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!