Dan Geer is an extremely well respected security expert. When he worries about something, people listen.
One of the things he has worried - and warned - about is the danger represented by IT ‘monocultures’ - the situation that arises when everyone uses the same software, for example, and therefore everyone shares the same vulnerability to a computer virus or other security threat.
[…]
As it happens, Dan’s bomb went off a few days ago, with the breakout of the “Backdoor.Ginwui” virus, a malicious bit of code that Symantec introduced in an alert as follows:
It has been reported that Backdoor.Ginwui may be dropped by a malicious Word document exploiting an undocumented vulnerability in Microsoft Word. This malicious Word document is currently detected as Trojan.Mdropper.H.
The ConsortiumInfo.org Standards Blog: “Monocultures and Document formats: Dan’s Bomb Goes Off”
]]>]]>from: [email protected]
to: BarryHi Barry,
I am looking for an information architect for [gigantic investment bank] in NYC. Please e-mail me your resume and hrly rate and I will get back to you. XML and investment banking are a must.
****
from: Barry
to: [email protected]
bcc: friendandcolleagueHi [Recruiter],
I’m off the market now, but I will pass this requirement on to friends who might be looking.
- bc
*****
from: friendandcolleague
to: Barryi will pass it along
man it’s getting hot out there
:)
*****
from: Barry
to: friendandcolleagueHot enough to make me worry about another tech bubble, actually.
- bc
*****
from: friendandcolleague
to: Barryoh man
here are two agenda items i saw on a whiteboard in a room i was in for a meeting
“new paradigms”
“reinvention”nda: sign here please
*****
from: Barry
to: friendandcolleagueYes. It’s time to break out the Bullshit Bingo board again.
http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/bullshit/
*****
from: friendandcolleague
to: Barry
Successes or failures of employees in the workplace can be traced to what kind of father they had, a psychologist argues in a new book.
In “The Father Factor,” Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers — super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor — who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters.
Children of the “time-bomb” father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes.
How “Daddy” affects your job - Reuters via Yahoo! News
We love our maps. At first glance, people are shocked by them: the shapes look familiar, yet everything is absurdly distorted. Without even thinking, they have learned something about the world they live in.
Most of our data comes from sources such as United Nations reports and is often tucked away in appendices. No one wants to look at those figures, and it would be hard to provoke any excitement by confronting someone with spreadsheets filled with numbers. But you just can’t help looking at these pictures. After all, a new view of the world, rather like the famous Earthrise photo taken by Apollo astronauts, is a compelling sight.
The maps referred to here are produced by the statisticians and cartographers at Worldmapper.org, and they use a simple but powerfully effective method to convey information: they shrink or swell portions of the world map to indicate the magnitude of the statistics being shown.
Here’s a pair of maps that speak volumes:
New Scientist: Change the way you see the world (subscription required) If you don’t subscribe to New Scientist–and you should; it’s a very readable weekly that wipes the floor with every other magazine that even attempts to communicate with a lay audience–you can go directly to Worldmapper.org and groove on the mappage therein.
Related: Worldmapper.org
]]>Simply put, research shows that people who are very good at what they do — star ballet dancers, soccer players, neurosurgeons — are not born with “natural talent,” but acquire their skills through ruthless discipline and practice.
]]>Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.
Their work, compiled in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,” a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.
Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.
OpenOffice 2.0 fully supports this standard.
Go download it now.
]]>It’s cleverly masked as a article about how to format your documents so that they will be easier to share between word-processsing platforms, but it is, in fact, a lesson on basic word processing. (I think she didn’t want to hurt the audience’s feelings by pitching it as, “Hey, idiots… time to finally learn how to correctly use that program you’ve been using incorrectly all your life…”)
Most word processors, Word and OpenOffice included, are set up to work out-of-the-box for people who have absolutely no clue what they’re doing, and who will use the software like a virtual typewriter–inserting hard returns when they need spaces, or, horror of horrors, using tabs and hard returns when they need indentation.
Making an analogy between formatting a document and packing and labelling boxes when moving to a new house , Ms. Haugland writes:
When you use very specific formatting like tabs to indent text and carriage returns to switch to the next line, it’s like trying to control exactly where your spatulas are supposed to go in the new house [instead of putting them in box labelled “kitchen”]. No two office suites are alike, and the more manual, highly controlled items you have in your document, the more likely the formatting will get messy when you go from one office suite to another. But if you use the formatting capabilities to indent and add spacing–well, that’s more like just labeling a box Kitchen and putting the box somewhere that makes sense.
The formatting tips in this article will also give you more professional-looking documents that are easier to update when the content or formatting rules change.
Word and OpenOffice are both very powerful tools for document production. If you’d like to leave the ranks of the Clueless and learn a little about how to actually use some of the formatting features of your word processor, this is a good article to start with. Once you realize that your computer is more than a fancy electronic typewriter, a world of possibilities will open up.
]]>Copywriting 101 is a set of articles about persuasive writing for the Web:
]]>Copywriting skills are an essential element to the new conversational style of marketing. Whether you’re looking to sell something or to build traffic by earning links from others, you’ll need to tell compelling stories that grab attention and connect with people. This tutorial is designed to get you up and running with the basics of copywriting in ten easy lessons.
Long seen as a method to maximize employment opportunities and salaries in the post-dot-com-bust era, a study released today finds that pay for certified IT skills falls short of the pay for non-certified skills.
The Q1 2006 Hot Technical Skills and Certifications Pay Index, released April 25 by Foote Partners, a New Canaan, Conn., IT compensation and workforce management firm, found that pay premiums for non-certified IT skills grew three times faster than for certified ones in a six-month period spanning 2005-2006.
The study suggests that there has been a change in employers’ acceptance of the value of non-certified tech skills versus certifications in maintaining competitive pay for their workers.
Sounds like employers are getting fed up with the performance of “paper MCSEs“–people who took cram courses to pass a Microsoft certification exam, but when faced with an actual server with actual problems in the real world, have no real idea of how to proceed. And they’re finding out that certifications are no substitute for experience and a proven track record.
There *are* some certifications that seem to be growing in value… and, interestingly, they are not pegged to particular products or technologies for the most part:
Fourteen certifications have grown in value, showing an 11 percent or higher growth over the last year, including SCNP (Security Certified Network Professional), CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) and MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer).
In the New York City market, we are also seeing demand for ITIL certification (and, to a lesser extent, CMMI training) for IT specialists, developers, and managers. And, of course, PMI-certified Project Management Professionals (PMPs) are in high demand.
]]>If you’re an aggregator “harnessing collective intelligence”, what are you aggregating? If it’s data and information, you’re competing with just about everything–Google searches, reference docs both online and printed, the majority of tech books and articles, etc. But if you’re aggregating up the hierarchy through knowledge, and especially understanding and wisdom, you’re adding huge value to someone’s life.
If you’re in knowledge management, what exactly are you capturing and managing?
If you’re a teacher, what are you teaching? Facts and information, or practical knowledge and understanding? Are you teaching the What and the How but without the Why and the When? More importantly, what are you testing? (Not that in the US most public school teachers have a huge say in this, unfortuntately)
If you’re a tech writer, what are you writing?
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