Hello everybody,

BostadDirekt Hunter

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:56:00 +0100

If you live in Stockholm and don’t have your own apartment, then you have a problem. Unless you’ve been waiting in the queue for years, there’s little chance that you can find a place to hire “first hand”. That’s why many people choose to find “second hand” places to hire, and so did I, for the 2nd time... A website for finding such places is Bostad Direkt (www.bostaddirekt.com). However, in order to find a good place before it gets hired by someone else, you have to be the first to notice the advertisement appearing on the website. Bostad Direkt offers some kind of e-mail service for that, sending you an e-mail when a place matching your criteria appears; but that is not very “quick” and customizable (and everybody gets those mails). They also offer an SMS service, for which you have to pay extra.

To summarize,
I was looking for a house on Bostad Direkt, but didn’t want to refresh the website every 5 minutes, as I have more important stuff to do at work, and didn’t want to pay for SMS,
I wanted to learn Python.

So, I took this opportunity to write a script in Python that would check the website for me, and send me (and to my housemates) an e-mail whenever there is a new apartment matching the criteria I set in the script. The result is below, a simple Python script. It’s not complete, not perfect, not beautiful, but it did the job; and that’s why I wanted to share it with other people who might suffer from the Stockholm accommodation market.

The code is pretty self-explanatory, but a few notes wouldn’t hurt:

It accepts three arguments:
SecondsDelay - how often the script will check the website (in seconds) RoomsMin - the minimum number of rooms [LastCount] - the script keeps state of how many places it found last time it checked. But in case you need to restart the script (which will set that state back to 0) and don’t want to get an e-mail for the houses it found before, you can (optional argument) set the number of previously present houses with this argument. Obviously the state could have been persisted, but I simply didn’t spend time to improve the script, this was just doing the job.

Other parameters can be changed directly by editing the script.
Do I need to add that you need to have Python installed, and that you can run the script by writing “python bdHunter.py”..

Here it is: bdHunter.py

Aktuell Säkerhet - Kerem in the press!

Sun, 4 Nov 2007 21:51:30 +0100

After the seminar about Corporate Governance at the Svenskt Näringsliv (check my previous posts), the project that Christer Magnusson and I have realized has appeared in the swedish magazine “Aktuell Säkerhet” (Actual Security). I’ve been in the press before, but this is the first time it is about the topic of security. Exciting!

Have a look at it:

After the seminar...

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:09:02 +0200

The workshop that was held in Svenskt Näringsliv 2 days ago (see my previous post) went as good as I expected. Although I got a bit excited during my speech due to the fact that it was my first one in swedish and that there were like 50 security professionals staring at me, the work that we produced with Christer Magnusson was appreciated, leaving behind memories of applauds, a huge thing to write on my CV, and a big smile :)

The report can be downloaded by clicking here.

Svenskt Näringsliv’s news related to the topic of corporate governance can be reached here, where you can also download our report and our presentation.

Here are direct download links to the files:
Corporate Governance - report.pdf
Corporate Governance - presentation.pdf

Corporate Governance from an Information Security Perspective

Tue, 4 Sep 2007 22:15:44 +0200

I am extremely proud and excited about this event that will take place in Stockholm on the 18th of September. I had the great opportunity to work with Dr. Christer Magnusson as my thesis advisor at KTH, and we came up with a very interesting and - in my opinion - successfull thesis titled “Corporate Governance: From COSO-ERM to ISO 27001”.

Christer Magnusson has then produced a report evolving around my thesis, called “Corporate Governance, Internal Control, and Compliance - From an Information Security Perspective” and commissioned by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise and the Swedish Risk Management and Security organization, NSD. The work will be presented at the above mentioned seminar.

More details about the conference can be found here. You can read the abstract of my thesis in the Academic section of my website, and I will soon make it downloadable. I can also make the report downloadable if I later have the copyright permissions to do so.