Books Plays & Poems

A stunning day, I should be outside enjoying it but instead I'm trying to make sense out of the attic, which holds a good twenty years of papers, books, documents, you name it.

It's only when I look at the cubic metres of boxes, that I fully realise how much I've read, written and published over the last two decades.

In there somewhere, there's the Prentice Hall Book on Lotus 123, an original 1994 thesis on "Groupware' - 'Lotus Notes an Emerging Standard' that was published in an an 'abridged' form in what was then, the Institute of Information Scientist's journal of document management, (ISSN 0969-9325) and a good fifteen years of Lotus, Microsoft, aquaCorps, Diver, and Java magazines as well as Computer Weekly articles.

Looking back though, through this weblog and indeed through the paper magazines and material that preceded it, it looks to the observer as if the world really started after 1995, when material started to appear, en masse, on the internet. Tragically, most of the really interesting stuff, that witnessed the beginning of the consumer computing revolution, was from about 1989 onwards and that's mostly lost.

Perhaps in a few years, I wil give some of this materal to a museum, IBM, Microsoft or even flog it on eBay. Who knows?

Civilisational Data Mining

It’s a new expression I haven’t heard before. ‘Civilisational data mining.’

Let me start by putting it in some context. Every character, you or I have typed into the Google search engine or Facebook over the last decade, means something, to someone or perhaps ‘something,’ if it’s an algorithm.

In May 2014, journalists revealed that the United States National Security Agency, the NSA, was recording and archiving every single cell-phone conversation that took place in the Bahamas. In the process they managed to transform a significant proportion of a society’s day to day interactions into unstructured data; valuable information which can of course be analysed, correlated and transformed for whatever purpose the intelligence agency deems fit.

And today, I read that a GOP-hired data company in the United States has ‘leaked’ personal information, preferences and voting intentions on… wait for it… 198 million US citizens.

Within another decade or so, the cost of sequencing the human genome …

The Mandate of Heaven

eGov Monitor Version

“Parliament”, said my distinguished friend “has always leaked like a sieve”.

I’m researching the thorny issue of ‘Confidence in Public Sector Computing’ and we were discussing the dangers presented by the Internet. In his opinion, information security is an oxymoron, which has no place being discussed in a Parliament built upon the uninterrupted flow of information of every kind, from the politically sensitive to the most salacious and mundane.

With the threat of war hanging over us, I asked if MPs should be more aware of the risks that surround this new communications medium? More importantly, shouldn’t the same policies and precautions that any business might use to protect itself and its staff, be available to MPs?

What concerns me is that my well-respected friend mostly considers security in terms of guns, gates and guards. He now uses the Internet almost as much as he uses the telephone and the Fax machine and yet the growing collective t…

Mainframe to Mobile

Not one of us has a clue what the world will look like in five years’ time, yet we are all preparing for that future – As computing power has become embedded in everything from our cars and our telephones to our financial markets, technological complexity has eclipsed our ability to comprehend it’s bigger picture impact on the shape of tomorrow.

Our intuition has been formed by a set of experiences and ideas about how things worked during a time when changes were incremental and somewhat predictable. In March 1953. there were only 53 kilobytes of high-speed RAM on the entire planet.

Today, more than 80 per cent of the value of FTSE 500* firms is ‘now dark matter’: the intangible secret recipe of success; the physical stuff companies own and their wages bill accounts for less than 20 per cent: a reversal of the pattern that once prevailed in the 1970s. Very soon, Everything at scale in this world will be managed by algorithms and data and there’s a need for effective platforms for ma…

Moores Law

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