Doing it for free?

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Volunteering is a great way to increase your self esteme, meet people, increase your experiences and make yourself more employable, … oh yes and help other people!

David Cameron’s Big Society ideas rely on volunteers so he’s keen to get more. I did get the impression New Labour didn’t like amature do-gooders much of the time. There is a theory that we should leave it to the professionals and all that’s needed from us is our cash but I think getting your hands dirty (figuratively or maybe literally) is good for us.

Anyway, to help get more volunteers there is a government report – it is, unsuprisingly, a bit wordy but has some helpful bits.

Here’s the report
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/unshackling-good-neighbours
and here’s a couple of sites commenting on it
http://www.vsnw.org.uk/news/view/2011-05-17-unshackling-good-neighbours
http://www.wrvs.org.uk/news-and-events/news/Unshackling-good-neighbours

Lockheed Martin shows how to deal with attacks… or does it?

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

The way in which the world’s biggest aerospace company, Lockheed Martin, dealt with attacks on its network were more than admirable.

That might be your first impression anyway – it was mine when I read the official statement from the Pentagon’s number one arms manufacturer.

It was this line from the official statement that had me convinced for about 10 seconds: “The company’s information security team detected the attack almost immediately, and took aggressive actions to protect all systems and data. As a result of the swift and deliberate actions taken to protect the network and increase IT security, our systems remain secure; no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised.”

This all makes it sound like the hack was fairly inconsequential. Perhaps it was.

But of course, when it comes to data breaches, nothing is that simple. Reports have suggested Lockheed was hit by hackers using duplicates of EMC’s RSA SecurID tokens – you know, the ones which were stolen in a separate hack attack recently?

Only now has the company moved to replace all SecurID tokens. As noted by Rick Moy, president and CEO of NSS Labs, “Lockheed had slightly over two months from the time that EMC notified them and other RSA SecurID customers about their breach.”

“Based upon their remediation actions for this breach, Lockheed Martin’s senior executives chose to do very little about the compromised SecurID token technology in spite of many warnings issued by security specialists about the potential aftereffects of the RSA attack,” Moy continued in his own blog post.

And that’s the real issue here – if Lockheed didn’t replace the tokens, why not? It was huge news at the time and given the warnings put out by various people within the security industry, you would’ve thought they’d act. It seems a little myopic… in fact it’s almost beyond belief if it really didn’t act on the RSA breach whatsoever.

Perhaps Lockheed didn’t consider it enough of a problem, or maybe RSA wasn’t strong enough in its own warnings. Whatever happened, it just goes to show, organisations need to protect against any potential threat they are aware of. Hopefully this event will act as a signal to others to do something about their SecurID tokens if they haven’t done so already.

Otherwise they could end up with the proverbial egg on their face, especially if they’re a high profile firm that does an important job like, oh I don’t know, making fighter jets for one of the most powerful nations on earth.

Just embrace the goddamn cloud why don’t you?

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

So the European Commission is consulting with the great unwashed about the benefits of cloud computing. Better late than never I guess, perhaps I should be happy that that EC has actually heard of the cloud at all. Apparently it will be ‘seeking views’ from the general public, business and other interested parties (by which I assume it means service providers and government) in order to determine how Europe can extract the greatest value from cloud computing.

The rather grand sounding European Commission Vice President for the Digital Agenda (phew!) has launched the consultation process, and in a statement Neelie Kroes (which sounds a little less grand) says he, or she for that matter, is “excited about the potential benefits of cloud computing to cut costs, improve services and open up new business opportunities”. Hmmm, aren’t we all?

So what, exactly, will this consultation actually achieve?

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Small scale email marketing works a treat

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

A long time ago, in a place far from here, on a dark and stormy night, I sent out my first mailshot to 100 names plucked from Thomson’s Directory. It read ‘Mark and Mac for hire’. The response was amazing, creating a customer base which lasted for a decade and more. My wife and I were some of the first designers in Brighton with Mac set-ups, including a PostScript laser printer and a full range of design software. It all cost a gazillion to buy, the typefaces alone were worth thousands of pounds.

Over the years, clients moved on, to be replaced with others. As new facilities became affordable we bought them: ISDN, ADSL, high-res scanning, image manipulation, large format colour prints and web page design.

Gradually I specialised into book production, with clients in London, France and America, while my wife worked for a national charity. But the bankers screwed the world, people stopped buying books, publishing moved to ebooks and for the first time in 25 years I had to get a proper job. Ironically back to my old career where there is a huge lack of staff and I’m working less for the same money I earned from design. But I still keep a toehold in the creative world, hoping for the return of the good old days.

Zany, attractive and to the point

Which is how one email caught my eye and instead of marking it as junk, I read each new one with interest. They were zany, attractive and to the point, obviously from someone who knew what they were doing, or at least appeared to do so. The email was from Keith Scott, another jobbing freelancer who was trying to create a new client base via email.

Pre-recession Keith had been the man behind British Airport Authority’s annual report. As any designer will tell you, a glossy annual report pays the mortgage for a year. When BAA were taken over, Keith found he didn’t have enough work after a career in typesetting and design for print, dating from the days of hot metal.

Keith explained: “Once BAA’s 2006 annual report had gone to print I was back in the normal run of things with no financial umbrella and wondering what to do about the monetary vacuum. I had been sending postcards then followed up with a phone call but it became too expensive and time-consuming. I decided to try email.

“I had built up a small database of about 120 contacts whom I telephoned to get an email address before starting a monthly mail-out. It was a slow, manual process but it did keep the work coming in. Eventually I set FileMaker Pro to send the emails for me.

“At the start of 2009 I had 300 friendly contacts and about 1200 who had never replied. Each month I carried on emailing both and slowly increased the friendly list, which kept the work coming in. Unfortunately, as the recession hit, work started drying up, I had to put my time to good use.

“With the help of Yell.com, Yellow Pages on line, I searched for graphic design companies in London and the southern home counties. I telephoned them and said I was an artworker. I gave them my details and asked for the email address of the creative director or studio manager. The vast majority of people were very obliging.

Life threatening

“One day, searching Yell, an odd message appeared in a new browser window. It said that I was deemed to be using their site for the purpose of making a database which was strictly illegal and if I did not desist I would be prosecuted. It frightened the life out of me.

“Now I buy low cost lists from other companies. Not all of them have been particularly useful and one even instigated a contact from another database company threatening to prosecute me for using their data without permission. A list I had bought was clearly not legal and I had used a hidden trojan.

“I now have 570 friendly contacts and over 3000 who have never replied. The irony is that I have less work than ever, although it does seem to be improving slightly. Producing an html email for a client gave me the knowledge to create my own. I tried Dreamweaver which wasn’t very successful before I settled on TextWrangler which is free and very good. I use MacMassMailer to send my html emails.”

As with all jobbing designers, Keith has had to learn new skills and software to keep up with the industry. He is keen to learn from others’ experience. In the last couple of years, MacUser articles have made him re-evaluate his approach and present himself more forcefully. For example: a recent article showed that skilled freelancers should present themselves as specialists rather than just run-of-the-mill artworkers.

Like Keith, MacUser’s Steve Caplin convinced me to switch to a graphics tablet and adopt a different method to do ‘hairy cut-outs.’ This was immediately before I created a book for the Imperial War Museum called The Animals’ War. Page after page had cut-outs of hirsute animals which even the best Photoshop filters were a major head-ache. Steve’s advice was to paint quick masks, convert them to cut-outs before generating ‘hairiness‘ with brushes and fitters. This helped when I went on to do The Children’s War.

Keith Scott concludes: “The obvious thing for me was to promote my traditional typesetting and artworking background. This is why I try hard to distinguish the fact that design and artwork are two very different disciplines.

“But I feel that I’m barking up the wrong tree much of the time – some might say I’m simply barking.”

Far be it for me to contradict him.

TweetDeck swallowed up by Twitter?

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

I am guessing the majority of you reading this blog have probably been sucked into the microblogging world/social network that is Twitter? (I’m @NifS by the way. Oh, and don’t forget @ITPRO…)

Well, those who use the addictive web tool are also more than likely to have heard of TweetDeck. It is a superb little invention by Iain Dodsworth, arguably the easiest to use and best functioning desktop application to keep on top of multiple Twitter accounts, along with rival social networking sites.

What makes me particularly proud of TweetDeck is it isn’t some large corporate operation, nor another innovation from Silicon Valley we wish to covet. It is from one man based in the new-fangled tech hub of the world in London’s East-End.

So, why bring it up now? Well, it appears Twitter has picked up on its popularity and the rumour mill suggests it has bought the one man band for a tidy sum of $40 million.

This is not the first, and undoubtedly won’t be the last, client Twitter has snapped up, but it has left me in two minds.

As I said, part of me is proud. TweetDeck is exactly the sort of thing we should be showcasing in the UK. A single developer building up a superb application that went viral and became the most popular client, only second to Twitter itself, being recognised and bought in triumph.

At the same time, I am always sad to see the little guys swallowed up into large companies, never sure whether they want to kill the platform to progress their own or just take credit for all the hard work done before them.

Now, I know Twitter is still a relatively small business, despite its global numbers, and it obviously realises something good when it sees it.

But, if this acquisition has gone through, I really hope Dodsworth and his beautiful creation doesn’t disappear into the ether. He is one of the tech champions we need in the UK to encourage others to get on board and TweetDeck is one of the examples we should use to show what can be done with little start-up capital.

Best of luck to all involved and Dodsworth? I hope you get a nice Lamborghini out of it…

Super injunction – is tweeting chatting or publishing?

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

I’m a bit confused about this whole super injunction fandango. The courts say you can’t publish stories about X and people said this was mad as you can talk down the pub about it. Now they are trying to charge someone who has tweeted about X – is tweeting chatting or publishing?

Maybe it’s how it has always been, you can call anyone a philandering moron to your mates down the pub but technically you could be sued for slander. If you jump on the table and proclaim it to the whole pub you may well be sued for slander.

It all seems a bit mixed up but an individual tweeting seems a lot different to a 6 page spread in a newspaper. Something to do with personal vs. corporate, size of content and profits made. There’s something about conversation / statement. I can express my opinion and you can reply in a conversation, in a statement there is no immediate right to reply. That differentiates a phone conversation from a newspaper article but where does that put a tweet or an email or a text?

As I hate secrecy but also hate scandal rag newspapers and also the ability of the rich to exploit the law in their favour I’m torn in too many ways.

What would be nice was if people weren’t interested in prurient of scandal – but that really is mad thinking.

Is it time for Android to do an Apple with App approval?

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

Like most people these days, I get tons of texts. Some, like those from my lover, are eagerly anticipated. Some, like those from people who think they are talking to whoever had my Vodafone mobile number before it was allocated to my handset, come as a surprise. But many just drive me to tears. If it’s not the use of ‘txt speak’ which even my 80 year old mother uses then it’s the amount of text spam that rattles my mobile comms cage. And you could be paying dearly for text spam, courtesy of Android.

Yep, it appears that a bunch of malware infected Android apps will turn your smartphone into a spam machine. The embedded malware code causes your handset to send texts to Chinese phone numbers, premium rate of course, which then subscribe you to paid for text-based services. So not only do you get more unwanted spam, but you pay through the nose for it.

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Cisco and Dell: A stormy nuptial on the horizon?

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

A matter of weeks ago the death of Flip was announced by Cisco. Not a sell-off or a cut down of resources, a total burial of the device which came from a company acquisition just two years ago.

Now the web is awash with rumours John Chambers’ shake-up of the Cisco catalogue is about to see two more divisions for the chop.

First up is Linksys, a consumer router division bought by Cisco back in 2003. If Cisco is turning away from these types of small fry buyers – let’s face it, the Cius tablet has yet to even emerge – then we could see why it could go.

Second is WebEx, acquired by Cisco in 2007. The online collaboration tool for web and video conferencing seemed to be a natural place for Cisco to put resources, but again, there is not often smoke without fire – ask Ryan Giggs.

What would be the biggest news to come out of all of this though is the possible merger of Cisco with Dell.

After Chambers revealed the shores in the bay were stormy of recent with “disappointed investors” and “confused employees,” the questions have been fired at the company about what they would do going forward.

Also, remember, Chambers has been leading the ship for 16 years and is due for retirement in just three, so how long will he be around to protect his baby?

Dell and Cisco could make quite a team. Despite it spreading itself rather thinly in the past few years, Cisco still has a great dominance in networking and has made a respectable play into the data centre hardware market.

Dell is a more than a worthy adversary in this area, but its failed attempts to buy up smaller firms like 3PAR has left it trailing even further behind its arch nemesis HP.

A pairing of the two would undoubtedly send shivers down the spines of Leo Apotheker, along with the upper esculents of IBM and even Oracle, but can we really see the two giants playing nicely together when they have been on their own for such a long time?

Obviously we asked Cisco about the acquisitions but were given the usual line of “we don’t comment on rumour and speculation.”

We will be watching closely, however, to see how – or indeed if – Chambers can pull this one back or have to row his lifeboat over to Dell’s studier ship.

It’ll be worse before it’s better…

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

I used to have this verdant, green lawn. However, if you looked closely much of the green was moss. So, a couple of weeks back I fed it “weed and feed” which killed most of the moss and I have spent much of this weekend raking it out. The trouble is I now have a lot of brown earth and not much grass. The idea is now the moss has gone the grass will (eventually) grow over the bare patches the way it couldn’t over the moss.

So what has this to do with IT? The whole process reminded me of bug fixing a project that has gone bad. Once a system is well out of hand fixing the bugs gets tricky because they interact with other bugs and you end up with temporary fixes and work arounds until the other bugs are fixed which in turn create their own problems… The “best” approach (for development) is to clear them all out and start afresh. The problem is you end up with system much like my lawn – a bit bare.

This doesn’t go down well with users, however they will sometimes live without features for a while IF they believe they will be replaced with fully working ones.

Marketing usually really hate the idea – they’d rather have a healthy looking a system even if the healthy look is only from a distance. Still, I have often said the you could display everything about most marketing departments’ enthusiasm for openness on one screen of a smart phone … in a very large font.

New Vistas on Lion

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Terry Seabrook emailed me today, about his new CD and concert dates. Don’t know who he is (I hear you say)? Terry is just a cool Brighton-based jazz man, his new website is here: http://www.milestonesjazz.co.uk/ . I’m not usually a fan of jazz but Terry’s last band, Cubana Bop and his new latest, Sketches of Miles, give you a Jazz which is very light and listenable.

As I looked through Terry’s back catalogue I tried to remember which were the CD cover’s I designed, from an era when my studio was in Brighton and I traded design of their poster/cover/whatever in exchange for a copy of their latest music as CD and MP3s. Brighton is the birth place of so many bands and musicians, I made sure my music library grew exponentially by working for as many as possible. Most of the CDs remain sealed in their wrappers in case in years to come, I can take them to the Antiques Roadshow.

The chances of running the software I used to produce Terry’s covers, diminish as rapidly as Apple switches allegiance in it’s choice of CPU suppliers. The switch from System 8 to MacOSX was expensive in some ways as scanners and some printers were left for dust but software still ran. Apple introduced their Classic emulator which I found ran old software quicker and more reliably than under native System 8.

I still have some of those old packages and welcome anyone creating a new Classic emulator so I can get to my old barcoders, Streamline and various graphics apps. Then Apple switched from IBM to Intel as their CPU supplier. That change was again, helped by Rosetta, the PPC emulation software which has kept all my older MacOSX apps running.

It is the switch to Lion which is going to hurt the most because this time there will be no emulator to keep PPC apps alive. They will wither away to nothing as soon as I switch and will include some of the heavyweight software I cannot find alternatives for. This includes every Adobe application I own, Microsoft Office suite as well as old faithfuls such as VisualHub, SilverFast scanning software and others.

Losing Microsoft Office will be the least painful, I never wanted to upgrade from Word 5 and definitely not the latest Word with the dreadful ribbon. For the rest of broken apps, I just hope they get updates pretty darned quick. Some, such as Epson’s drivers, are all PPC. Others, such as SilverFast, will probably be a paid for upgrade.

This next MacOSX is the first where I shall really examine whether it is worth the hassle to use. For me to say that, I think Apple might be on the verge of making the same mistake as Microsoft did with Vista.