Oli and the Daleks

March 18th, 2009 2 Comments »

So I was walking through the office reception yesterday when a Dalek approached me and tried to exterminate me. Luckily my ninja-like reactions saved my bacon and I dodged out the way just as The Doctor ran past and disposed of him with his lethal witty banter. Actually I just made most of that up, but the Dalek was genuinly in reception while a film crew were busy filming Doctor Who, presumably using part of our campus as a location film set. I’ve not seen any sign of *him* so I’m not sure whether it’s the current or the new Doctor, only time will tell….

me-and-dalek-for-web


Biometrically annoying

February 19th, 2009 1 Comment »

This is a little annoyance of mine and it’s not to do with actual biometrics themselves but the way people use them. Biometrics, for those not in the know, is all to do with the science behind the identification of an individual such as fingerprinting, iris recognition etc.. Enterprising laptop manufacturers have recently over the last year or so started to introduce these little biometric tools as add-on components, HP with their fingerprint readers on business laptops, and Dell touting their facial recognition software which uses the built in web cam to make sure you look like the person you are supposed to be. So it was with great amusement that I read this story about facial recognition authentication being hacked with nothing more than a printed out photo. A failure in the technology you might think? Nope, stupid people putting it in the wrong place. Let me enlighten you on the subject of user authentication. If you make use of a computer system, such as the beloved Facebook, you type in a username and a password. This is known a two-fold (or two-factor) authentication.. you have a username (who are you?) and a password (what secret do you know?). Very secure in principle as long as the secret is kept a secret. Some online banks even give out a special smartcard and a card reader, so you end up with three-fold (three-factor) authentication: username (who are you?), password (what secret do you know) and smartcard (what have you got?). If you use a cash machine, the ‘who are you?’ and ‘what have you got?’ are combined in to one, your cashpoint card with account number written on it (note… whether this is know two or three factor is a point of debate!). How does this fit in with biometrics? Well which of those questions mentioned above can be answered by a biometric solution? In my opinion they most definitely answer the ‘who are you?’ question, and could be argued that they answer the ‘what have you got?’ question but I wouldn’t be confident in using biometrics there… So why are manufacturers using biometric authentication instead of a password???? Crazy stuff. The ‘what secret do you know?’ question is very important and to replace that with biometrics is mental, everyone knows what I look like so facial recognition is out of the question, and my fingerprints are also no secret unless I wear rubber gloves before I touch anything. OK, so iris recognition might be a little more complicated to steal but possible all the same, it’s not a secret, someone just has to scan your eye and they have all the data needed. Laptops secured with biometrics replacing a password are only slightly more secure than a laptop secured with just a username.. Now if they combined the facial recognition with a compulsory password I’d be happy.

The Colour Works

February 12th, 2009 2 Comments »

I’m about to break one of my blog rules: talking about work. Normally I don’t divulge more than the odd vague comment however earlier this week I was sent with my team to a workshop session titled “The Colour Works”. I was very apprehensive to start with being initially asked to answer 25 airy-fairy questions structured as statements for which you had to rate as ‘most like you’ to ‘least like you’. Groaning at each one with a can’t-be-arsed with this sort of thing attitude and dreading two days of a hyperactive socialite trying to pry emotions out of me with forced games of ‘Simon says’. Group hug. Hippies.
So it was a surprise when I found myself having a good time. The course was based around the idea of four colours, each of those colours represent a similar grouping of personality traits. An individual’s personality is made up of many different traits in different proportions, and can therefore be represented visually by a certain order of these colours. Take a look at this colour wheel and see if you can work out what your predominant colour would be:

colourworks1

colourworks2To help you decide a bit more, you can see that the right hand side of the wheel (red and yellow) are qualities of an extrovert, on the left hand side (blue and green) an introvert. The top of the wheel (blue and red) contain thinking qualities, but people in the bottom half of the wheel show more feeling characteristics. I was very proud to say I am very biased to the blue (97%) – the highest blue in the team. In other words, psychology officially shows that I am a geek. My colour order (blue, green, yellow, red) was then displayed for the two days on an authentic home-made Lego badge (genius idea I thought) and I was also provided with a 23 page document titled “Oliver Shingler: Personal Profile”. Now this is where it got quite scary. My entire personality was guessed by a computer after only 25 questions, and it was pretty accurate. Here are some direct quotes:

Logical, analytical and objective, Oliver is unlikely to be impressed or convinced by anything
other than reasoning based on solid, concrete facts. He is unlikely to be comfortable expressing
his inner feelings to strangers. He is seen as an unpretentious colleague who has a good
understanding of the way things work.

OK, so far pretty good, but it continues:

He displays little emotional response to situations which others may perceive as crises, and is usually seen to deal with them in a calm and cool way. He tries to use logical principles to make sense of the ideas that constantly arise in his mind.

Riiight, I think that describes me too….

Ever concerned with efficiency, (a place for everything and everything in its place),
he may neglect the human element, unwittingly causing stress in the process.

Yeah I get on people’s nerves.

He tends to mistrust people who he thinks are ignoring reality. He may feel under strain if he is
unclear about what is expected of him or if duties at work are subject to change at short notice.
He is reluctant to display his emotions to others. He will often do without something rather
than reach out to others to get it. He may seek to reduce his personal needs rather than be
dependent on other people. He conveys an image of stability and reliability – an image which
can be trusted.

Stupid people ignoring reality. Hang on, I’m sure I do that myself… so I mistrust myself? Could be true.

He is logical, objective and analytical with great reasoning power. He is not usually prepared to commit to high risk decisions…. He is reticent about expressing his feelings and may be rather slow to make decisions as he wants to gather all essential information before acting. He will support those he considers as friends but can feel rather pressured if made to act against what he considers as his better judgement.

I’ll let you make your own judgements on that! All the above information was taken from a 2 and a bit page overview. The report also contained several other pages detailing my strengths, weaknesses and ways to / not to communicate with me. Essentially the book in the wrong hands is a very specific guide on how to get on my nerves. I’ll now allow you to finalise a choice of predominant colour for yourselves (go on, leave a comment and let me know) and leave you with my personal favourite quote from the report:

Because of his well developed tolerance of himself and other people, Oliver may appear detached and disinterested.

Net Neutrality

December 23rd, 2008 1 Comment »

This is a buzz-word / phrase that I predict will become a big issue in 2009: Net Neutrality. The geek press has been banging on about this for a while so I’ll start off by explaining what it means. The Internet (aka The Net) is one big network spanning the globe, sections of it are owned by private companies (such as Google or Microsoft), sections are government owned, but most of it is owned by telcos and ISPs (Internet Service Providers). When you connect to the Net at home, you connect via an ISP.. that is, the ISP lets you use their part of the Internet to connect to the rest of the world in return for a small monthly fee. They often place a limit on your speed or give you a monthly data transfer cap which is their way of trying to keep some sort of control over dishing out their internet-flavoured cake. Now, along comes Google with their hungry YouTube video streaming… enter the BBC and their iPlayer TV catch-up service, hello to BitTorrent and all the other peer-to-peer file transfer / downloads services.. the ISPs networks start to creak at peak times with users downloading like crazy. ISPs decide that something needs to be done, so they start installing traffic management hardware and ‘limit’ certain types of traffic to ease the burden…. so a few customers who have been downloading loads of dodgy movies, games and music have to wait a bit longer to get their mits on the latest Beethoven release and no harm really done. The ISPs don’t need to spend money on more bandwidth which would impact on their already tight margins (well, we do want really cheap broadband don’t we?) and most customers are happy and able to carry on surfing and watching as they did before.

This is all sounding quite nice at the moment, until the ISPs realised just what they could achieve with their traffic management equipment. What would happen if a particular company (let’s call that company G) who owned a video streaming service wanted to make sure that their videos could get to the end user faster than a rival company (for argument’s sake.. M), well, the bandwidth goes to the highest bidder, the ISPs make a ton of cash and competition between video streaming services is squashed. Google, sorry, company G are campaigning for Net Neutrality which is defined as being against this type of behaviour… it’s bad for the t’internet apparently. At the same time however they are actually talking with ISPs to make sure they get the bandwidth anyway in case their moral stance falls on deaf ears. There are essentially two sides to stand on and I’m unsure. On the one hand we, as broadband consumers, could see prioritised services working faster, perhaps a price-drop in our monthly subscriptions due to the ISPs extra sources of income or at least a reinvestment of that cash in a better service. On the other hand we could be limited in the services we are offered as the smaller guys are squashed by the corporates with the cash causing us to become locked in to a single provider monopoly… imagine if Apple’s iTunes store was the only place you could get music from and their prices kept going up and up.

Twister!

July 29th, 2008 No Comments »

Seeing a storm brew over the Bristol channel was pretty cool. I was watching out of my office window as a twister came down to meet the sea for a couple of minutes before it shot back up to where it came from. Neat!

House news…. none to publish yet – but there are ideas brewing so watch this space.

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