Clairvoyant Engineering

Where has the agilecookbook gone?

2011-11-05T13:20:46Z

Sadly, the domain name of agilecookbook.com no longer holds the agilecookbook.

The registration changed hands in july this year.

Does anyone knows where the book went ?. ....

The git community book

2011-11-05T13:01:58Z

is available for free download here

No reason not to grok git anymore :)

I really like the typesetting

Free stats book

2011-11-01T10:36:50Z

Just found a free stats book
Can't vouch for the accuracy - yet - but reads well.

T-shirts, workshops and conferences

2011-10-19T10:16:12Z

A timely and pertinent post on geekfeminism.org about the perennial T-shirt problem for most women.

I’ll be attending a workshop soon. There were rumours of a free t-shirt but the women’s sizes stop at 38 inch so that puts me out of the running for one of those. My choice is therefore limited to the men’s selection - which at least has more colours.

You can compare the paucity of women’s designs available via spreadshirt.net against the range in sizes and shapes available at Company Casuals,

I’m sure most so-awkwardly-non-spreadshirt-sized tech women attending such conferences and workshops find the restricted subset offered disappointing if not down-right annoying.

Of course, it’s ultimately my fault I’m not the right size and shape for the female T-shirts offered.

And I’m being a bit rude to complain, I should instead be considerate of the effort the conference organizers have made in ensuring promotional T-shirts to be made available at all.

It would just be really, really be nice if there was one that fitted and was the right length for me but I have to decide the T-shirt problem doesn’t defeat the workshop content or not go over a T-shirt.

I am interested in the workshop content although it might be nice to be able to reflect that interest with a nice fitting good looking promotional T-shirt. Handy when out and about perhaps even trying to promote the language.

I’m also not presenting nor helping out this year so I am not bound by any circumstance to wear the workshop’s promotional gear.

There are probably more than a few out there who have a problem of some degree or other with this entry. There are those who don’t understand the problem so I’d like to ask them the question -

When did the size or shape of any part of your anatomy last become an issue in your public and professional domain?

Zen and the Art of Perl

2011-09-22T13:09:56Z

On the oppositeness of pop, push, shift and unshift with Perl

I had reason to use

perl -f unshift

unshift ARRAY,LIST

   Does the opposite of a "shift". Or the opposite of a "push", depending on how you look
   at it. Prepends list to the front of the array, and returns the new number of elements in
   the array.

unshift(@ARGV, '-e') unless $ARGV[0] =~ /^-/;

Note the LIST is prepended whole, not one element at a time, so the prepended
elements stay in the same order. Use "reverse" to do the reverse.

The second sentence piqued my curiosity enough to check the differences between shift, unshift, push and pop. After all, surely an unshift operation was the same as a push operation?

I already knew that shift pops off the front of the array and I learned unshift pushes onto the front of the array. The opposite-ness is clear.

I was familiar with the concept of pop and push w.r.t stack operations, pop something on to the stack and pop it off ... anyone remember the postfix (reverse Polish) notation exercises in their CS A-Level?

In Perl, pop pops off the end of the array and push pushes onto the end of the array. And that provides a different kind of oppositeness to unshift/shift operations.

I misinterpreted the second sentence on the basis of previously stored information.

The use of pop/push and shift/unshift in other languages is quite common. It's not just a Perl thing.

Debian Women Mentoring Scheme

2010-09-16T17:14:46Z

The Debian Women mentoring scheme is up and running again. More information can be found on the Debian Women's mentoring page. If you have always wanted to get involved in the Debian project - take a look at that page and send in an email. It's now as simple as that.

Opting out of the NHS SCR

2010-05-19T15:01:02Z

If the SCT system isn't good enough for people at the British Medical Journal then it isn't good enough for me.

If you want to opt out you can download the form, print out the third page and send it in to your GP surgery.

Curious to note the NHS is running a presumed opt-in policy with the SCR.

There's been advice against running under such a presumption - e.g. for mailing lists - leaving clients, customers or site visitors with the choice to opt-in rather than assuming they'll opt-in and making it difficult to opt-out. I think that is an aspect of systems engineering and design - usable, friendly and inviting to humans rather than being monolithic and stone-deaf to all complaints and queries.

You might want to check if you are in the pilot project for the SCR and, if you don't need your medical details to be online then opt-out. There are security concerns within the NHS.

Finding Ada - Ada Lovelace Day and Dame Caroline Haslett

2010-03-31T13:33:07Z

Okay so my entry to finding Ada is a week late :

This year I entered Dame Caroline Haslett a pioneer for women in the Electrical and professional world in the early 20th Century. She was the very first secretary to the Women's Engineering Society in 1919 - just six years after Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under Anmer at the 1913 Derby.

Dame Caroline's IET biography also states

She became Chairman of the Council of Scientific Management in the Home and presented papers on home management in various countries.

While her Electrical legacy appears to be concerned primarily with the domestic use of electricity, she was active in engineering and electrical engineering at a time of great change, gaining her initial training during the First World War and going on to co-found the now disbanded Electrical Association for Women which existed from 1924 until 1987.

EAW's aim was to promote the use of electricity as a safe domestic tool. The first entirely experimental public electricity supply was made available to subscribers in Godalming, Surrey, UK around 1881, with the first commercial electricity centre being built at Holborn Viaduct the following year. The 1925 Electricity Supply Act gave rise to the National Grid system in the UK so Dame Caroline Haslett, between the EAW and the Women's Engineering Society, was well placed to encourage and promote the use of electricity in the home.

Dame Caroline was the only female member of the British Electricity Authority from 1947 until 1956.

In this age, some might find Dame Caroline's emphasis on the domestic use of electricity disappointing but she influenced generations of people, educated countless women on the new technology of their time, was active in the Engineering profession throughout her life - being the sole female member on the Council of the British Institute of Management and the first woman to hold the office of Chairman of the British Electrical Development Association during 1953-1954 as well as acting in an advisory role in women's training for the Ministry of Labour during the Second World War.

Dame Caroline's continued level of activity throughout her entire life certainly deserves a mention when looking for Ada.

The UK NHS SCR

2010-02-16T11:56:36Z

The NHS in the UK is rolling out a Summary Care Record - something which contains a summary of any single person's health care - including allergies, any medicines you react to and your current prescriptions. The concept is that clinicians can obtain important information about you when treating you in an emergency.

On the face of it, it looks like a "good idea" and some businesses have at least turned over a lot of money implementing such a system.

Any one who can suffer anaphylactic shock must have a huge concern over safe treatment if arriving at hospital unconscious since their trigger stimulus can be life threatening. With their body already in a weakened state, any further threat might prove catastrophic by the time clinicians realise the threat exists. This example of the motivation behind the system stimulates the desired response. Most people will respond altruistically to such examples and if you have a severe allergy then you want to be as safe as you can be in an emergency as do your relatives and loved ones.

.All sounds well and good except that we must accept some people will and do pervert systems to their own requirements where they can. Otherwise we would not have people who defraud the tax system or the benefit system, hackers defacing websites or indeed people who defraud others via social engineering.

It is never that a security breach will occur but when and how.

Access to data in the NHS is via a Smartcard system. Different staff have different security levels; some have access to depersonalised data and some have access to data identifiable to any individual

There should therefore be no surprise to find, according to this Computer Weekly article, that one person managed to circumvent existing security procedures and access health records identifiable to specific individuals - a privilege way above their permitted access limit.

According to the article "The [NHS Hull] trust says: "A total of 358 patients [registered at] GP practices have been affected by this.""

There is already some awareness of the potential risk to patient data in some areas of the NHS system, The Computer Weekly article cites GP Paul Cundy, "a former spokesman on GP IT for the British Medical Association, said of the Hull incident: "This confidentiality breach, in one of Connecting for Health's showcase systems, highlights the inherent dangers of the Summary Care Record and all shared record systems. This is alarming news, but precisely what was predicted.""

NHS Trust management in the form of Kath Tansfield, a Director of the NHS Hull trust with responsibilities for IT in her portfolio takes a different viewpoint; to quote from the article again : "It is shocking to us that an individual who takes on a public service role and who agrees to abide by strict confidentiality agreements should go on to abuse their position and violate patients' rights to privacy"

So we have new systems being implemented with those at the coal face warning of potential dangers in the system and those directing the change being shocked when the predictions and expected human behaviour actually occurs.

I don't think there is anything new in that.

Although I can't help the phrase "The children were shocked! There were fish in the sea!" wondering across my mind.

Regretfully I can't help but link this information to recent posts in Geek Feminism on harassment and intimidation in the cybersphere, and the blasé attitude of Google to basic information security for ~~some~~many people.

The trackback to Melissa's article extends the argument for those systems where we have a choice about entry. Ultimately you can opt-out of a MUD or Google if you have to.

In the UK we don't have much choice about our entry into the NHS system. It starts when we are born and persists after our death.

Not that I want this article to be used as an argument for private health care as in the USA. To the contrary. Your pet stalker has a more limited pool of information from which to access your data and it really doesn't matter that your local Health Centre only hires people it knows and trusts. Successful stalkers rely on a highly developed skill in social manipulation to get what they want and, like terriers, they simply aren't going to give up that easily.

It is surely insufficient to propose and develop systems without regard to data security in all its forms including auditing data access at frequent and regular intervals if not on a daily basis. I wonder how much of this is factored into the costs of a data system like SCR?

Link spam

2010-02-01T08:54:57Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/31/female-film-makers

Indymedia receives subpoena for site user profiles

2009-11-12T06:29:34Z

Kristina Clair, volunteer sysadmin for indymedia.us, was served a subpoena by the U.S. government demanding IP information on traffic flow on a specific date. Fortunately for Kristina she was able to call on the EFF for their help. The subpoena has been described as bogus.

Liz Henry has posted a good interview on the matter at Geek Feminisim.

Interesting viewpoint on volunteer work from Kristina Clair "The common advice for volunteer work is to have good boundaries with it so that it doesn’t burn you out."
.
I'm glad Kristina had the EFF's help on this matter.

Indymedia UK has it's own take on the subject

Free and Open Source Software - what is it and why should I care?

2009-09-21T12:36:26Z

Let's call software the programs you run on a computer.

The browser you're reading this in is software, the operating system you use to run the browser on is software.

The ethernet card or wireless network connector you are using is hardware.

All software is written in some form of code whether it is Perl, Java or C++ or assembly language. This is called the source code.

Proprietary software is often sold, i.e. you often have to pay for it, and is closed source. The source code is not available for the Windows XP operating system nor is it available for MS SQL server.

Source code is freely available for the Linux operating system and for various programs that run on Linux.

A lot of end users find that concept worrying and have stayed away from Linux and Open Source Software as a result.

Proprietary software is always released under a license. With some proprietary licenses, even moving the installed software from one machine to another is heavily governed by specific procedures.

Open Source Software is released as open source. For the average end user this doesn't actually mean very much. You still have to install the software either by download or from other installation media (e.g. CD/DVD). You still have to learn how to use it. That aspect is no different to Proprietary software. So it doesn't make your job any easier in that respect.

The difference in Open Source Software is the way in which software problems or bugs are handled and the way in which development and testing happen.

With Proprietary software the end user or their employer pays for license to use a copy of the software and this payment might involve some end user support. Any testing is internal to the software provider and bug reports are hidden from the purchaser and end user.

With Open Source software, bug reports are openly available so if you are having a problem you can at least check whether it is you or it is a bug in the software. Testing is performed by people in the user community and the development community who have the skill to test or the willingness to learn how to test and report bugs. So there is a possibility you could take part, either by reporting a bug or by testing new releases. But you don't have to; although every involvement, every contribution, helps, it isn't compulsory. You can simply be a user of the software.

Because the software is open source it can be downloaded and developed on. A lot of open source software is distributed under the GPL license. This allows you to download the source and modify it in some way.

This is something that upsets a lot of people. The immediate response is that irresponsible people will download the software source code, modify it to do horrifically horrible things and submit these modifications. These horrifically horrible things will then be compiled into the software and then redistributed to any poor unsuspecting soul using the software.

The reality is quite distant from that scenario. There are many developers working world wide on various open source projects. All these projects are governed in some way by project and team leaders. Too many people work on too many projects for any of them to allow someone to upload poor code, let alone damaging code. New maintainers and developers certainly aren't let loose on a whole project straight away - as within any organisation, privileges have to be earned and there are rules of behaviour. Breaking these rules can mean exclusion or no further inclusion - ever.

Open source projects get quite strict about that.