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!!