Stackoverflow podcast

April 24, 2008 Development No Comments

Well guys, edition two of the podcast was much better.
I take it all back, now you’re in the flow i’ll be listening in.

InfoSec 2008

April 23, 2008 Development, Random No Comments

I visited Infosec Europe again this year, mainly just to see Bruce Schneier really. The show seems to be much more marketing than I remember in past years, perhaps I was just in the wrong places.

Anyway Bruce’s presentation was fantastic. It was basically looking at the psychology of feeling secure over being secure and the impact this can have. I really like this idea because it fits with my theory of ability and gives me a much more eloquent model to describe it, my model of knowledge/ability is basically people who tell you they are an expert in something generally know so little they don’t even realise the enormity, I’ve had ‘Flash Gurus’ who don’t even know what ActionScript is ‘Expert MS Office’ user who don’t know what a macro is and can’t write an Excel formula.) Anyway.

As I understand it Bruces’ theory of security is based on a model of:

  • Reality – what the potential threat/situation is
  • Model – the way the understands Reality, based on knowledge (books, experience, news, peers)
  • Feeling – how the user feels emotionally about the situation

Bruce suggested that we are poor at making security decisions because our models and feelings as humans have evolved over millennia to help us in a fight or flight situation. Not in a pragmatic sort the facts out and adjust our models kind of way. The problem is that our context for these decisions is wrong.

To me it shows why the experience gained by doing a job is so important, your model is adjusted by constant feedback of what has and hasn’t worked. Why do you know that… because I’ve done it. This experience is often overlooked and people assume that someone with a higher qualification in a subject will be better at a job in that area – not necessarily true.

Anyway to find out more about what Bruce said read his article the Psychology of security.

Backroom Boys the secrect return of the British Boffin

April 22, 2008 Books No Comments

Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford

An absolutely amazing collection of short stories, each delving into the way British Scientists have been at the forefront of technological and scientific revolution in the Post War (WWII) era.

My favourite is the Genome experiment with a race against time to beat a company who wanted to privatise the genome.

I think the book is aimed at an audience older than myself, perhaps more the authors age, with many references to Dan Dare, but this doesn’t stop it being interesting, informative and well written and researched.

As I said in an earlier post I visited Duxford whilst reading this which just added another level to the experience, getting on to the Concord there having just finished reading about the people and the trials of the teams designing and building the first prototypes.

I feel that there is the opportunity for an additional chapter on the British invention of asymmetric key encryption, but perhaps there is another book on the way (or you could read Simon Singh’s The Code Book available for free download)

If your interested in science, innovation, or just proud of British achievements you will enjoy this.

Colour theory

April 18, 2008 Books No Comments

Just seen this post over at GreyscaleGorilla basically about a design book and a bit of colour theory (always good to know).

I just wanted to point out my worry about C+M+Y=K in CMYK though.
I used to work in print (newspapers, so it may be different elsewhere) and one of my challenges creating pdf’s on the fly from web input was the converion from RGB to CMYK and making sure that the black was K not C+M+Y.  The reason was explained to me as ‘when your basically printing on bogroll at 100mph if your black isn’t black [100%K, but C+M+Y] then [especially on text] you’ll just get a fuzzy mess [if there is any misalignment]‘.  I realise that newspapers aren’t everyone’s target publishing medium.

Having said that, you can get much nicer tonal greys, subtle colourings with warm and cold shades, using additive colour than you can with percentages of K.

Stackoverflow

April 17, 2008 Development No Comments

As a developer who reads Coding Horror, I’ve been keen to find out what Jeff has been up to with stackoverflow.com. So I was surprised and pleased to find out that it’s (at least in part) a collaboration with Joel (on Software). So when the the announcement came that their first podcast was up on stackoverflow, I went straight over to listen…. The site sounds great, for developers by developers, an awesome resource (if you do have problems with erm… the site they refer to… scroll down to the bottom, the answers are usually there even if they are wrong) anyway… the podcast!

An opportunity to listen to people who I really respect as bloggers and as developers. I love both their Blogs but really the podcast was dull, to me it was Joel talking a lot, talking over Jeff and then leaving big pauses where he wanted Jeff to say ‘right’ or ‘wow’ a few times and they don’t talk about Stackoverflow until about a third of the way through.

I liked the Vista discussion halfway through. That did seem like a proper discussion, if the whole of the cast was like that, that would be better. (I agree with Joel though, what is the advantage of upgrading to Vista… no new features and you’ve moved everything… learning overhead for no return).

A square 45 degree angle?

So stackoverflow .com sounds like it will be good, their podcast… average, I’ll listen again to see if it gets better, and I hope it does, and with the ability to call in i’m pretty sure it will.