands of dollars.

Related Links

• U.S. Trademark Application Suspension Notice [U.S. Patent and Trademark Office]

And as a candidate, the odds that you’ll find an employer where you match every item on the skill set is low too. Chances are that some part of the job, such as the industry, language, framework or some aspect of the technology, will be something you’ve never worked with before.

How do you translate your past experience to employers? Share your thoughts below. 

For example, I recently needed to find someone to maintain a .NET-based Content Management System (CMS). In Boston, where I am, available .NET developers are pretty hard to come by, where as in Europe it has some traction. I realized this hire could easily take months, or years. I was hoping for weeks.

Faced with the fact that I probably wouldn’t find someone who knew it all already, I looked for someone who could learn it quickly. I specifically sought someone with similar skills, who could translate that knowledge into the specific technologies that would be used for this position.

Developing an Eye for Transferable Developer Skills

The following job requirements could potentially be handled by alert engineers, who recognize the potential for transferring their technology skills:

• .NET — Someone used to working with frameworks on Windows is probably going to work out.
• CMS — Any non-trivial CMS here will do. Someone with a Drupal background, for example, will understand the basics of how this CMS works and have an advantage over someone who has never worked with a CMS before.

Employers will find that candidates who have worked with similar technologies, or in similar industries, have a leg up on learning. They can apply the concepts and ideas from their past experience to the new environment. On the flipside, new employees joining a company that uses a similar technology will have an easier time learning the details. From both perspectives, similar is better than “never seen anything like that before.”

There’s no such thing as a perfect match in employment – from the hiring side, or from the candidate’s perspective. What it comes down to is finding the best candidate who posses the closest match in skills and a candidate who knows how to present those transferable skills to a prospective employer.

Such as?

For the ubergeek there is the Arduino, which has a variety of sensors to monitor the external environment and feed the information into an iOS device. You could, for example, make your own weather station or robot.

For those of us with less time and fewer programming skills, there is the Galileo, an iOS-controlled robotic iPhone platform that allows you to move and rotate your iPhone or Touch from a browser or another iOS device. By mounting your iPhone to Galileo – which is also a charger – you can convert your device for baby monitoring, video chatting, bird watching or cinematography.

Galileo’s manufacturers also provide an SDK to extend its uses. Look for downloads that let you do things like perform time-lapse photography.

Galileo is a Kickstarter project from Motr, and has far exceeded its funding goal. You can pre-order it for $85.

Related Links

• Arduino
• Galileo

Image: Arduino

• The percentage of CIOs who are women dropped from 11 percent in 2011 to 9 percent this year.
• Thirty percent of 450 companies polled said their IT departments have no women in management positions at all.
• Only half of the survey’s respondents think women are under-represented in IT.

Kind of a disconnect. Women still have to overcome preconceived notions, such as their desire to start a family gets in the way of their work. The fact that women see few others in management and executive positions often discourages them from pursuing technology careers. It’s “a self-fullfilling prophecy,” Anna Frazzetto, senior vice president of international technology solutions at recruiter Harvey Nash USA told Reuters.

Related Link:

• Women disappearing from top technology jobs, survey says [Reuters via G&M]

Let’s power through the Chartboost Hackathon held over this past weekend but do it in less than 30 hours. Strap in and here we go for a recap:

• What’s a hackathon without a meetup? How else do solo hackers find potential team members? And, hey, how do you become a hackathon rockstar? Check out the Friday night hackathon party piece.
• So, you say it’s a 30-hour hackathon, eh? How are these folks going to last? Let me see those Saturday afternoon fresh faces before the grind gets nasty. (actually, participants did get some shut eye since the facility closed at 2 a.m. Sunday morning and re-opened around 10 a.m. PST)
• Well, what about the winners? Who got the Sunday night winner’s glory? You’ll just have to click on the proverbial envelope. You’ll also find an added bonus of a video of the winning game.

Enjoy!