Personal

My personal ramblings!

Ethics and Integrity in Security

If you follow my website, you’ll have seen that I haven’t posted in quite some time. Not because I haven’t wanted to, but because I have never quite managed to find the time with everything else I’ve been working on. One of those things is getting a company up and running. I’m proud to be the managing director of Willsley Ltd which is a really fancy way of saying that I have a side gig alongside my day job as the Information Security Manager at CAF. In previous articles I’ve talked about my personal philosophy of “Always assume the worst,…
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I’m back and soon to have a CISSP

“We like to call this voluntary hanging”. Not really what you want to hear the night before you sit down to do a six hour, 250 question exam. That said, it’s probably an accurate description. Yes, the reason I haven’t been around lately is that between working 50-60 hours a week in my day job, I have also been studying for my CISSP. This culminated the other week in a pass, which means that I supposedly know something about information security! For the uninitiated, the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) qualification is considered to be the baseline for a…
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I’m back… And I have a big broom!

I know, I’ve been away for a while. Perhaps a bit longer than I should have. However I couldn’t leave it any longer… The sight of 800+ (mostly spam) comments awaiting moderation was driving me mad. What I find interesting though, is in amongst these spammy comments was a couple of little jewels. I found some thank you messages from people telling me that they found the content on here useful. Seeing that made me smile, and perhaps, if people are reading, then I’ll keep writing! I may disable the posting of links into comments… If anybody is still reading,…
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I hate Lexmark… About as much as this cat!

I have never had a good relationship with Lexmark printers since the 3000 series from the late 90’s. Sadly they seem to have remembered this and are now determined to frustrate me on a daily basis. Today I needed to print a label onto a C5 envelope, so I tell it to pick the envelope up from the manual paper feeder, I position the envelope and hit the print button for it to say “Insert media in paper loader” !!!!!!!! There’s a bloody envelope here, pick the bloody thing up and print on it! No wait, “Error: Guide rails not…
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How I spend my weekends…

Anybody that visits this site on a regular basis will notice that I have not been posting much lately. The reason for this, aside from my laziness is that I have been working on another project with my partner-in-crime – Mitul Patel. This time we have been doing some more work on his parents mini-supermarket. This time there I have taken a series of photos to show the saga. This photo was taken in July 2010, almost two years ago to the day. At this point I had only known Mitul for a couple of months and he asked me…
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On the search for better internet. Part 1

Let me answer a couple of questions about the internet. Is the internet a human right? No. Should it be? Not really. Would I become a raving lunatic if the internet was taken away from me? Probably! The reason I say this is that I have had enough of ADSL, it’s crap and that is putting it mildly. We have two ADSL lines coming into the house. Measurements taken at 1240 on a Sunday afternoon reveal that the main BT Business broadband connection manages a pathetic 3.15Mbps down and 0.38Mbps up with a 19ms ping through a Cisco 1841 router….
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Back to school: The start of 6.002x

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, I signed up for a free online self-study course in Circuits and Electronics, run by MIT under the MITx programme. Today the course started and I wish to say one thing should my Electronics teachers ever see this (David Brooker or Paul Abbot) half of what the course covers I have never seen before. When it comes to pure maths, my skills are pretty week, fortunately Google has been able to help me answer some of the questions, which so far concern looking at discrete abstractions based on the V-I relationship. From…
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Updated: MIT to launch free online study courses

According to the BBC, next month, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will begin offering a free online course in 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics through its fully automated MITx programme. From the looks of it, it’ll be free to join from anywhere in the world, and those that complete it successfully will receive a certificate, while MIT students can complete the course as part of their degree. Apparently there are plans to offer more courses in a wide range of subjects once this initial trial has completed. They say that there are no formal entry requirements for the course other than…
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