Persona Non Grata

Lest you think that I’m over on the Emerald Isle for fun (I’m having fun, but that’s not the primary purpose of my visit), I had one of those “wait, what? oh yeah…” moments during a discussion on secure applications development.

It centred around the this analogy (edit 21:18 – given by the interviewee):

I don’t know how many of you have been on a secure coding course (I’d hazard a guess and say “not many”), their tendency is to spend most of the time showing you what goes wrong (“look at how bad SQL injection can be!”), then spend a tiny fraction of that time showing you how to do it right. If we continue from our Continuing his analogy, the Interviewee said it would be akin to letting someone crash a car, and then saying “don’t do that…”.

So, my question is this… are we teaching these things the wrong way around? Is it not better to show people the correct way to handle things like user input, SQL queries, or error handling? Once we show them the right way, we can then move to show them what happens when it goes wrong. Having said that, any of these types of training guidelines would depend on the technology being used, and the associated infrastructure for reviewing the code afterwards, so maybe the answer isn’t as clear as we’d like it to be.

It’s an interesting idea, and one I’d like to explore further… if you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. If I do manage to nab some time, hoping to do a session on it at Barcamp London.

So I ran the session at Barcamp London, you can see the slides here:

An pretty good session, with a very interesting debate. Now to wait for some more feedback over the next few days.

So arrangements are well underway now for Hacio’r Iaith 3 in Aberystwyth, and we’ve already got some sponsors have been lined up. Now all we need is more people to sign up to do talks (to that end, I’m hoping to push out a guide to barcamp talks sometime near the weekend – probably after Barcamp London).

With the announcement today of the S4C’s shotgun wedding to the BBC, I’m even keener to develop a talk on what I’ve decided to call “S4C 2.0″. The talk will probably focus on a lot of the ideas I’ve explored here before (ad nauseum), as well as a few more ideas I’ve been developing off-line.

So, I’ve been on the go quite a bit lately… as I type, I’m listening to the rain lash down on an already sodden Dún Laoghaire (I’m out here for the week with work, staying at the rather nice Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel – @fitzcastle). I thought, given I’ve got some time to kill…

So, having missed Blackpool Barcamp last year, I was really quite keen to make it up for this year’s event. The first thing you noticed was how many more people were gathered there this year (which is a credit to the organisers, who’ve grown it from a really tiny event two years ago to one that attracts people from all over the country). I ended up delivering a talk that I’d initially prepared for Tweetcamp the week before but didn’t deliver. The talk centred around themes I’ve previously explored on this blog of how the web helped me re-establish my ability to write in Welsh.

It was a spur of the moment thing really, and I think had I maybe opted for a later session, I’d have had another hour to practice, and drawn in a few more people to see it… I’ve since had some time to work on it, so I can try again at…

So, picture the scene… I’m sat waiting on an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, and decide “you know what? I’m going to switch my phone back on” and the first alert I get is from Barcamp London, telling me I had a chance to nab a ticket off the waiting list, just as the plane starts to taxi…

Queue minutes of frantic fiddling as I try to remember my Eventbrite login details before the plane takes off. Thankfully, I got one, and I’m looking forward to seeing what a REALLY big barcamp looks like.

So, my Twitter followers will know that I’ve been quite excited to get a hold of Jeff Jarvis’ latest book “Public Parts”. I have to confess however that I’ve had little time to read it lately, and the few times I’ve tried to make time usually result in me waking up the next morning with a cold cup of tea on the sideboard, and the book neatly placed next to it. Thankfully, an hour’s flight to Dublin meant I got some time to catch up.

I’ll post a fuller review in time, but the hundred odd pages I’ve read so far have been quite enlightening. He offers a detailed insight into his life, and the advantages he (and others) have drawn from living an ‘open’ life on the web (he doesn’t advocate full disclosure, merely suggesting that there are advantages to be had by opening up). I must confess, I find it hard to disagree with anything in there. I too have found advantages employing many of the things he suggests. I’ve made good friends through Twitter, Google+, E-Mail Lists, my Blog and at Conferences. I’ve managed to reconnect with a part of my life I had feared I’d lost, and learnt more about photography than I ever could through formal education.

So, I think I’ll try to embrace the concept of publicness a bit more and see what happens.

So over the weekend, I spent the day down in the east end of London at Tweetcamp 2011. The conference explored the use of social media within life, work and everything in between. I was surprised to see the cross-section of people in attendance, which ranged from journalists to web designers through to marketing and PR people.

I ended up in a discussion on how you’d approach using Twitter in multiple languages. I got into an interesting chat with a woman working on the next generation of the web (and in particular the approach to a multiple language web). We ended up having a fascinating discussion over issues ranging from the best approach to social media through to how pubic services fail to address or take advantage of the developments in technology.

A fab conference, and a jolly good time.

In completely unrelated news, with my recent issues with my poorly work macbook, I came to the conclusion that I needed to address my approach to backups. I came to the conclusion that I’m both incredibly forgetful, and a little lazy when it comes to such things. My old approach was to connect a USB drive to the laptop (when I remembered) and let it finish. I looked over the backup logs and realised that before this weekend, I’d only backed up once in the last two months.

So, the best idea was to actually make the computer do it for me. Now, I wanted to have a local and eventually a remote backup. The local solution came in the form of an Apple Airport Extreme, which is now letting me share a hard drive over the network, which means that as long as the system is online in the house, I’m backing up my data. So, if the laptop gets broken, I have a backup. The next question is, what happens if the house burns down… What options do people use for a remote backup? I’ve seen adverts for services like Carbonite, but I’d like to get some recommendations from the rest of you.

So, until next time

So, this Sunday I finally hit the ‘Deactivate My Account’ button on Facebook.

Why? I’d like to pretend it’s because of some massive ideological issue, or that I’m making a stand on X or Y, but honestly it’s because I’m bored of it. Yes, a privacy issue was the final straw, but there’s little more to it than that.

So, the final straw came after Facebook announced some changes over the last week at its F8 conference, where it announced a re-design to the interface, and some API tweeks. For me, the most interesting were to do with the ability of partners such as Spotify to automatically post what you’re listening to on your wall. The same system could also be used for sites like the New York Post to post the articles you’ve read, and as soon as they get a law repealed, what films you’ve watched in Netflix.

Now, the normal response to this sort of thing is that you’ve opted in to using the service, and if you don’t want Facebook to track what you’re up to, then log out. Ordinarily, I’d agree with you, except for a rather interesting article Logging out of Facebook is not enough where a blogger called Nik Cubrilovic shares his insights into how the Facebook login cookies work. It seems that even when logged out, Facebook can still obtain and track your activities when you visit a website with any of its elements loaded (e.g. the ‘Like’ button). In my view, this is a particularly underhanded thing to do, since the logout should be the last interaction you have with that website. By surreptitiously gathering user data with (what is essentially) a hidden bit of code, Facebook is spying on those users who’ve made an effort to take their privacy seriously.

So, that was the straw, but it’s a decision I’ve been putting off for some time now. I only really got into the whole thing because my Ex kept bothering me to join the damned thing. What I realised is that the 300-odd people I have listed as “friends” are either those I lost contact with years ago (people I went to primary/secondary school with), people I follow on Twitter/Google+, or people I email on a semi-regular basis. What little time I invested in it isn’t showing a return, and I’ve got better things to do with my time.

Am I saying you lot should leave it too? Honestly, I don’t know. If you feel like you’re getting something out of it, then keep using it. Otherwise, consider if you really need a way to keep in touch with that annoying guy you went to primary school with who keeps posting pictures of his drunken nights out in your old home town, or that girl you knew at University who keeps posting pictures of her kids. Like me, you’ll probably discover that you’ve grown so far apart, you won’t miss them at all.

Now, back to work…

So, I was introduced prior to a conference in 2010 to a new website called Lanyrd.com. It’s the brainchild of Natalie Downe and Simon Willison, and was apparently written in a hotel room in Casablanca (three months into their honeymoon).

It’s designed as a social conference directory, letting users compile an elegant page to list attendees, speakers, trackers and event coverage. You connect your Twitter account to the site, and it links your friends together, the conferences they’re attending and gives you links to any presentations they’ve made.

As an example, you can see below my profile looks a bit like this:

It links out to slide decks, videos and photos of any talks or events I’m involved with.

One of the reasons I want to talk about them is my experience with them today. I was populating the page for an event I’m involved with, and thought it’d be nice to see sub-venues (you know, rooms within a conference venue) and was prompted by a message “Chat with Lanyrd”. I figure… nothing to lose, so I send them a message to ask about it. I get a message back from Sophie, explaining it was a feature they’re implementing, but in the meantime I should email the details through to their support team.

So, I send the e-mail off, and an hour later I get a note back from Lanyrd telling me the whole thing is done. Damned good going I thought.

The Lanyrd guys I think are a walking demonstration of the way a company like this should work. They’re active in dealing with their customers and refining a product that delivers (to borrow a Zuckerberg phrase) “elegant organisation” to the wealth of conferences that happen all over the world.

The 7th is their 1st birthday, they’ve just secured a new round of seed funding. I wish them every luck in the future, and look forward to getting to meet them in the future.

I’ve been trying to write this one for a few days now. Each time I start, I end up thinking “christ, that’s a bit dull…” and delete the whole thing.

I’ve been settling into my new job, and found that I’m really enjoying it. I’d been questioning around the end of last year if I was actually working in the right industry, but the recent change has reminded me of why I enjoyed in the job in the first place.

So, my focus now is switching to trying to decide whereabouts I’d like to live in the long term. I have to say that the idea of living in London is quite appealing, so I’d be able to get into town to enjoy a lot of the rather fab pubs dotted all over the place (one of which featured Somerset based Moor Beer Company’s Illusion IPA). I’m thinking that I’d like to live down the western end, down in the Ealing area. I think it would offer the best balance of being near the centre, and being close enough to get out of the city relatively quickly.

So, this weekend I’m up in Mytholmroyd to celebrate Gareth 33rd birthday. Gareth has, more than most people been one of my closest friends, and I’m really happy to be here to celebrate his birthday.

Happy Birthday, old man.

Congratulations to Liz and Simon, who got married this weekend in Coventry. I’m really happy for the two of them, and really glad I could be there with them to share in the day with them.

Everything else is great, work going well, enjoying everything… more to come in the next few days.

Once again, work has me over in a distant corner of the UK. Now, after a few days, it seems like the worst of the snow has passed (for now), and there’s a chance I can escape home.

I’ve got a nice holiday booked this year, spending the end of this year (and the very start of next year) on a cruise ship in Dubai. Until then, I shall continue to put up with travel-disrupting snow, blocked up roads and overly keen hotel staff.

Apparently, it’s 28°C in Dubai…

I was asked recently in a comment about my experiences of bilingual blogging. It seemed like a pretty decent topic, and the result is this…

It’s *bloody* difficult.

The more eagle-eyed (or bored) amongst you may have noticed that the Welsh and English content isn’t exactly the same, and that’s becasue I don’t really think “translating” blogposts works terribly well. Phrases work in one language that don’t make sense in the other (or that there isn’t an equivalent phrase in the other language), so it becomes necessary at times to re-write passages to get the same content across.

I feel also it may be time for a confession, much to my dismay, I do tend to write this in English first, and then work on the Welsh version. I think I’ve spoken before about the difficulties I’ve had in writing again in Welsh (mostly because I wasn’t amazing at it in School, and until I’d re-started the blog, I’d not written in a few years). There is an intangible fear at times of the “Language Snobs” in Welsh, the people who sneer if you don’t use a mutation correctly, or ridicule you in a public forum for using informal language where they thought formal language was more appropriate. It’s a bit of a confidence knock, and it makes you a little gun-shy. I don’t think it exists in the same way in English, maybe because the concept of an ‘English’ web has been around for more, and all the pedants have given up and gone back to writing surly letters to the Times or the Telegraph. Or maybe it’s just me…

I suppose that practice makes master, and the more I keep writing, the better I’ll get at it and eventually I’ll learn to ignore mean-spirited criticism. Until then, you’ll all have to put up with my stilted Welsh posts, and my meager attempts at posts in English.

Until next time.