The most obvious has been Euclidian geometry… In case you’ve missed it, it describes how shapes relate to each other. And after some 2000+ years, you might think that the general population might have “got it”.

Sadly not. For some reason, people are allowed to drive £50K vehicles, and do this…

Sadly, I didn’t have the paper to leave a note to the effect of “And why didn’t you just leave me a fuc*king tin opener to get my car out…?”

And these people drive these things on the roads…?

Be careful out there, people…

Over recent months, I’ve been trying to figure out what it actually adds to my life, and the answer is a resounding “Bugger all.”

Aside from seeing people’s new haircuts, hearing how drunk they got at the weekend and getting updates on their virtual farms, I’ve yet to find any practical use for it. Sure, I had about 100 friends, but most of them were ex-colleagues from work or people I was at school with, and we never actually exchanged any communication.

Yes, there are “causes”, but have you seen one that has achieved anything other than promote a pop record to the top of the charts? Thought so…

Besides, I’m not sure I want to give out my personal information to an organisation that likes to change its privacy policy on a whim and opt me into exposing my details by default.

I figure that anyone who wants to contact me either already has my details, or is bright enough to find them out. If they can’t, they’re probably too dull to talk to, anyway.

One of the great things about being brought up in a middle-class English family is that you’re taught manners.

For example, “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, then don’t say anything.” 

Or “Don’t tell lies about someone if you can’t prove them.”

And “If someone gives you a present or does you a favour, you should return a present or favour.”

We then grow up a bit, go to university, have new experiences, for better or worse, but those fundemental social rules remain with us.

Throughout the course of our lives, things change. We take jobs, we get upset by people at those jobs, and sometimes we even leave jobs because of it.

And as we grow older, we recognise higher social structures, and rules that come with them.  For example, if you join a professional organisation, such as the IET or IEEE, part of the membership criteria is abiding by their codes of practice.

Of course, joining such an organisation shows you to be someone who is prepared to further that organisation’s cause, and in doing so, you are prepared to follow the by-laws. And as a professional, you stick by them.

Naturally, there are some companies that suffer from a moral malnutrition…   These are companies that like to use the current recession as an excuse to get rid of staff who they couldn’t remove in a more favourable economic climate.  It doesn’t just apply to the technology industry, either; I know of plenty of people with excellent track records who have been forced out from their jobs without their employers following correct procedures.

As one of those people, I’ll just say this: Stay professional, stay focussed, and stay supportive of colleagues in the same situation.

And I’d just like to mention to a certain storage technology company near Oxford, that there’s no need to continually place barbed comments in your job adverts… 

It does you no favours, and just makes you look stupid.

We’ve nicked your trees, branches and leaf nodes.

We’ve had viruses and paths.

 So it perhaps won’t be a shock to know that we’ve just carried out a hit-and-run with another one – The Cloud.

 Since the public got onto the internet in the mid to late 1990s, companies joined them in trying to find ways to make money. And up until the last couple of years, this was easy – you were either a bricks-and-mortar retailer with a new outlet, like Argos, or you started the same thing, but without the physical presence of a bricks-and-mortar store, like Amazon.

The infrastructure was always yours; you had your own servers, they held your data, and you scaled up the hardware and software accordingly.

 It was the breakthroughs in semiconductors that made it all possible – you may remember someone saying “A computer on every desktop”. It was a revolution designed to put power into the hands of every user, and it was a promise that the major vendors were happy to sell to us.

 Up until now.

If you’re old enough to remember back to the late 1970s, and indeed the early 1980s, if you wanted time on a computer, you booked time on a machine, typically a mainframe, and all of your code and data resided there. You accessed it on a dumb terminal, in my case a DEC VT220, did your kung-fu, and then got a message 5 days later that your program had failed to compile because you’d missed a colon at line 355. And then the mid/late 1970s hit.

Suddenly, we could all have machines to OURSELVES, we could write whatever we wanted, put whatever we wanted on the machines, and they were OURS. IBM was incensed, but at the same time, grateful, because even though the likes of Apple had attracted the hobbyists, they also had a machine that could provide you with your own computer system – and because it had the IBM badge, your boss would sign off of the purchase request. The mainframe model was broken, it was power to the people, and things would never be the same again.

Or would they…?

 Let’s spin on 35 years.

Living in 2009, most people simply can’t imagine what the computer world was like 30 years ago.

But they’re about to get it again. I

t’s called Cloud Computing, and like the name it stole, it looks nice and fluffy, but is full of potential rain and thunderstorms.

Breaking The Law

Almost everyone who uses computers today has heard of Moore’s Law, even if they don’t understand it. There are people who describe it far better than me, but it basically says that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a device, doubles every two years.

What Dr Moore actually wrote in April 1965 was:

 “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.”

 OK, so what does that mean?

Well, it gives you a desktop machine with some 820 million transistors.

 Holy heat dissipation, Batman!!!

Apart from setting fire to your office, with that kind of power available to me on my desktop, why do I need anyone else to help me with my computing?

Well, like every field, state-of-the-art is expensive.

But it soon drops in price if you just buy enough of it. And with the number of businesses using sites like Google and Amazon each day, the cost for them becomes cheap – and when you run the kind of numbers these companies talk about, it really does become cheap.

Relax… we’ve got your data…

So, as a business, you’ve now got a situation where you can place your business running on the latest hardware, load-balanced, and centrally managed. What’s not to like?

Well, you can place your business there, but so can world+dog. When was the last time you handed over your personal data, and didn’t find it comprised or leaked with the subsequent 6 months? Thought so… Do you really want to hand over all of your company data to someone running in “The Cloud”? If you’ve ever posted any message, photo, or personal data to a social networking site, and had it escape beyond the limits you expected, have you ever managed to reign it in? Once the data is out there, it takes on a life of its own. If you place corporate data in the cloud, who owns it? And when (not IF) it’s leaked, what protection and mitigation policies do you have in place? And if you come into a contractual dispute with your cloud service provider, and they close off your access, where will your data come from to ensure your business continuity?

 But on a more daily-basis consideration – you need to have a 100% full-bandwidth link with a 0% SLA agreement to make Cloud Computing work. And whilst you’re CC hosting company may be prepared to sign up for that, will your infrastructure provider…?

It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To…

 And I DO want to cry… Aren’t we reverting to the 1970s model of computing?

At least with the 1970s model, your data and its processing stayed within your company. My advice would to be keep your data processing inside. Send it outside when you need to – and YOU control it – YOU take control of encryption and deal with the levels of privacy that your customers expect. There are several companies that can help you.

Obviously, I recommend Trusted Technologies

For those who have been following the case, you have to believe that this is nothing to do with hacking US military networks, and everything to do with being a showcase trial.

Over the past 7 years, McKinnon has consistently admitted the unauthorised entry into US government and military networks to search for evidence of alien technology that could solve the energy crisis.

Hardly the work of a hardcore spy. In fact, more like something that might be done by a 40 year old sysadmin with Aspergers Syndrome, an over-active imagination and a fan of the X-Files. All of which, funnily enough, describe McKinnon perfectly.

Let’s be perfectly clear here. This is described by the US authorities as “the biggest military hack of all time.” Well if that really IS the case, if I were in a position of securing the US IT military infrastructure, I’d be bloody terrified, to put it mildly. Are you seriously suggesting that a single 40 year old man in a bedroom in the UK (the US closest ally), armed with a couple of Perl scripts could steal the keys to the kingdom? So what about the Chinese?

To give you an example of the kind of dangerous misunderstanding that pervades politicians minds, let’s not forget about the huge DoS attack that took place about a month or so ago, which took out large parts of South Korea’s systems. Most readers of this blog will know that DDoS attacks simply cannot be put down to a single point of origin – that’s why they’re called “distributed”. Unfortunately, a combination of ignorance and over-excitability led one US Congressman to the conclusion that because the attack was directed against South Korea, it MUST have originated in North Korea, and that the US should immediately take steps to defend themselves, because they could well be the next target and have vital infrastructure disabled.

It’s this kind of dangerous, woolly-thinking ignorance that simply HAS to be behind McKinnon’s predicament. How else can there be any other justification for extradition to the US?

Let’s also make one other thing clear – the cost of this attack. The US are claiming that $800,000 (£487,000)worth of damage was done. I’m sorry, but I simply can’t see how this can possibly be true. Sure, there’s the cost of auditing what was compromised and fixing it, but if you’d spent  that money in the first place and didn’t have such shoddy security arrangements, the whole sorry tale could have easily been avoided. Equally, I fail to understand how simply reading some files from a network can cause the levels of damage that the US are claiming.

I’m sorry if I sound like I’m condoning what McKinnon did; I’m not. As a computer security professional, it’s my job to stop attacks like this happening. It is quite clear that what McKinnon did, breached acceptable computer usage laws, both here in the UK and in the US. McKinnon himself freely admits as much.  In a recent survey for computer security firm Sophos, 71% of IT professionals believe that the treatment of McKinnon is way out of proportion to what he did. And these are the very same people tasked with keeping people like McKinnon out of the systems they are responsible for.

I don’t want to get into a political debate about the current credit crisis, but I notice no charges have been brought against reckless actions by banks ,nor against individual traders. Even the Natwest Three, when extradited to the US, were granted bail to return to the UK. McKinnon faces a potential 70 years in a US jail – condemning him to the rest of his life behind bars.

I’m worried, but not shocked, that the UK government has decided to press ahead with this. Despite the support of nearly the entire UK IT industry, high profile celebrities such as Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, and even the Daily Mail, the Home Office are clearly determined to press ahead with this case.  After all, nearly a million people protested against the war in Iraq – in person – for all the good it did them.

The UK government does itself no favours in this case. It is quite willing to hand over a UK citizen with a diagnosed mental illness to the US authorities, but refuses to deport the convicted murderer of the headmaster Philip Lawrence back to Italy.  Can you imagine the US authorities hanging its own citizens out to dry like that?

The UK Home Secretary who started the whole sorry affair, David Blunkett, now says he wishes he hadn’t started it. And his successor, “Wacky” Jacqui Smith, who continued to allow the extradition procedure, recently said she felt she was out of her depth in the job.

And yet, despite all of the public anger over the proposed UK ID card scheme, the present holder of the post of Home Secretary, Alan Johnson,  yesterday described the actions carried out by himself and his two predecessors as a “No brainer.”

And for the first time ever, I completely agree with them.

One topic that’s quite close to my heart, but one I’ve kept clear of discussing is that of Project Management. Or mis-management; unless you’ve been in orbit around the second moon of Jupiter.

I first went to the Farnborough Airshow in 1988, and saw a wonderful pile of bolts called the EAP. It was the prototype of the Eurofighter Typhoon, and impressed us all with its ability to loop, roll and deafen anyone within 30 miles – qualities which I sure terrified the Russians…

So there we have it; a fully working aircraft on display to the public.

What’s to do? Well, quite a lot, apparently.

Ten years later, I found myself at a desk working on the flight controls for the same plane – an aircraft so unstable, it needs to be controlled by about a dozen Commodore Amigas… Which brings me neatly to the actual topic-in-hand – Project-Management. With a team running into thousands, across 4 countries, how can it be possible to take so long to produce a single fighter?

At the SAME company, I also worked on the Boeing 777 PFC – and yet that entered service within a couple of years from project launch to service.

Software design is a strange beast; an unholy-alliance of science and art, each resultant product is unique. I’ll accept that many products are derivatives of what went before, but each involves building the unknown.

Let’s take a moment to think about the term “Project Management”. The two words that can make or break an enterprise.

Consider it. There’s a task that needs to be done by a certain time. You have a set of resources. Let’s build a house. You’ve got some brickies, a chippie, a roofer, an electrician and a plasterer. Logic suggests you build the thing using the brickie and chippie. At the end, you tile the roof, run the cables through the place, then call in the plasterer the hide the mess. That’s fairly obvious, but what happens if snow falls? You have to delay the builders, the electricians get pushed out, and the plasterers are sitting around getting plastered. And that’s just scheduling individual tasks. If you have multiple houses at different stages of construction, you may be able to get the roofer involved on those units that are unaffected by the snow. And then you put them back on their first units, while you use the electricians and plasterers on the unit that has just been worked on.

What have we learnt? That resources should not be statically allocated, and you should be prepared to re-assign them due to external factors.

So, project-management is a damn sight more than putting dots on a Gantt chart and connecting the lines. I should at this point, admit that I’ve been forced into project planning – with the results you’d expect. I’d have been better off standing in for the principal-violinist for the London Symphony Orchestra, or maybe deputising for Wayne Rooney.

What a Project-Manager does NOT do is simply take estimates from their staff, and then punish them for failing to meet them – particularly if they’ve been advised of potential issues by those staff.

By now, you’re waiting for the punchline. Well, there isn’t one. But what I can do is to offer some observations about what a Project-Manager should do:

1) When you start a project, use the estimates from your staff as a “Dot-On-The-Chart” to give you a feel as to the confidence of your staff.

2) Use metrics. I know I’ve said each project is unique, but draw on your staffs’ expertise. If you’ve never attempted a particular product in your company, draw on the experience of those that have.

3) Be PROACTIVE – monitor the checkins. A large number of trivial checkins should indicate that a developer is under pressure, and feels a need to show progress.

4) CHANGE THE PLAN. I know this sounds simple, but you’d be amazed how few managers do it; The Plan is what MUST be met at any cost. Sadly, this is the trap that most managers fall into; you have a set of resources – shuffle them about. If someone has expertise in a particular area, then allocate them to the area of concern, even if temporarily.

5) It’s ironic that I’ve left this until almost last, as it’s probably the most important of all. Have something MEASURABLE! Its YOUR plan – you live and die by it, so support your people by making it known what they need to deliver. Simply saying “Add Power Reduction” is not enough. How much power reduction, how do you control it, what is the impact on other parts of the system? A comprehensive Requirements Specification will help you immensely.

6) Be aware of other parties. You may be managing a development team in one location, but if you are working in a multi-site environment, consider that other parties may have a vested-interest in your new feature; don’t inform them through the code changes – get them involved at the start.

And that’s it. Six, just SIX (6) simple rules for effective project management.

So, have I solved the “Software Crisis?” Well, no actually – because people seem to have an inability to do what they’re told. The above rules have been formulated over many years and at many companies, but all 6 rules apply to anyone developing a multi-party software product.

I don’t know about you, but I’m typing this in the midst of the worst winter weather Britain has seen for the past 18 years (apparently).

Normally, I’m pretty cautious about venturing outside, and definitely try to stay indoors if the words “shovel” and “snow” get equal billing in a sentence. However, given the recent storms, there was no way the family could be without a car; I walked into the village with my son on Monday, and on the way back thought it would be prudent to put my AA membership card in the front of my wallet, so that the rescue team could find me…

Having made it back, and made soup with the spoils of my marching victory, I decided that clearing the cars would be a good move. And it’s here that the story starts…

Whilst clearing the cars, I made the mistake of trying to save energy by not moving my feet, but by swivelling around. And it was great – until Sir Isaac Newton got roundly pissed-off with me and demanded more rispek. At which point I went over and decided to show my love of Rover/MG cars by submitting my chest on one.

Flash forward to the next day, where my wife was keen to point out that “Your ribs don’t look equal – I think you should call the doctor.”

In the midst of intense snowfall, doctors aren’t particularly keen to hear from idiots who have been over-exerting themselves in the snow, so the instruction was to get myself to the nearest A&E.

And if you’ve been reading and waiting for the story, I apologise. Because there isn’t one.

I got down to Frimley Park Hospital, did some stunts in the car park, and promptly ventured into the wrong department, where I was given instructions to go to the correct department. Despite the best efforts of the signs, I got there OK – although the resulting detours were a real eye-opener in what hospital staff do every day.

Once there, I was sent through a series of nurses, doctors and consultants, who I can only describe as EXCELLENT. 

Much of what is said about the NHS always comes back to one group – Government. And I’ll agree with that.

The government are endlessly tinkering with management organisations, league tables, “Consumer Satisfaction Surveys”, but I’ve yet to see one that gives me a chance to give proper feedback to the people in the hospitals.

Well – this is my chance. To ALL of you at Frimley Park – from the receptionist on the desk when I first walked in, the receptionist in the Fracture Clinic who told me I was in the wrong place, the nurses and porters who guided me to A&E, the admission staff in A&E, to the triage nurse (yes, that’s YOU, AJ), to the consultant and the X-ray specialist – here’s where I say “THANK YOU”.

I doubt anyone involved in my whole scenario will read any of it, but I’d just like you to think that the next time someone comes on the TV and bitches about the NHS, just remember that they’re doing a great job; please think about aiming your anger at the right people…

(This post is dedicated to ALL to hard-working and caring people at Frimley Park Hospital, Surrey).

Where are the Greenies and the Anti-Capitalists/Anti-Globalisationists?

We’ve been told by the Greenies of the world that owning cars is the ultimate sinful purchase and will undoubtedly turn our once beautiful blue and green planet into a ravaging sandstorm that may soon overtake Venus in the inter-planetary wasteland league, so the news that the major car companies are laying off people, closing plants and stopping production of 4x4s should surely be great news to their ears. But I haven’t heard one ecomentalist on the news saying how great this is, or cracking out the elderflower bubbly. Surely this is what you’ve been campaigning for all these years? So where’s the celebration? Can’t we all climb some trees with you and enjoy a bowl of tofu and spinach? And before you say “Hey, well they’ve been given £2.3 billion”, let’s just consider a couple of things. The money has gone to the UK car industry. Oh really? What car industry would that be? Name me three car manufacturers that are British owned. The last one was MG/Rover – bailed out to the tune of £6 million, just before a general election. £100 million would have provided them with the funds to produce a new series of models based on the stunning IP they held. Because of UK.gov ignorance, that expertise was sold at a discount to a foreign company. And so the money that I’m paying as a British taxpayer, is going to prop-up overseas companies – despite the fact that the UK is listed as the country that will be hit hardest. No wonder people are going on strike when overseas contractors are brought in to perform a service that could be performed by currently unemployed UK workers.

While you’re thinking about this, let’s look at the same people who like a good riot and vandalising shops and offices – the Anti-Capitalists. We’re currently looking at some 51 million jobs being lost in this global recession. That means families on the breadline, families being evicted from their homes, families losing everything they’ve got. But it’s OK, because the Evil Of Capitalism is being hurt.

So where are the celebrations going on? Once again, the protesters are getting what they want; major corporations and banks failing. What these people don’t seem to appreciate is the fact that their win is a very cruel loss for the people once employed by these organisations. But hey, you’ve got your financial losses, and that’s what you wanted. Of course, the protesters have gone quiet for one simple reason – they like their money, too. Have you ever seen one of these protesters that looks like they have a day job? Or are they just claiming support payments while “Fighting against the evil of capitalism”…?

I’d like to remind you people that WE are paying for you to lounge around, smoke dope, get pissed, drop acid and THEN attack they places we work. The same places we work to get paid and then pay taxes on so that it can be given to you to fund your sad, misguided anarchic protests. I’ve never heard of employed people book holiday days to go out and smash the windows of their nearest McDonalds.

Having said that, we’re in a unique position in the world right now – the biggest, richest companies begging for help from governments that they’ve tried to defy over the years, and yet getting handouts. This is Socialism For The Rich – something I never learnt in my history lessons – maybe I bunked off for that lecture. I don’t know how it will all end. What I can tell you is that 2009 is 30 years later than 1979. I was 6 at the time, and my son is nearly five. There are a lot of similarities between the two. And hopefully the same change will come soon and bring the same benefits that happened to me at that age…

I’ve also been wondering how I can help to secure Great Britain, but drawn a blank. Obviously, I have some technical ability and a strong sense of pride in my country, but how can I possibly make a difference?

Well, thankfully, the answer arrived in an email a couple of days ago – and unfortunately got sent straight in my spam bin…

MI6/SIS Advert

It seems that Oxford and Cambridge are lacking in potential recruits for the security services. Now with the number of people attending university these days, you’d have thought that finding graduates with the requisite moustache wouldn’t be difficult, but it turns out that foreigners studying chemistry and middle-eastern politics doesn’t seem to sit well with the security services’ recruitment department.

So they turn to the likes of me. Now, I (used to) love my country dearly. As readers of this blog will know, I’ve contributed to parliamentary enquires, supported open government, and been a great campaigner for the use of technology to promote open government. And oddly enough, I seem to fit the advertised profile perfectly.

I have to admit, it would be nice to actually spy on someone else, rather than be spied on by your own country. In the early and mid-1990s, I worked on a number of defence projects that were marked UK/US Eyes, and yet over 10 years later, I’m under more surveillance by my own government than I ever was from the Russians.

Even given the above, it’s an alluring prospect; flash a “James Bond” ID card at the police, vodka martinis on expenses, and the chance of sleeping with Yiavonna Succabich…

Sadly, I’m actually a professional engineer, and so don’t qualify for entry into the rarefied strata of the security services. Professional engineers understand good security practices, and so I’ll present some questions that better reflect the current “State Of The Art” within the service…

Have YOU:

• Left any TOP SECRET papers on a train recently?
• Flogged a digital camera on eBay (complete with classified images)?

Can YOU:

• Leak like a sieve?

If so, MI6 could be just the place for you!!

I admit I’ve been very scathing of the UK security services in this post, so as a way of making amends and doing my bit for the defence of my nation, I’d like to offer some free words of advice to the security services (as this post goes through GCHQ); next time you let your operatives out of the office with a CD-ROM to leave somewhere in public, make sure it’s an ADA compiler. Hopefully someone from a hostile power will pick it up; It’ll set ‘em back at least 30 years…