I really nearly did!

Did you ever go into a bathroom in some ultra-avant-garde sort of a place and get so confused by the tres-chic decor that you nearly pissed in the sink?

No? You should get out more...or maybe I should...

Beware the Swankentyler

The other thing I saw at the movies the other day was a trailer for some new flick. I was waiting in line for popcorn and looking at this thing, thinking - "shit! Liv Tyler is really starting to look a hell of a lot like her dad now she's getting old..."

Then they ran the credits at the end, and I discovered I was completely wrong! It was Hilary Swank...

So Hilary Swank is getting to look like Stephen Tyler...that is a little disturbing...

Up, Up and Away-hay-hay!!

I'd forgotten - ice is really slippery! Weird...what made me remember how slippery it is was yesterday at breakfast when I put the orange juice jug back in amongst the ice chips on the hotel buffet. I gave the handle a shove, and the things spun for ages...cool!

As long as you avoid SkiDubai (and I make it a real big habit to avoid SkiDubai) the only place you see ice here is in your drinks, so you forget what it's really like. I forgot. It's slippery...mental note to self - "do not go anywhere where there might be ice occuring naturally on the ground...it's fucking slippery stuff and you will fall over!"

Ok...public information notice over.

I went to see Transformers 3 "Dark of the Moon" (called that because obviously Roger Waters has too tight a hold on the copyright of the much more appropriate title "Dark Side of the Moon"...oh well...)

Once again I thanked my lucky stars (both of them...) that my disbelief is so easily suspended, because if it was not I think I would be writing an angry letter to Mr Bay. That storyline sucks the biggest ass, with the biggest sucky lips of any suckerdom since the giant monster robots of Suckdonia invaded the planet late in the last Ice Age and sucked all the ice off the planet...they also sucked off all the dinosaurs...which is why they became extinct (nothing to do with an asteroid, they all just died from being sucked off...ask your science teachers. They know the truth...)

Yeah, so anyway. Why spend all that money on all that flawless CGI then fill in the gaps between each computer generated segment with bits of the crappest storyline and the corniest dialogue anyone could possibly ever write?

One bit of CGI that was not flawless was one piece near the start where the Whitwickey guy gets plucked out of the air by Bumblebee and pulled inside the car when he changes back into his (its) car-like form...such an obvious (and not well colour matched) composite.

So all in all I was disappointed. But I will survive.

The question I had in my head before I went to see the movie - a question that lingers on from last week when I met with a guy who's job it is to answer such important things - is, what can we do in the future to improve the design of aircraft to make them more secure.

This is a CPTED question, where the environment in question is the aircraft. Certainly the risks and the vulnerabilities cannot really change. You're in a box with a lot of energy (lots of fuel and fast moving parts) and you're waaaaayyyyy up there in the air.

That's a damned dangerous set of conditions. How do you reduce the risks?

Ok, we all realise that one pretty good idea is to not let people take on items that could be used as weapons, and it's also a good mitigation plan to prevent the wrong type of individuals from getting on board. But you can't spot a terrorist until he becomes one and I don't think it's safe to assume that terrorists are all called Mohammed and all carry Middle Eastern passports.

Any person is dangerous as hell when they're intent on doing bad things. Is there anything we can do with the actual physical design of aircraft that could make it easier to manage threats from onboard personnel if they were to happen. If we take away the opportunity and the means, we take away the problem.

From what I've seen the aircraft makers are so focused on their own "risk-realm" they haven't even begun to look at the kinds of risks we mitigate against on the ground every day of the week.

That worries the hell out of me.

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned...

Ok, so I bought an iPad2...shoot me!

The whole time I was buying the thing I was thinking to myself "why am I doing this?"...then the next things I was walking back through the mall with my little bag asking myself "why did I do that?"...and now I just spent the time since I woke this morning trauling thing the AppStore looking for useful little dickety-doos to install on the thing, then trudging through my music collection and transferring (converting...waiting...) to iTunes all the stuff I might be likely to listen to any time soon...

I am a sad person. But it's happened.

I watched a couple of presentations lately that were made on Keynote and they did look very nice...sort of "not like PowerPoint" enough for me to like them. I've also managed to find a bunch of my favourite little tools to download (Evernote, DropBox, Remember the Milk...for instance) and that makes me happy.

I've downloaded a few note taking/scratchpad/digital whiteboard type things to see which one fits the way I like to do things. I think I'm going to have to get a stylus...

The big question would need to be, could this thing actually replace the notebook and pen I carry around with me everywhere I go...? Who knows...probably not, because even though it has an 8 hour battery life my notebook has an endless battery life and is recharged by me just buying another pen...

Interestingly, the very first utility listed in the AppStore was a CCTV calculator that works out lens sizes, storage and volt drop along cables. Hmm...we'll see if it becomes my trusted side kick...

What I'm probably more guilty about is the absense of blog posts. Just too damned busy and too damned hot.

This week I've been wondering about Thales and their Crisis Management Software Suite - the thing they call Hypervisor...

I haven't seen this thing in real life whereas I have seen things like AtlasOps which do much the same (or are supposed to). The functionality is also quite common in a lot of the better PSIM applications that are becoming popular...so I'm wondering whether this isn't just a dinosaur developed by a large French dinosaur organisation...

Work & Play & Where It Came From

I am a committed believer in determinism (as opposed - that is - to believing in the concept of free will). I don't find it restricting or philosophically stifling. It just is the way it is. The future is going to be the future whether you go out and do something with your life or whether you mope around in your bedroom like a teenager, deciding it's all pointless because nothing can change what's going to happen. Doesn't matter. Have fun. Makes no difference to the future, but at least you're going to get layed occassionally if you stop hiding in the dark.

When I was about fourteen or fifteen I remember going for walk with a friend of mine (his name was Eddie Ball...I have no idea where he might be now). During the course of that walk, he and I developed this whole idea for a game we were going to build - or not so much really a game as a "simulation". It would be computer based and would feature a complete universe in which we could fly our space ships around. We'd build these space ships in our wardrobes so that they'd be nice and dark, and give the impression of being out in the infinite. We really had the whole thing worked out, from how we were going to build the user interface and how we were going to get our two space ships in two separate wardrobes and in two separate parts of town, to know where each other where.

We'd need to do a lot of software development to get the environment realistic, and to manage to keep our two space ships operating in a synchronized universe, but that was okay, because we were forteen or fifteen, we were not into sports, we had not discovered the joy of sex (except in the occassional discarded magazine we'd find out the back of school) and the consequential social outcast status meant we had plenty of time on our hands.

The electronics part of the deal we could handle. We'd both been hobbyists for a long time and our teenage confidence and enthusiasm meant we could overcome any minor issues of where we'd get the parts or get them to work.

The main problem was that this was about 1979, and we couldn't get our hands on one computer - never mind the two/three we envisaged we'd probably need to run this thing.

So did we give up? Nope. We were fourteen/fifteen. Did we build the thing? Nope...I doubt we could build what we'd designed in our heads on that walk through the woods even today and with NASA's budget to spend!

But together we did end up building computers a couple years later, and we did end up spending an awful lot of teenage energy writing games on those computers and others that came later. Without that walk through the woods I may not have become an assembly language wiz, and so may not have ended up in embedded product development when I grew up.

Last time I touched a computer game was a month or so ago on a FlyDubai flight to Kuwait playing Solitair on the seatback screen because I forgot to bring headphones and was too lazy to get a book from my back in the overhead. I don't do WoW or SecondLife or any of those things and I don't own a console (I have a PSP I use for MP3 playing and Skype now and then), and I don't feel drawn to buying one (mostly...). I would go so far as to say that I have had a life-long fascination with games, but the problem is that Eddie and I set our expectations really high that day in the woods, and we (me anyway) still haven't found something to match it.

I was really interested to read a couple of days ago an article about how some companies are now developing games that turn employee activity into a game that they play. End result is the job gets done and the workers (maybe) have fun...I think that generally speaking the fun probably wears off real quick and the competitiveness spills out into the workplace, but hell - what do I know??

But the concept is not a bad thing, and possibly specifically not in the "security game" where we frequently have operators of systems who are minimum-wage, untrained staff who do not have the experience to do what the management want them to do anyway. Training costs money, but because of the game culture so many people have grown up in, a lot of "game related activity" has become intuitive for people who play games.

Replace the Pelco joystick with an XBox or PS3 joypad and people can operate the systems quicker and more easily.

Take away that generic VMS front-end screen (you know the one...device tree on the left, split screen in the middle, alarm stack at the bottom) and put a slick looking skin on it, and you'll minimize your learning curve.

But it's not only about the user interface, I think there's quite a lot of the things people do that maybe don't actually relate to what you'd think a security control room operator should be doing, but ba doing them you are encouraging the operators to actually take notice of what's happening with the system. They'll notice and report faulty or out-of-focus cameras much more quickly, they'll maybe become more adept at recalling footage associated with people they spot on the screen. They're much more likely to actually look at the screen and not chat or read the newspaper.

I'm going to begin to try it out with our operators and score them based on information out of the system activity log. I'm going to think of some games to play and see how it goes down.

Touch it...with your finger

I forgot to mention the thing that seems to have appeared over the last six months or so - particularly from US based organisations - something that REALLY gets me reaching for the Uzi.

There are lots of these "business-speak" expressions you hear about the place that have various amounts of nonsensicalness built into them, and that a lot of folk complain about. "Going forward" is one that everyone mentions. Nobody "brainstorms" any more, they have "blue sky" sessions and "idea showers"...

To be honest I don't really mind most of them. Talk how you want to talk and I'll talk the fucking way I want to...sorta, but I started to hear this new one a while back. The first time I heard it I thought the guy was trying to be ironic or something, but then other people started with it too, and I realized they were actually being serious.

I was following up (actually complaining) to a supplier who hadn't come back to me with an answer and the guy on the other end of the phone said to me "sure - I reached out to him and am waiting for a response"...

WTF...?

Then a tech support guy mentioned how he'd "reached out" to the manufacturer for help...what are you talking about, for Christ's sake?

You reached out???

We're still having difficulty with some L1 Identity fingerprint readers (Bioscrypt to the traditionalists). We're using them on Lenel OnGuard in one to one mode, and they keep randomly locking up. You present the card, the light goes orange ready for you to present a finger, you get a biometric mismatch error then they just lock up. You have to cycle the power to get them back. We've played with them a lot and talked to Lenel a lot and now (because we bought the damned things through Lenel) we're talking to L1 through Lenel. They're blaming grounding or "magnetic field"...which I'm somewhat skeptical about.

One of their suggested solutions (!) was that we connect the power to the reader via a relay and cycle the power automatically like once an hour!!! That's their solution to a fundamentally unstable product? Ok...yeah...

I'm not an enormous fan of HID (another day's tale I suppose) but we've used their biometric readers and...well...they work. I want to get an i-EVO reader to play with. I want to "reach out" to it underwater wearing a latex glove and see for myself if it really does work the way they say it does.

Re-inventing the wheel...only squarer...

I was talking to a guy a couple of weeks ago about the evolution of programming languages. I mentioned to him about what a huge change there was between Microsoft C Compiler version 5.0 and 6.0. He was like..."you mean from Visual Studio 5 to 6?" and I was like "how long have you been out of short trousers??"

Ok...I get that a lot these days. Everyone is younger than me.

Microsoft introduced the capability to work with Windows in the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler version 6.0. It was so incredibly complicated to launch a window that it really didn't seem at all worth learning how the hell to do it. If my memory does not fail me entirely, they introduced Visual Studio after the C/C++ Compiler version 7.0. Visual programming was something of a revelation...

But that's another day's story. I'm not fundamentally anti-Microsoft. I think they've made a few really good products. I just think it's a shame that they're so inconsistant in everything they do.

I use MS Word all the time. I used to use a couple of DTP packages to prepare docs to be able to get the layout flexibility I wanted, but now I can actually do pretty much all I need to within Word. I tried using OpenOffice and it is a total train-wreck by comparison.

I also use MS Excel all the time. It is an extremely powerful tool without which we would have a hard time running the business. That's no exaggeration, because we use it for so many different things. I tried importing a few of my general purpose spreadsheets into OpenOffice...it cried its little eyes out...it willingly donned the gimp suit and stuffed a little red ping pong ball into its mouth and offered me some ripe pink rump...it failed...

I had a run down on KeyNote on the Mac the other day. I liked it. I liked the feel of it, and I really liked that the presentations did not automatically look like PowerPoint...I use PowerPoint quite a bit but I never really like the end result much.

It made me think about the MS Office packages. I can now draw a box on the screen in just about any of the MS Office component packages. There are also a couple of packages that are specifically written to help me draw a box on the screen (Visio, PowerPoint, Publisher...I think they canned the other one...Photoshare? something like that...not counting that total waste of space MS Paint...). Every single one of them works a different way! Why can't they just write a drawing/painting plugin and let all the apps use the same interface?

They must spend so much money having separate development teams maintaining all those different products, as if we (the user) gave a damn!

Disillusionment and People Who Do Not Get It

I'm really getting sick and tired of people who have a stack of certificates but who can't tie their own shoe laces. If I have to hand-hold any more SixSigma black belts through the simplest process of not alienating the client whilst still getting the job done I will probably show up on CNN next day as the guy who took an Uzi to the office...

It seems as though you can't walk in to a Starbucks in this part of the world without discovering that the guy squeezing the beans has some god-damned MBA from some two-bit third world flea pit. Every person who arrives for an interview for any position regardless of how technical claims to be Cisco Certified to some degree or other, but strangely they just sit there and grin at me when I start asking them how they'd design one of our networks.

I sort of "get it". I understand how hard it must be to stand out from the crowd when the crowd has literally billions of people in it, and to figure even in the top 50% is maybe fantastic because they at least means there are a hell of a lot of people further down the food chain to you. I sort of "get" that...but I don't get all the expats who seem to want to join in with that crap instead of just standing out on their own merits.

Today (not just today...it's been a while now) I've been once again disillusioned by a person with a lot of certificates. This guy left the company just the other day (and would have been fired if he'd stayed any longer) after spending months digging us into a worse and worse mess on a site with a client. Throughout the process he's been telling me all is good, he's been telling me he's on top of everything. He's been telling me he's in constant touch with the vendor who sold us the equipment he's been trying to get work, and he's been telling me that everything is being done to resolve the problems.

Bull...shit...

All of it.

We paid this guy good money. We even touted the guy around, telling people how great we were because we had such a highly certified engineer working with us...sigh...

I don't have time to follow these guys around holding their hands and making sure they're doing things right. Why (and I have used this expression several times already this week) have a dog, and then shit on the carpet yourself?

The process of resolving problems seems to be beyond so many people nowadays. So many people would rather sit in front of a PC monitor and stare at it for hours and hours in the hope that some solution to their problem is going to just leap out at then...when we all know that it frequently does not.

Fix things. Make things work. It does not matter that you ask for help or that you do not know all the answers, finding the solution is all that matters.

I get a little annoyed with people who try to pull the old "we need to solve the problems ourselves if we are going to learn". No, my friends. You need to fix the fucking problem so the company can get paid and thereby pay your god-damned salary at the end of the month. Full-fucking-stop!

You want to learn? No problem, we'll send you on a training course. Fix the problem and we'll make enough money to do that, otherwise call the god-damned support line, read the fucking manual in your own time and do what you get paid for!

In which I complain about people who aren't as perfect as me

So which browser am I using...? You need a clue??

Wow...the browse window got so big! First impressions are good...

I don't know why I let things bother me so much but they do. People things really bother me a lot in a way that probably makes no difference my team at work but that really effects me a lot outside of the office. I'm a sociopath - I get that. But I've got feelings too...weirdo...

Did you notice that a lot of us work for companies that have the word "Solutions" in their titles or in their marketing tag lines or slogans? We're all into providing "solutions"...which is a bitch, because by implication it means that we're always surrounded by problems.

I don't mind problems. Not at all. We all have them, and to a lesser or greater extent we all make them too. Remember the addage? The person who never made a mistake never made anything. It's a good one. It's very true. The clients I deal with come to me with only one or two actual problems, we then design a bunch of systems to try to solve those problems and in the course of coming up with those systems we create dozens and dozens of engineering problems for ourselves that nobody's going to solve but us.

That's what we do (or it was when I first learned about what an engineer was supposed to do). We provide solutions to problems.

One of the important lessons any good engineer needs to learn very early on if he's going to ever get enough time to get anywhere is that a solution is a solution wherever it may come from. You can't afford the time to work it all out by yourself. Other people can help. If you need to know something go ask. If you don't know who to ask, ask someone who can help you work out who to ask. Very little ever got fixed just through somebody staring at it for days and days - and even if you might eventually discover the truth - why wait? Get someone to tell you the truth so you can take it and go out discover new truths armed with that initial truth as your guide.

Why am I so keen on this topic today? Well, because today I had to listen to a guy I believed was a good engineer tell me how it wasn't his fault that a project went over time and over budget by months because nobody offered to help him. He complained that the only people he ever saw were people asking about when the project would be complete and when could we get paid.

This guy just couldn't get his head around the fact that throughout the months during which he failed to complete what he'd been tasked to do, he continued to receive his salary. Where did that money come from, I wonder? During that time he was present at more than one team meeting at which I explained that project over-runs and over-spends hit everyone in the pocket. And yet despite all this, he failed to come ask for help, he failed to even identify who he needed to ask for help from or what help he should seek. And at the end of it all, he blames all around him for not coming to his aid...ironic when he was the most highly certified member of the team on the particular piece of equipment he couldn't get to work properly.

Look, when it all boils down, this guy does not share my core values. He and I do not see eye to eye on what constitutes getting stuff done, and that in itself means he's not right for my team. You can't afford to have a democracy when it comes to driving a company forward. Only the people who know where to go and how to get there can get to help steering the boat. Everyone else is rowing in the wrong direction and slowing the rest of us down.

Another example of my callous cold heartedness...myeh...not really. This whole incident and the last couple of weeks that have led up to this point have actually upset me a lot. I lead by example and I expect (reasonably or not) people to follow me out of respect. When people fail to do that I do not cope well. I get annoyed. I get upset. I sulk.

It was up around 45 degrees today too, which is bad weather for sulking in.

Take the veil cerpin taxt

I don't know what the hell it means either, but I love those fuzzy haired bastards.

So now I'm wondering whether to get an iPad or one of those Blackberry Playbook things...the dual compelling facts that I can sync to my Blackberry mailbox and browse sites with Flash makes me think favourably of the guys from RIM (even though they named their company after a dubious sex act)...actually I think Apple did the same, now I come to think of it...

I'm not really one for games or the like, and Apple's iTunes gets on my nerves. I hate the fact that I can only have one profile on one machine. I do not listen to Justin Beiber or Boyzone, and my daughter has not yet matured into Frank Zappa or The Mars Volta, but we each musst tolerate each other's tastes whilst I have to host her uploadings.

iPad or Playbook, though. One or t'other though. I deserve one.

Hey, I deserve a whole lot of things while we're on the subject...

A friend in the games industry has convinced me that the best way to achieve our business video conferencing requirements is through an XBox with Kinect. Yes! (air-punch). I guess we'll be playing Halo in the boardroom then...

So what's with L3 and Praetorian? I heard they canned it - but that would be weird given the money they pumped in. Immersive C4i makes a lot of sense to me (or immersive PSIM if you want to be all modern and hip with the youngsters).

Oh boy...The Haunt of Roulette Dares just started. Can't sit still to this one so I gonna have to go head bang around the garden for a while...

Kong has lucky escape due to 125th floor viewing deck

Callous and insensitive? No, really. I was planning this picture for weeks.

Last time I got refused holiday by anyone I just gave my wife their phone number...problem solved.

Summer is almost here and there's a lot to do. I was at the Milestone Partner Day in Dubai the other day along with about 160 other lucky people. Did you know they have a song now? Like a real, honest to goodness Milestone song all of their very own...

Taking something dreary by Coldplay and pretending it was written about them wasn't good enough for the Danes, oh no, they actually had to destroy some guy's soul by forcing him write a song about an open platform video recording management software package. I wonder if he's out of councelling yet.

They had a video to go with it too...which was interesting.

Okay, I'm being pithy now. Bite me.

They had like a little mini-trade show thing there too with a bunch of Milestone technology partners. There were (I think) three different analytics providers, four camera manufacturers, three storage companies and an access control guy (yay for diversity). They were all in the room shooting daggers at each other and bitching about the other guys' performance. I hate that.

But the food was pretty good and I got a free screwdriver from Vivotek...er-hum...you have to grab on to the small wins sometimes...

I'm not going to get to IFSEC this year...well, not the Birmingham one anyway, which perhaps isn't such a bad thing. Now I can maybe justify going to some other show somewhere a lot nicer than the B place.

I'll do a run down on those Aperio locks some time soon...they still on my desk under a mountain of other things that seem to be more important right now.

Having trouble with a Lenel/Bioscrypt fingerprint integration on a site at the moment...weird hang ups (the system, not me...). I'll update when I have something worth updating...

A Hot Day Out In Kuwait and Assa Abloy's Aperio arrives on my desk

The chances are fairly high that I will not watch the Royal Wedding tomorrow...note the cap letters as a sign of my respect to the Royal (did it again) Couple (probably didn't need to there...). I'm hoping for New Year's Honours...

The weather in Kuwait was surprisingly cool over the last couple of days. I dropped into town to talk to a few people about some projects that are happening. Interesting in a number of different ways - none of them being the ways I'd intended.

It's one of the hottest places in the Gulf in the middle of summer, but it was actually really quite pleasant for the time of year - or as pleasant as Kuwait every gets...it's like there's been a war there or something...

At one point we were hurtling through traffic in a car that weighed enough to ensure it had absolutely no chance of stopping if anything unexpected happened in front of us for maybe half a mile, and for a bunch of different reasons I was thinking about how if the word "Flammable" meanth susceptible to catching fire, "In-Flammablle" must surely mean the opposite of that...

Anything to take my mind off my impending death.

I got one of the Assa Abloy Aperio wireless locks in my hand for the first time today. It comes with what they call a "wireless hub" which is in fact the device that provides you with the communications to the main access control system. You have to have one "hub" to one "lock" at the moment, but they're talking about having some sort of one to many connection model availablel some time in the future.

Taking the battery cover off the lock I'm not sure the build quality is robusst enough. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know how I feel about the little slide-in clip that gets used to release the battery cover either. In my view it isn't going to work on all types of doors and you need to get the position of the cylinder just right when you install. It'll work best if the cylinder protrudes just a little...

I can't hook the damned thing up to anything right now because I don't have a panel that's compatible as yet. The Maxxess eMAX panels are (but they're still stuck in the supply chain somewhere). I'll take some shots and let you see how it goes together when I get a chance.

Too much energy makes you into an over-energetic annoyance to everyone else

Did you ever get into one of those circular arguments with yourself?

I had a couple of days off - I think I was about to go to work with an Uzi in my lunchbox, so it was like a public service thing - but my brain has a tough time shutting down from stuff, so I was layed out on this sun-lounger thing beside the pool with a little drink thing complete with some umbrella in it. There were sparrows and a few other more interesting and exotic birds flying around, and I was looking at this thing hopping and bopping all over the place. My immediate reaction was - shit, that thing bobs about a whole heck of a lot. It must need to eat a shit-load of things to be able to get that much energy. So then I thought, yeah...that's why the thing is so energetic, so it can get enough food...
So next thing I'm in this total circular argument with myself about how if the damn bird would just chill once in a while it wouldn't need to eat so much and so wouldn't need to be so annoyingly over-exited all the time!

I get the feeling we all get stuck in those sort of viscious circles all the time.

Anyway, I came home again now. I am just as bad-tempered and cantacorous as I was before and nobody got me an easter egg.

Secure nuclear power...well how's that going to happen?

No, I am not related to Barrack Obama. I hear they managed to find some link from his family to some family in Ireland...well, that's obvious, his surname starts with "O"...

The idea of acceptable degrees of risk is something that maybe needs to be thought about in light of recent things going on in the land of Nippon. When you look at the way major construction projects are awarded in other sectors you have to wonder whether it's any better in sectors where the whole risk thing is actually important.

We all know the way big projects work. Some guy has a great idea and decides he wants to build something. He employs a design team to turn his idea into a stack of documents. A main contractor agrees to turn the stack of documents into a stack of bricks and mortar. A bunch of sub-contractors agree to do the bits that the main contractor can't do.

The sub-contractors may never get to meet the original guy with the idea. They may get to see the stack of paper...but the main contractor will usually tell them the price is the most important factor, and because these sub-contractors have usually been in this game for a while, that's probably what they believe too.

So they ignore the stack of paper and they give a price based on the cheapest equipment they can find.

Ok, sometimes it doesn't work that way...but when you're building a big building the job of writing the specification is a difficult one. It's really not very likely that you're going to get it right (not first time, anyway), so even if the sub-contractor works to the word of the specification, the end result probably will not match the original guy's original idea.

That brings us on to the subject of the people who produce the big stack of paper in the first place. Maybe they'll use a specialist security consultant, but maybe they won't.

What is the job of a security consultant anyway? The way I see it, the job of a security consultant is to talk to the client, understand the assets to be protected, understand the risks and potential losses, advise on how to minimize the risk based on the physical layout and operation of the premises, and then to define a budget for the risk mitigation systems.

That's it.

Systems design? How many security consultants have actually gone out and installed a camera or an access control reader? Some maybe, but not many. Who better to understand what is the best way to implement the system than an integrator?

Okay, a lot of security integrators will want to push their own favorite line of equipment because that's how they'll make the most money, so you may want an independant voice in amidst the noise to make sure the whole thing doesn't get dragged into a dark alley and beaten with a rubber hose. I get that, but let's face it when you get up into the big boy's league of system platforms a good integrator can make any platform perform any function. Note that I said a Good Integrator.

So anyway, what about those nuclear power stations? You think things are done any different? You really think there's not an idea guy, a bunch of paper stack guys, a main contractor and a bunch of sub-contractors fighting to get their cheapest range of toys into the mix?

I heard a report the other day from the UAE where the guy in touch of planning the build of the country's nuclear power stations was saying that "every step" has been taken to make sure they are as "safe as they can be". Yeah? Really? And everyone makes a whole lot of money and go lives a long way away...and up at the top of a mountain...

I invented Spyware

Ok, so I didn't invent Spyware. Is this the first time you've read something on the internet that isn't true??

But it is funny how sometimes you say things that later on turn out to be a little scary. Some years back I worked for a while designing chips to go into flight data recording systems. It was a strange time when I was just in the process of setting up another company and I really only took the job because it paid well...my mind was mostly elsewhere, though.

I arrived at the place on my first day and was walking across the car park towards the building when I spotted another guy walking in roughly the same direction. It was one of those occassions when I looked at this other guy and - for no logical reason - took an immediate dislike to him, even though I didn't know who in hell he was. It turned out that the other guy was also starting work there as my junior on the same day. It turned out that if there was an Olympic event for asking dumb-ass questions, this guy would have more medals than Mark Spitz.

Anyway, this was back in Windows 3.11 time. We sat next to each other in the office mostly in silence except when his mouth was open and a dumb-ass question was coming out or when I was saying "don't open your mouth, dumb-ass, a question might leak out!" We got on like a house on fire...

Now and then amid the silence in which I tried to make sure we worked, one of our workstations would suddenly whirr into life and the disk access light would flicker. One day dumb-ass turned to me and said "I think there's something wrong with this PC, because it keeps doing that even though I'm not touchinig it", to which I responded "didn't you know? That's Bill Gates. He has a special patch built into Windows so that he can tap into all the computers of the world and find out what we're all doing. That way he can work out what he needs to build into the computers of the future so we won't be able to resist his will..."

Dumb-ass (being totally devoid of any sense of irony) immediately responded with some sort of "blah blah blah" straight as a die answer about it not actually being Bill Gates and how I was clearly wrong. I then punched him in the face and got on with my work.

I think dumb-ass is still working at the same god-damned place all these years later. I wonder if he's still watching the drive light on his computer...

I just found a god-damned banana in the freezer. What the hell is that about? I guess it's some sort of science experiment and I'll remember why it's in there eventually.

Another of those bulletin mails just dropped in from the guys at ASIS - even though I haven't paid my dues in god-knows how many years - talking about the bank heist of the year so far in Pakistan, where a serving security guard turned up for work one day with a bunch of his pals and held the manager at gun-point until he opened the vault for them.

They got away with  9 million Pakistani rupees...okay, sure, it's only about USD107,000 but let me make my point. The 9 Mil sounds a whole lot better...

The world is still a real simple place - even though we see increasingly more complex problems all around us. Banks mostly annoy me. I see it all the time where they get all pernickerty about their fraud detection systems and their internal audit procedures, but because they are deep down just a bunch of ass-holes who we pay to hold on to our money so we don't go spending it on fast women and loose cars, their security procedures for the basic stuff are often horse manure. Especially when it comes to the developing and emerging market territories.

Don't be mistaken by the whole "emerging market" status crap. Even where there's the earliest stages of market emergence there's a bunch of Western oriented guys looking to carve up the foundations of future properity between themselves. They lord it up, driving around in their fancy cars and treating the serving classes like dirt so that they can feel like gigantic whales in tiny fish bowls. The only way they can get to do that is to oppress those serving classes by putting them on subsistance earnings and making them work in terrible conditions. You see it a lot. The security personnel they hire are just uneducated guys in uniforms (it's not the fault of the guy wearing the uniform that he's uneducated, by the way), so the procedures they're forced to follow have to be simplified to the educational level of the operative. So the procedures are useless and the guys who have to follow them get bitter and twisted because they're being treated like dirt while the guy in the Mercedes gets to eat lobster for breakfast.

Result - bitter and twisted security guy decides his only way out is to bring along his friends and put a gun on the manager's head until he opens the vault. USD109,000 split six ways is worth the risk.

So what am I saying here? Physical security, dude. Get your shit together at the core.

Such a messy eater!

Schneider to gobble up Tyco?

The larger companies in the security business get, the more like huge, hideous monsters from 1950s B movies they like to act. They trudge along real slow, they roar a lot, some of them are able to shoot laser beams out of their eyes! One thing they all got in common is their insatiable appetite to get even bigger and more monster-like, somehow forgetting along the way that if they don't stop gowing they won't be able to fit back into their flying saucers if they need to escape back to Planet Zarko...

It wasn't a big surprise that somebody bought GE Security, the only thing that surprised me was WHO bought it. I've listened to so many GE guys and UTC guys justify the whole thing since the buyout. They all tell a great story about how wonderful it all is, and how powerful the brand has become, but I remain unconvinced. When you put a whole bunch of sheep in a field and let the farmer loose late at night, sometimes he can't decide which one he should marry...

So now we have Monsieur Le Schneider. Not content with buying Pelco when they already had a CCTV company it now looks like they could buy Tyco...so they get another CCTV company (well...if two is better than one, three must be better than two) and at least three more access control companies to add to the one they have already! Tyco was already a confusing little Frankenstein that's gone through a lot of pain to remain where it is. Now it can be sewn onto the side of Schneider (I'm going to call it Le Franc from now on) to make an even weirder barrel of competitors all trying to carve up the same pie under the same parent group.

Am I confused? Well I sure am bemused.

I remember being in with some guys from Schneider about a year or so ago, and they were totally convinced that they had the whole security market sewn up with their integrated building management/access control/security products. They were talking all about how everyone in security would inevitably move over onto BACNET and abandon the folly of their current direction. In my usual friendly way I told them they were all full of "Le Merd" and bid them a fond farewell.

So have they now realised that they are all up le creek without le paddle? Have they now decided that the best thing they should do is buy a couple of market leading brands to hedge their bets?

Maybe, so why go with Software House and Kantech? Same type of decision they made when they decided to get into IP CCTV...so they bought Pelco...

Our survey said : UGH UGGGGHHHH!!

Okay, there's the whole ADT side of things. Monitoring centers, domestic intruder alarms, long term recurring income across the globe. There's the fire business (everybody who's in the fire business loves the fire business...when they're in it), there's the EAS thing with Sensormatic dominating much of the industry (kinda...), but this is all "old school". It's all yesterday's security industry. GE snuffed out all the R&D in Interlogix and elsewhere when they took over. They tried to stay "hi-tec" by buying a few companies with bright ideas, but they just didn't invest the way an innovator needs to if they're going to stay an innovator. You see something similar with Tyco.

Where will it all end? It's getting to be like these few enormous snakes trying to swallow their own tails now. Maybe they'll eventually just disappear in a puff of self acquisition...I don't know. I just wish I had all that money to invest in nice small agile teams of clever people creating cool new products for the cool new world.

Opening The Spell Book

Dragon Cat valiantly defends the city against the onslaught of Garfields from another dimension, as Bill Murray looks on from his hot-air balloon trying to pretend that he had nothing to do with it...

Do you really think that the ones they dunked in the village pond or burned at the stake weren't just old fashioned geeks with bad hair and a slight Tourette's problem? So a lot of them were women...same difference.

They had their little books where they wrote down the things that worked. They kept gadgets. They liked owls and toads and kittens and other such kule kreetchers.

So I'm keeping a Grimoire now. A book of spells. A place to write down the secrets of the world...but that aren't secrets no more once they're out in the world where you're reading them.

Let's start slow. Tiny things and half secrets. Things you might already know if you just went and thought about them long enough.

Alakazam!!