I Really Don’t Know

Professionalism at play

Euan Semple, the BBC’s director of Knowledge Management, says… this

Read this guy’s blog, he’s good and clearly very professional.

Silkworm, Folksonomies, looking at things backwards

A colleague of mine has been looking at Folksonomies recently and it’s likely to feautre more and more in our work, but his post on Reversed folksonomy is really interesting. This is very much the culture of Silkworm, a networking project I’m involved in.

Something interesting always happens when you look at things backwards. The stuff above is a great example; a number of years ago I was penetration testing (legitimately) and developed the reverse brute force attack for gaining network access - passwords are secret, usernames are known. A brute force attack tries every password against a known name. I gained access by trying a few likely (i.e. probably known) passwords against every possible username. It would be interesting to know just how many online banks would be vulnerable to that?

You see, look at things backwards and something interesting falls out.

update: typo corrected; “A bruce force attack tries every password against a known name.” This is not to be confused with a Bruce Forsyth attack which David Leigh-Fellows has just pointed out to me involves attempting access using jokes about your mother-in-law.

Striped Leaves

This week’s BlogPaper is the only one, so far, that I’ve altered digitally other than to crop and resize. This was taken in low light with a fast film speed so ended up grainy. I did a simple motion blur ,totally vertical, to blur the grain into vertical stripes.

Anyway, Striped Leaves is below.

Download one here: 1600×1200, 1280×1024, 1024×768, 800×600

Can’t we all just get on?

:: The names have been changed to protect the innocent

I blogged a while ago on professionalism and received some interesting comments, some encouraging, some less so.

The the other day I was having a deep conversation with a colleague who was upset at having being told he was rather too intense. This got me back to thinking about the best teams I’ve worked in and what the relationships were like there.

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Red Arrows Corkscrew

So, each week I’m posting one of my own photos, sized for use on your desktop. Join in by blogging your own photos and include the phrase [grid::blogpaper] in your post - then everyone can google for them.

A few weeks ago I took my boy and a friend, Jake, to Cosford airshow. The cameras went with us and this photo of The Red Arrows Corkscrew was taken by Jake.

Download one here: 1600×1200, 1280×1024, 1024×768, 800×600

Dry Stone Wall

So, each week I’m posting one of my own photos, sized for use on your desktop. Join in by bloggin your own photos and include the phrase [grid::blogpaper] in your post - then everyone can google for them.

This week’s BlogPaper is called Dry Stone Wall:

Download one here: 1600×1200, 1280×1024, 1024×768, 800×600

The Hum^H^H^HBabble of The Machine

Ward Cunningham has been using automated speech to monitor activity on his wiki…

Paper your screen, Blue Timber

I’ve been taking photos since I was little. I started with my Dad’s camera and my first photo was a great holiday snap in which our family dog, Honey, takes centre-stage and my dad appears alongside her in full 70s kodacolor… less his head.

My technique has improved little since then, but with advent of cameras smarter than I am and, more recently, affordable digital SLRs my luck has changed a little. My camera allows me to take several hundred photos on a card, virtually cost free, So I’m now able to apply the monkeys & typewriters approach.

Anyway, a few of my shots have come out quite nicely so I’m doing two things. Firstly I’m going to post one of my shots, sized to common desktop resolutions, to my blog every so often as I get a moment. Secondly, I’m going to invite everyone else to do the same and to add the phrase [grid::blogpaper] so we can all google for the grid.

This week’s is called Blue Timber:

Download one here: 1600×1200, 1280×1024, 1024×768, 800×600