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a good security design for an office

One issue that is rarely considered is how to deal with office break-ins for the purpose of espionage. I believe that this issue has been solved reasonably well for military systems, but many of the military solutions do not apply well to civilian systems – particularly the use of scary dudes with guns. Also […]

review of Australian car web sites

It seems that Toyota isn’t alone in having non-functional web sites. In fact it’s better than some, the basic information on the cars is available and it is possible to get contact information for car dealers, also they have a feed-back form on their web site (to which I submitted my previous blog post). Incidentally […]

SAK, ctrl-alt-del, and Linux keyboard mapping

A common problem with Linux systems is when Windows users press CTRL-ALT-DEL at the login prompt and reboot the machine.

To fix this some people change the ^ca line in /etc/inittab to just disable the reboot function. However this is not desirable because sometimes you want to reboot a machine with a simple keypress.

Another […]

Ethernet bonding

Bonding is one of the terms used to describe multiple Ethernet cables used to form a single virtual network link. This can be done for performance or reliability.

Bonding for performance used to be common when 100baseT was the fastest network technology that was commonly available. In 1999 servers could usually sustain considerably more than […]

Advice for speakers

I am not an expert at public speaking. Attending Toastmasters to improve my speaking skills is on my todo list. However having given hundreds of talks over the course of about 14 years and being paid for giving talks (the minimum criteria to claim to be a professional speaker) I think I can offer some […]

uplift

For a long time I’ve enjoyed reading books by David Brin. Not only does he have some good sci-fi ideas and a good writing style, but he’s also a cool guy when you meet him at a signing. One of the core concepts in a number of his books is the idea of uplift, whereby […]

common mistakes in presentations

I attend many presentations and have seen many that had a lower quality than they should have. Some things are difficult to change (for example I have difficulty speaking slowly). But there are some things that are easy to change that many people seem to get wrong and I will list some that stand out […]

fair trade is the Linux way

I have recently purchased a large quantity of fair trade chocolate. Fair trade means that the people who produce the products will be paid a fair price for their products which will enable them to send their children to school, pay for adequate health-care, etc. Paying a small price premium on products such as coffee […]

invasive vs inconvenient security

The recent news from the UK gives us an example of invasive security. Preventing passengers carrying on any hand luggage (even wallets) and frisking all of them is the type of treatment you expect for criminals and visitors to maximum security prisons. It’s not what you expect for people who are involved in routine (or […]

the waste of closed lists

As I mentioned in my first post the amount of effort I’m prepared to invest in posting to a small group of people is limited. I don’t think that I am the only person with this opinion.

I also believe that the number of people who refuse to post to open lists is quite small, […]