I have a daughter; in the near future she’s going to start browsing and terrorizing the web at large. One of the things that’s been at the back of my mind is how I’m going to handle that. I don’t subscribe to the notion of ISP level filtering; not because I think it’s a bad idea (it might not be a bad idea, but it’s sure to be implemented terribly), but because I don’t think that I should abrogate my parental responsibilities in that fashion. The other thing of course, is that my daughter will (eventually) be able to bypass any security; that’s not an if, it’s a when; when she can do that, then good on her; I think I’d have to trust her by then. In the meantime though, it’s time to start locking down the network…

One of the things that’s happened with Windows 8/2012 is that you need to sign your installers or a big fat warning will present itself to the user when they click on it. I’m not exactly sure how having a signed installer protects the user as certifying authorities will sign any old certificate. Anyhow, with the release of 2.9.0 the installer supported Windows 8/2012 without having to run it in compatibility mode; but the warning still presents itself to the user on startup. With the release of 2.9.1 (now in beta) we’re going to sign our installers. Hopefully no more warnings when you start the installer (other than UAC prompts).

Once a business is established then some things become entrenched; business processes, the interaction between core systems and what have you; some things do change really quickly and often (like requirements). It will take time for you to replace some of the systems that you have in place, but you need them integrated now.

I was pretty much one of the first 10 ADSL installations in Reading; I was with BT back then (waaaay back in 2001), and I have stayed with them, during all that time I’ve only had 1 week’s outage and they’ve been pretty reliable. What has irked me is that my local exchange has been fibre-enabled since 2011; it’s only now that I’ve been able to get BT Infinity (installed for 2 weeks now). The nice engineer came round and disabled all my phone sockets bar the one in the study. The reasons for this I’m sure are quite technically sound I’m not a telecoms engineer; he said you can only run the infinity modem off the master socket (I don’t have power near that socket); he moved the master socket to the office, which incidentally meant that all the other sockets have been disabled.

Back in 2011 we needed to replace a legacy mainframe system for a customer. They were in effect acting as a Value Added Network (VAN) in a small industry and needed to completely replace legacy hardware and out of support software; essentially they were trading two types of data, EDI (X12) and a proprietary flat file format. Enough time has passed now that I can blog about it fairly objectively and use it as a case study for how we achieved the deadlines and transitioned this community to a cloud enabled platform. Our strategy for migration had to cope with no documentation and the lack of a test infrastructure for the community.