Why Not?

To blog or not to blog, that is one of the questions...

Hints on tips on whether to blog, what to blog and when to blog.

Posted at 08:34AM May 23, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  |  Comments[2]

How stupid are these phishers...

Phishing: The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. (courtesy of the Webopedia Computer Dictionary)

So phishing emails arrive all the time. Some are works of art, beautifully crafted to look and feel like they come from the company they claim to, use real URLs throughout except one carefully masked one which is the hook. Many are pretty dire and basically depend on a mix of greed, stupidity and/or an over-trusting nature on the part of the recipient.

I just got one which must be in the running for "stupidest phish of the year"... From the top:

It arrives from a German (.de) email address, claiming to be from the "Microsoft Word Lottery, UK".

The office address is in Liverpool and they are emailing from Germany?

I have of course won £1m and I'm one of 25 lucky "international winne(Addresses) who have won in this category". Just one example of many garbaged bits of English. Oh, and another, which implies its not a £1m prize, actually it's a staggering "GBP 1,000,000.00M"!

Their website is apparently "still under construction, as we are updating our site." A £25+m e-lottery fund without a website?

My email address was selected from their Microsoft Word user lists. Odd, given that like many computer users (most?) I've never actually owned a copy of Microsoft Word...

Then there's the "Non resident claims form" I am required to "completely fill with your correct information". I am a resident...

And my favourite, just for the geeks: my email address was apparently randomly selected by "our new java-based software". Microsoft? Use Java? And tell people about it? Get away...

Just goes to show some phishers are dumber than their victims

Posted at 01:59PM May 01, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

A little help for those just adopting Linux

Actually not a huge amount of help, but rather entertaining:

The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons

Courtesy of The Register.

Posted at 04:27PM Apr 15, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Found: one small, fast, muddy spotty dog

Bob turned up. Or to be precise, a dog rescue near Bicester called to say they had him. Said dog rescue is about 11km away from where he was last seen, so for a moment I thought he had achieved all the previous posting had suggested he might. But no, he'd been found in our village and taken there. Evidence suggests that after his normal mud "seek and splash", he had been distracted from returning by a lady Boxer on her morning walk and didn't hear the whistles for his return due to mud in his ears. At least that's Bob's excuse...

Posted at 03:57PM Mar 25, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Lost: one small, fast spotty dog

A Springer by the name of Bob.

Far too fast for his own good. So on his usual morning walk he ups and goes after something or nothing, which is normal; only this time he didn't come back. A blog is not a common place to notify people of a lost dog, but Bob is very, very fast, entirely single-minded and, while unlikely to leave the country, is all too capable of running flat-out for hours, which could put him in one of three or four counties.

So if you see him, tell him to go home. Fast.

Posted at 02:50PM Mar 25, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

If this doesn't make you cynical, nothing will...

Or if you are already cynical, it might be enough to get angry. The article unearths some evidence from an anti-trust trial in the US - it is an email chain from 2000 with a document attached, written in 1997, that might as well be called "Ensuring victory; the art of war in under-informed markets". Enjoy:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071023002351958

Posted at 08:57AM Feb 19, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Zigackly, Obelix, ferpectly right

Well, not Obelix, but Dana Blankenhorn, a blogger on ZDnet (for the record I'm don't think I'm Asterix either!).

He writes in this entry, a comment on HP's increasingly vocal open source strategy, that successfully using open source software in your organisation is as much about changing the company as it is about changing software. He writes that:

" * They need an internal network of engineers and programmers who know the tools and the rules.
* They need to network with others in the open source community to stay on top of trends and get things fixed.
* They need to open their use of the Internet.
... The whole idea of open source is that you become independent, that your people become independent, that you open up to the world."

Yeah, like what he said...

Posted at 12:24PM Jan 29, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Billions of questions about compatibility

So, we get ever closer to the next stage of Microsoft's attempt to force through a secondary document standard. Making extensive use of their deep pockets as always, Microsoft have been flying people here there and everywhere to try and persuade national standards bodies to change their vote. Having just read this blog entry by a Malaysian blogger, I have some advice for them - if you are going to send people to talk about technical subjects, make sure they actually know something about them...

Posted at 09:29AM Jan 23, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

ISO/IEC 26300 versus OOXML

Just in light of Microsoft's claims that OOXML is "needed" as a standard/format because OOXML has better support for legacy formats. While many have pointed out the flaws in this argument, not least of which that it is the application and not the format that supports (understands and can therefore translate) legacy formats, few have come up with such a nice analogy to illustrate the lack of need for OOXML:

"It's rather like a transition between VHS videotapes and DVDs.

Microsoft Office is like a VHS tape deck. OpenOffice.org (and Lotus Symphony, and Lotus Notes, and 'KOffice', and Sun StarOffice'[etc. etc. etc.]) are like DVD players.

If you've got a pile of videos on VHS, and you want to move to a DVD player, well, there are services which will transcribe. But I don't think it's very likely that a VHS tape deck should have a DVD writer in it. Nor that a DVD player should have a VHS reader.

New stuff, ISO 26300. Interoperable."

From a comment on this blog entry (I was not the commenter!): Minutes by Leif Lodahl.

Posted at 09:09AM Jan 21, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  |  Comments[1]

How to report bugs

Or more generally, if you want to someone to help you with a problem, explain what the problem is...

An excellent essay on reporting software bugs that can be far more widely applied. Read it here.

Posted at 11:46AM Jan 17, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

A late Christmas present for anyone who has worked with ICT in schools

Finally the UK government agency (Becta) that advises schools on their use and deployment of ICT have come good on their promise and advised schools to seriously look at open source. Well they refer to "free-to-use" products but we know what they mean! Oh, and savaged Microsoft on their licencing policy for schools, Vista, Office 2007 and the OOXML format in the process...

Click for The Register's take.

Posted at 05:29PM Jan 11, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Maybe I just slipped into an alternative universe...

If so, I rather like it so far. It may be that other things come to light that make this alternative less attractive, but the first sign of my accidentally slipping through some sort of space-time rift is remarkably positive:

BBC television news just talked about Linux in a positive light... A BBC Breakfast guest even went so far as to suggest that, in conjunction with ultra-cheap and light laptops like the Asus Eee, Linux was not only the most important technology for 2008 but may end the Windows monopoly!

Maybe it wasn't me that slipped through the rift; maybe it was the news programme or just that item. Or maybe I was hallucinating. Because I can't find a replay of the item available on the BBC Breakfast site (OK, that might be because it is the festive holiday season, and a Sunday, and they only update Monday through Friday).

Or maybe, just maybe, the BBC TV people have finally noticed that Linux is here, rising fast and a real alternative to Windows and Macs.

Neeeaahhh. Seems far too unlikely. The rift/parallel universe theory seems the more plausible...

Posted at 09:49AM Dec 30, 2007 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Another organisation switches to the right road

In this case Seneca College in Canada, who are standardising on Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. For me it is an obvious selection; what is particularly interesting in this case is the reasoning - so similar to my own analysis it's almost frightening :D.

Read more at Bread and Circuits.

Posted at 11:55AM Dec 14, 2007 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Some OpenOffice clever stuff

For those who have and those who don't and following on from the tips for Zimbra, here's some tips from the masters and mistresses of OpenOffice (some of them anyway):

Shrink big presentations with ooshrink - optimising image sizes etc. in presentations automatically.

Creating interactive forms with OpenOfice.org Writer - self explanatory really!

There's lots more and in many places. This is probably something done better on a wiki, as are the Zimbra tips, and hopefully we can get a company wide wiki up soon. In the meantime, questions and tips as comments on this blog entry, and they will all be transferred to the wiki as and when it is ready.

Posted at 09:22AM Nov 30, 2007 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Adding real charitable value through ICT

A lot has been written in recent years regarding the importance of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) staff understanding the business in which they work and therefore being able to add real value to the business through their selection and application of technology. Companies the world around have taken heed of this, particularly after noting the positive results generated for the trailblazers, and have explored ways of getting their ICT staff aligned with the organisation (instead of treating them as outsiders). Many specialist sectors tend to be a little behind in these trends, and it recently became apparent to me that possibly this message had not got through to the charitable sector, at least not in the UK or in a way that makes sense to me.

So for the benefit of charities and their ICT staff, here's my take on the how and the why.

First a brief history. Traditionally IT support (note not ICT then, as phones were commonly under operations or buildings and email was strictly for geeks) was a very specialised task, maintaining complex and fragile technology for the benefit of another, better embedded (although similarly misunderstood), group of specialists: the finance team. As computing technology became more mainstream the function naturally continued to report to finance, with whom, it turned out, they had little in common. Other than similarly esoteric sets of knowledge and language and an ability to strike fear into those who work in other functions...

As a result of reporting to a senior function that no real interest in IT challenges and opportunities, IT staff became quite isolated. The situation was then exacerbated by the rapid move to pervasive computing, leaving many non-IT people a little confused and resentful of technology and those geeky types who understood it; this was magnified by said geeky types' need to associate with large, noisy yet sensitive machinery: cue The IT Crowd.

The end result was an entire generation of IT staff who didn't (appear) to "understand the business" because the rest of the company basically ignored them. Or outsourced them. And then email and the web rose in importance as a way for organisations to communicate both internally and externally, then along came VOIP (telephony over the computer network). IT became ICT. The corporate communication solution is scary stuff to put in the hands of people you don't actually communicate with...

So to some thoughts on resolving the situation. First, all non-ICT staff note: actually, despite appearances, techie types are not just bright, they're mostly pretty sociable. Indeed the quietest ones (your perception) probably know and interact with more people from more countries, races and religions than you. It's just they don't know what these people look like, sound like, their real names, etc. because they communicate using technology such as online chat. And spend so much time communicating using online chat (commonly IRC, which considerably predates AIM, MSN and GChat) and email (around in its current form since the 1980s) that they have sometimes failed to develop face to face communication skills to the same degree. Nonetheless they communicate, and richly. Think on this: who do you think invented emoticons (smilies)? As in who saw the need to add emotional (social) content to text communication? Teenagers 5 years ago when they got mobile phones and AIM? No, geeks, a quarter of a century ago .

So act one is bringing ICT staff inside. Stop treating them as something that services "the business" and realise they are or should be an intrinsic part of the business. Realise that given the world is now heavily, for good or bad, dependent on technology and that your organisation stands to gain a lot from clever use of the same technology. Then realise that the people who are absolutely and utterly, without question, best placed to identify and implement new technologies that will be of benefit to the organisation are the ICT staff.

This means having representation of ICT at the most senior levels of the organisation. Not someone that ICT staff report to but does not have sufficient time in their day to actually appreciate or understand ICT, but someone whose job it is to think strategically about information and communication and how technology could support and improve their processing and use for the organisation. Someone who when talking to you does not have to worry about whether your laptop is working, just as the FD shouldn't have to worry about whether or not your pencil is sharp.

On to how ICT staff in charities can add real value... It can take some time for the best of us to identify technologies that will help in a given sector, let alone an individual organisation, but with charities there is a neat starting point - almost all charities depend on a single aspect of culture: the willingness of people to give, to volunteer; to spend some of their own time doing things for the benefit of others. Regardless of what else a charity does, educate, feed, heal, house, clothe, etc., it is essential to their success that the general populace has the desire and interest in giving freely, whether of time, skills, cash or a mix of the three. Anything that promotes this behaviour in our culture encourages charity and therefore allows charities to thrive.

This is the same positive aspect of cultures and individuals that allows open source software to thrive; people give of their time, their skills and/or their cash for the benefit of the greater good. So there is one simple thing that ICT staff in charities can do to add real charitable value; switch their charities to using open source.

Switch the charity to open source not because a given technical solution available at that instant of assessment and acquisition is "the best". Not because the use of open source allows you to ensure the chosen solution becomes the best (once in use and the success criteria far better understood). Not even because the same technical people interested in open source are more likely to be interested in working in the charitable sector even if that means lower pay. Nor for the other long term cost savings offered by open source. Think, for a moment, about the tendency of charities to be helping the under-privileged in the global society and how an open source solution, having no cost of purchase, is likely to permit adoption by those very same under-privileged people and how the charity's use of it will help to improve the software for all other users; let that influence the decision.

But in the final analysis, switch to open source because it promotes a charitable outlook in the greater society. The ultimate way to add value to your charity through technology. Technically not simple, but philosophically so, and ancient philosophies at that. Cultivate the desire to give charity; giving begats giving; do unto others as you would be done by.

To promote your charity, act charitably in your choice of ICT...

Posted at 07:08PM Nov 19, 2007 by Chris Puttick in General  |  Comments[0]