Passing Thoughts

Weekend

When they hear that I work from home people often ask how I manage not to get distracted. However I actually have quite the opposite problem - left to my own devices I would work all of the time. In order not to get burnt out and also so my girlfriend and family don't leave me I make an effort to keep my weekends free. This weekend we ended up in Dalkeith visiting family. The air was crystal clear driving up, with a tiny cap of snow on the highest mountains. The image above was taken on my camera phone in the near by park.

One of the consequences of cheap reliable lighting technology is that outdoor decorations have also become cheap and reliable. This has led to some amusing excesses - the drive back took us along the A702: If you should ever chance along that road at night at this time of year you will pass a house that has a (large) garden crammed full of lurid illuminated signs - at least one every couple of square feet. Also worth watching out for on the drive back: along the M6 just outside Carlisle is a row of houses covered in so many signs that at first glance I assumed it was a warehouse that sold the signs. Fittingly, when we got back we discovered our neighbors had also been indulging themselves and lighting their house up just in case no one can see it from space.

On a more serious note I notice that the NHS move to electronic records is moving forwards. This is in my opinion a good thing. The cost both in terms of manpower and the consequences of lost or hard to obtain paper records must be very high. I am sure that the initial cost is going to be awful but in the long term things should be better. One thing that I find very annoying though was a government spokesperson on the radio claiming that the system will be secure. Now I don't know if the government actually think that it is possible to build totally secure software systems but anyone who has had any involvement in building these systems will tell you that it is not. This is due to a simple fact - the attacker has the advantage- when you build a system you plug as many holes as you know about or can imagine being attacked. You then release your system which is then probed and poked constantly. And I do mean constantly - if you look at the logs of a webserver or your firewall you will see that all machines on the internet are being scanned and tested for vulnerabilities all of the time. One way to envisage it is if your house was always surrounded by crowds of burglars looking for ways in. All is not lost though. You can do a lot about the situation for example having multiple layers of access (so called Demilitarized Zones or DMZ's) which will slow any attacker down considerably. The point is though that it would be better if a) we where sure that the government actually understood this about it's systems - because if they do there will at least be a vague chance they are managing it properly and b) it might be good spin now to claim a system is invulnerable but surely that is at the cost of very bad publicity later on when that security is breached. Surely it is better to manage expectations now and give the public at least a glimmering of understanding about how these systems work in practice so that they can make informed choices. Mind you- perhaps that would only make sense in a democracy.