Hectic Eclectic

Web Applications Security Issues Make up almost half of all Successful Attacks in 2009

http://www.scmagazineus.com/ibm-report-vulnerabilities-fell-in-09-attacks-rose/article/164547/.

I Am Jack’s Overwhelming Sense Of Awe

Picked this up thru Google reader...

Web Application Security - The time of the carrot and stick has come

As I mentioned earlier the information commissioner's office has announced big fines (~£500k) for folks not getting their data security sorted out - web application or otherwise.  I'd not be surprised to see at least 10 people get a big fine in the next 12 months and can imagine just what action will be taken with the CIO in charge of these outfits.

I hear from people on the grapevine that the banks are already starting to look downstream on their supply chain to ensure they don't have any dirty little secrets hanging around in there.  Do you supply any of the big banks?  My money would be on you being a target for a juicy fine.

Seen a great article at www.mcpmag.com which covers a lot of the drivers for Standards (CWE/SANS OWASP) and Legislation (US Fed/UK/NY State etc) currently out there.

IBM Storage CTO visits Seric Towers

Steve Legg, IBM CTO Storage popped in to Seric Towers to give our team a briefing on the one of the more recent updates to the IBM storage portfolio VDS - and very interesting it was too.

Steve Legg (right) is pictured here along with Abdo Gadmour (left) who is heading up the charge on VDS in our region and our main technical lead here at Sericville Mr William MacLeod.  As I said it was all very interesting and once we have done our appropriate training (very shorlty) we will be taking the message out to folks around the UK though of course focussed on Scotland, NI and the North of England.

For anyone looking to do a bit of background reading you can do well to have a look at the UK VDS landing page in IBM land.

Thanks to Steve and Abdo for your time today at Seric Towers.

Glue - now I've only sniffed it - not had a full look yet

... but this look pretty interesting for folks going down the in house social software route... but perhaps looking to take it out to the network edge and (eventually) beyond.

The offering extends the functionality of Connections to include more of the Twitterlike ( @stuart-seric ) microblogging functionality.  Here's a wee demo from Youtube land

There's a 30 day trial available and I can see this being useful for at least a decent subset of staff in an fully online business and a smaller proportion in others.  No news/comments on whether mobile support will be offered or how this fits in on what Lotus are up to with RIM for Connections

Lotusphere Comes To You 2010 - Edinburgh Date Announced

This year's (Scottish) Lotusphere Comes to you Event has been announce and the word on the grapevine is it will be a corker, with even more great demos.  I know David Hood has been working on bringing the right people to the show.  We'll be there along with the usual suspects and of course hoping to see many more new folks along.  Why not tell a friend...

You can get updates and register (not quite yet) for the Edinburgh event at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/events/lcty2010/europe.html

If in the meantime you want to let your contacts know you're interested or are planning to attend I've created an event on Linkedin so you can let folk know you are going and get some of your own networking done at the event too.

Aussie bank launches online social community for people with plans

I picked up from a fine article at finextra.com that Australia's Bendigo and Adelaide Bank have launched an online social community where anyone with a plan, project or idea can connect with other people to find support, resources and expertise.  This sort of community enterprise enablement through social media is the sort of thing that could really bring big changes to communities.

The PlanBig site, currently in beta, lets users come up with any plan they choose, from a campaign to bring music education to rural communities in Queensland to fundraising for a horse rescue centre.

Users provide a description of their plan, the reason they are embarking on it and an explanation of what will constitute success. They can also post pictures, videos and documents.

Other visitors can then post comments, offering support, money, advice and information. They can also "get involved" by telling people about the plan through Facebook and Twitter, voting to support it and signing up for progress updates.

The bank says PlanBig draws on the strengths of social networking to enable people to efficiently share information, create partnerships and support each other's plans.

"One day we hope that PlanBig will be part of everyday life, a self-sustaining and self-moderating community that is of real use to passionate people and real benefit to communities with all kinds of plans, big or small," it says.

Themed collaborative platforms such as these will help to bring people together around a common purpose.  Interesting to see banks getting involved in this space given older survey of facebookers have suggested they might be interested in taking up such things should vendors run with them.  Good on the boys down under in getting this one out, looking to take a lead in their market space.  Fortune favours the brave and this might just erm disrupt the apple cart.

Oh Philip, you made it all better again and again and again

What a gift to conceive/dream/imagine/invoke/create/transcribe/deliver such a beautiful noise for Solo Piano.

Life is just easier with Mr Glass.  A friend, lost to me through time and separate lives, introduced me to PG and a very many others almost 20 years ago but this is the one that cuts and mends me.  Standing the test of time along with perhaps only two others in the 1000's of listens category.  Good luck wherever you are big J.

For anyone interested enough the others are 'Laughing Stock' by Talk Talk and 'In A Silient Way' by Miles Davis.  And although I enjoy a very many others, across a very much more Catholic taste than my short shortlist might suggest, and each give me something, nothing sustains me like these three, save a single track Canteloube's 'Baïlèro (Chant de bergers de Haute-Auvergne)'.

Music is the purest art form and these have spoken to me most, if you haven't stumbled across any of these I hope you enjoy them.  I came to these through good friends and despite a musical non-education at school; I took the triangle and f*cked off just like I was told.  That said they were right - only the ears work.  ;-)  

Fat girls & Gingerbread Men: the wonderful world of Sarah-Jane Szikora

We got a couple of Sarah Jane Szikora prints a few years ago, SWMBO is a real fan and my niece and nephew love them to bits.  Personally I allways wanted to track down Foolish biscuit.  Funny I never dug online for her stuff so it was nice to stumble onto www.sarah-janeszikora.com

Of the newer stuff - I really liked Damien's dress. 

And I never tire of the antics of her Gingerbread man.

Here is the aforementioned foolish biscuit.  I see a lot of myself in him - though he is thinner despite liking milkier tea.

Windows 7 Client Support Announced for Rational ClearCase & ClearQuest v7.1.1

ClearCase 7.1.1 and ClearQuest 7.1.1 introduce support for Microsoft Windows 7

You can get trial of this stuff to put onto your shiny new Win7 clients and start to test those vendor promises right away... Rational Clearcase Download Site

Unfamiliar with Rational ClearCase?  Well there is plenty to learn, Rational ClearCase is a software tool for revision control (e.g. configuration management, SCM) of source code and other software development.  Here's a screenshoot and details from IBM Support describing the explorer window.

The Rational^® ClearCase^® Explorer window consists of several panes and a toolbar.

By default, all panes and the toolbar are displayed.

• The toolbar provides quick access to frequently used commands. Move your mouse over the icon to display the command.
• The shortcut pane holds icons for your views. At the bottom it has two tabs: Views and Toolbox.

  Under the view icon Rational ClearCase lists the view tag, which is the name by which you reference a view.

• The folder pane identifies the root directory of the current view, and lists the data repositories, called VOBs, that are accessible under that view.

  Move your mouse over the root directory to display the view tag and its associated path.

• The detailspane displays the content of the item you selected in the folder pane.

  When you open the Rational ClearCase Explorer for the first time, with no view selected, or when you click the Getting Started tab in the Shortcut pane, the Details pane then displays a Getting Started Help topic.

  The details pane is replaced by a browser pane when it displays information in a Web browser.

• The status bar displays Rational ClearCase messages.
• The information pane displays information about selected views and tools in the shortcut pane. The behavior of the information pane varies as follows:
  • When you first open a view or select it, the information pane displays summary information about the type of view.
  • When you select a single item in the Details pane, the information pane displays summary information about the item. If you select more than one item in the Details pane, or an item in the Folder pane, the display changes back to summary view information.
  • The information pane is only displayed when the details pane is also displayed. Both are replaced when you display the browser pane.

Ok so that was a bit of Brain dump... but I'm not guilty cos ClearCase is pretty decent and I like what you can do.  That said  I am generally more interested in the Rational stable based on the Jazz plaform which you can find out about at Jazz.net  here is a description from draft 0.24 of the Detailed Architechture Overview of the site.

"The goal of the Jazz Integration Architecture (JIA) is to enable diverse tools to be used together providing an integrated experience to their users. This document provides an overview of JIA, and introduces the notion of a Jazz Team Server (JTS) that provides the Jazz Foundation Services (JFS) that allow groups of tools to work together. It also explains the relationship between JIA and Rational’s Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative."

The fulcrum provides flexible bridges ... simple, logical, functionally rich.  Very nice.

More info on World of Rational sometime soon... S

Bladerunner still

Another go with the quick blogaroo... Now let's see, if you are naughty I

Just testing my little blog from my berry

Widget... Seems to work ok
I'll try a picture next
S

Storage Rant in E Minor

Via Twitter came across @StuieSav 's blog on storage, info et al.  Good geek postings and links on there but def this article stood out and struck a chord.  Trying to get people to align IT with Business objectives is frustrating but so so so so so key to getting anything done.   Why not check out Stu's coherent and succinct rant lyrical on the purchasing end of IT's perspective on this dielectric element of many IT conversations.

Yes, this is where to go for the Rant in E-Minor

Jamie Oliver wins a TED 2010 prize...

Jamie sans magic torch delivered his Ted Talk in California this month and has become one of the winners of the Prestigious TED Prize.  Seems our Jamie has been doing much of the same as his UK projects in the USA.

If you liked that you may enjoy this slightly older vintage (not available at Sainsbury's)

I like TED, I just do.

Introducing the G-Point Mouse

This may be the maddest product I've ever seen online... could this top e-bay's flux capacitor?

Check out the article in full

100 Amazing Scientists You Should Follow on Twitter

via @dollars5 100 Amazing Scientists You Should Follow on Twitter http://bit.ly/azZ5GM

Really nice and you do get some really nice stuff from some of these guys - not just the usual collection of comedy folk...

Event on Reducing Datacentre Management Costs

Some of you folks may be interested to attend Avocent's Winter breakfast briefing at Murrayfield.  

You can find out about the Government's new CRC scheme, The CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (formerly known as the Carbon Reduction Commitment) is the UK's mandatory climate change and energy saving scheme, due to start in April 2010. Joan Ruddock speaks about the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme
If you cannot see the video download the latest Flash player

And also find out about Avocent MergePoint® Infrastructure Explorer (AMIE) software which really makes managing data your data centre easy and extremely energy efficient.

 

AMIE has a great GUI and some delicious features for managing migrations.  Want to know what was/it/will be in Rack #7 rows 15-25?  Very interesting.  The visualisation, calendaring and librabry feeds are key, after all if you can see it, you can understand it... which allows you to know, plan and manage your data centre effectively.  It's no just pretty mind - there is sub-rack power management great for you hosting providers out there.  I've whacked a few pics in here to give you an idea... 

Project Planning

 

Putting some kit into the Data Centre
 

Rack front view of equipment

 

Rack rear view of the equipment

Not what is once was... or so I was recently told

One of my old high schools...  a la Steely Dan

and another... epic

Crayola's Law

It would appear that since 1903 something interesting has been happening over at Crayola land.  It would appear that they've been doubling the pallettes of our youth every 28 years.  Which is really rather nice I think.

Well done Mr Weathersealed and mr Velo of course.

Oh and if you are interested in how colours evolved on computer monitors then you might be interested to check this super-retro web page with some cold hard facts available behind all that glamour.

For some unknown reason this picture made me think of this old track.

Rational Requirements Composer 2.0.0.1 Released

RRC is on the next increment of v2 and integration capabilities with RQM an RTC are greatly enhanced with the respective v2 released of each of this cheeky triumvirate of the jazz.net fold.

I'm about 2 weeks late with the news here.... afterall you could have been downloading this Good Stuff for almost a fortnight (that's the time you spent being posted to a fort -2weeks- in the olden days) and you can get it here.

Ah yes, they are all shiney and new on v2...