Simon Ralfe

1. Inclusion of the acronym 'IT'. This is a guaranteed turn-off in terms of compelling people to read anything. 99% of the human race has little to no interest in the stuff that most IT professionals do or produce on their behalf. All they want is that stuff to work, be usable and understandable with as little complexity as possible. Why should policy set implementation be any different to the end user experience of, say, the design of an application or the settings on a laptop build?
2. Use of densely worded, overly prescriptive policy documents as the initial delivery point for security information. Instead, consider a small number of high-level 'principles' worded as clearly, succinctly and as non-techy as is possible. From these invite further reading into the policies themselves (and keep these short too).
3. Using terms in a policy without any corresponding definitions or usage examples. How is a sales person meant to understand 'perimeter firewall' or 'defence-in-depth'? Yes, these may be simple enough for security professionals to understand, but you are likely to see the blood drain out of the faces of personnel in your business when presented with such concepts in isolation.
4. Narrow, single media presentation. Rather than page-after-page of dogmatic or just plain vague policy statements where the words 'will', 'must', 'not' and 'cannot' rule, perhaps investigate using visual or animated explanations of important concepts. Human beings perform well with visual cues, it's hard-wired into our noggins. After all, how many people would walk through a door with a big yellow triangle nailed to it showing a body being hit by a bolt of comedy lightning?
5. Lack of alignment to the business. You cannot hope to phrase your policies correctly without understanding your business, their aims, drivers, concerns and requirements. Developing policy in isolation with no collaboration or review  is likely to lead to low levels of compliance with the policies ultimately produced.
6. Accessibility. Don't hide the policy set 5 clicks down in an Intranet, behind an explicit login, or bury them in a file system.  Promote them from the top level of your Intranet, and use a permanent link to them or your security department at the top of all pages.

I hate you even more now I've heard your music.

Take that old-hat MP3 players.

1. The general complexity of most reference material for a beginner/dufus. Don't get me wrong, there is some great stuff out there; Apple themselves, Aaron Hilleglass, Steve Kochan and a fair number of others - all fine efforts. What I found was they didn't really take into account lazy sods such as myself, who in the mistaken belief that having last touched C when 'Bros' were riding high in the UK Pop chart, felt qualified to embark on such an adventure. In essence, you need to know C and when I say know I mean KNOW. Don't fall for any Objective C or Cocoa books that include a line such as 'you can pick up C syntax as you go along' or 'Objective C syntax is simple' - Its hogwash.
2. Work. Surprisingly, doing the equivalent of warming a chair in sector 7-G does actually take a fair amount of effort and therefore time out of your day.
3. Children. Diverting buggers.
4. Wife. They need some of your time occasionally.
5. House. 'Re-modelling' thereof and the associated grief this has presented. I can't see an end to this, much like a shoddy British soap.
6. TV. Damn those fine American shows. Luckily a number of these now appear to be heading South so perhaps I'll recover those wasted hours moving forward.
7. And finally, lack of motivation. In layman's terms I could not be arsed. Mainly due to all of the above. But also 'cos I just couldn't get my bum in gear.

Two lunch hours to get a string to output to the console in Xcode - Kachow!

Spotted this a while back but lost the photo. Not entirely sure how relevant these two activities are, but clearly the perpetrator is assuming someone will make the connection here.

I've been absent from this blog for a while due to a couple of reasons. The first is that I have been outsourced, in the classical sense of the word. This isn't a bad thing to be honest given the fact that remaining with my previous employers for another few decades was starting to fill me with dread. So, I am now a very much smaller cog in a much much much larger machine which I find strangely comforting.

Anyway, the other reason for my lack of posts is a new condition I'm suffering from called 'Kindle-itis'. I've had this since early September and it coincided with a small, slim slab of plastic arriving on my door mat. I was having problems with reading any form of printed (or PDF) book, too often my family and/or the idiot box would distract me. I've managed to chew through an unprecedented four whole novels in the last six weeks, an unparalleled achievement given prior form of barely one every two months.

Naysayers, i.e. Apple succubi and so on, probably have many negative opinions on the use of discrete devices such as separate phone, ebook readers and MP3 players as opposed to, say, a multifunction cash sucker such as the iPad. So far though the 'overhead' of carrying each of these devices does not in anyway make me want to move to the giant iPod touch, or any of its Android based wannabes.

The 3 week+ battery life on the Kindle, at least a week of the same on the phone and 3-5 days on the Sansa clip+ are all basic factors which contribute to the likelihood of me ever moving to a converged device as being slim to none.

The only complaint I have about the Kindle is the price of reference books vs. fiction. The former is priced perhaps barely 15% less than the print edition. This is far too expensive especially when you already own the printed version, which is a real and actual thing made of dead trees and all.

However, overall the impact on my life has been positive, which is not the usual effect technology has I'm, sorry to say.

I generally like to avoid 'one-point-o' products of any type. You see horror stories in the press of phones that can't be used as phones unless held in a certain way, missing functionality like the ability to perform a task as advertised and so forth. With this in mind, and the fact the there is a 4th gen iPod touch due later in the year, I have taken the proceeds from my retired XBOX fund and invested them for now in a new Amazon Kindle (which I won't see until at least September).

I carry a lot of (e)books with me (I hate that term), primarily PDFs, and have great difficulty reading these without a computer. Even when I do have access to such a device, the reading experience is not ideal, what with sharing a screen with everything else I'm up to and so on.

The pricepoint Amazon have set for the new Kindle is at the top end of what I wanted to pay (I'm a bit tight you see), but is incredibly cheap for what you get; a mature-ish platform and market leader which blows everything else nearby out of the water. We'll see how long it takes for me to get this on ebay once I receive it but hopefully it will live up to the hype.

Another example of our reality crossing over into that of the Simpsons. I spotted this theatre poster over the weekend:















Reminds me of the episode 'The Lastest Gun in the West' where the main character, Buck McCoy, had a TV show in the 70's called McTrigger (where all he did was shoot hippies). One of these episodes was called 'Excuse me while I kill the sky'.

I've been toying with getting rid of my XBOX 360 for a number of months now. I've been distinctly underwhelmed by the 'quality' of recent games and, from an innovation perspective, the gradual slide downhill towards mundanity appears unavoidable. This is what happens when game design occurs by committee, and marketing determine what the next hot IP will be. So, you get beautiful but hollow and boring script-athons like COD4 (Dragons Lair anyone?), or half-assed reboots of non-broken games like the Burnout series.

A recent issue with my XBOX Live membership, which I always resented paying as I rarely play online, has been the final straw. Basically the whole kit and caboodle is going out the door and the proceeds will either go towards an Android 2.1 based device or an iPod Touch.

A fabulous offer from one of the worlds largest supermarket chains, based here in the UK.











Is this deliberate, are we programmed to spot what we believe are 'offers' which on closer inspection are nothing of the sort? I expect that the 'policy' of non-offers is based on careful psychological observation and research. All for a few pennies, the money grubbing so and so's.

I had to buy some wild bird food at my local pet store recently. Whilst wandering around with my daughter I spotted these:





















If you squint you can just about make out the sentence at top-centre, 'Must live alone', much like the style of a tag-line for a particularly poor Steven Seagal movie (i.e. any of them).

There were at least 4 of the buggers in the case so I'm not sure what is going on here. Perhaps they mutate into some sort of super hamster when they grow up.

Here's a shot of the sky today above the vicinity of Gatwick Airport:















As you can see, no jet engine exhaust plume - Just a seagull. Nice

Another in my series of randomness/WTF'ness:






















Yes, you are reading right, this is a carton of orange juice. I think Tesco are being slightly over-cautious here.

Unless you are living under a rock on the moon, you are probably sick to death of the current ash cloud coverage and the associated anecdotes from those affected, including the whinging of highly-subsidized Airlines carping on about how they will need bailing out financially. Whilst a fan of the engineering expertise required to push a large lump of metal up into the air and bring it down safely again (most of the time), I am far less enamored with the commercial operations behind supporting the growth in demand for powered flight. If I never saw another large passenger plane in the sky I couldn't care less and think the world would be a better place without them.

My favourite comment overall is an alleged individual at Heathrow who asked '.. couldn't the plane just glide down if its engines were affected?'. Probably the same bloke who invented Concorde or the Comet.

There are two reasons I am glad that planes are not flying today. One is the complete lack of smoggy streaks in the skies above southern England, which usually looks like a giant child has had a go at it with a tin of squirty cream.

The other is the fact that the formerly obese yet-still-a-complete-waste-of-humanity DJ Chris Moyles is 'stuck' in New York. Those of you in the UK familiar with this sentient turds 'work' will hope that with a bit of luck the sky will remain unflyable for a number of years, and he will be forced to become a naturalized American citizen never to darken our shores again.

I'm a big fan of the town of Springfield and it's collection of humorously named businesses, such as 'Let's get Fiscal Financial servs.', 'Alternative Knifestyles' or 'Sales from the Crypt mortuary'. I recently visited a town near to me along the coast a bit and walking through the main shopping area spotted this:






















It's good to see, in this age of brand obsessed corporates with their marketing by committee mentality, that the small business can still match their every move.

Go here for an excellent interactive map of Springfield