Graham Chastney

I’ve always found it fascinating zooming around Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth looking at the amazing detail on famous land-marks. It was also interesting to look at the slightly blurry, but relatively old images of my own house. The privacy issues never really occurred to me, until today.

Today Microsoft Virtual Earth has had a whole load of new images and the pictures of my house are no longer blurry or that old. In the old images my garden was still a patch of grass making it at least 5 years old. The new picture shows my garden with all of the landscaping and the trampoline which was present to the kids (honest) 18 months ago.

It all feels a bit too close to home now. It’s especially disconcerting to think that someone can look at the front, the back and the sides.

The picture below shows the construction of a set of houses near us into which some friends have just moved. That makes the images a few months old, max.

I didn’t dare show the images of my house, far too embarrassing. 

Observation of the day: People who start their working career in small organisations go further than people who start at the bottom of large organisations. People who start their career in growing small organisations go the furthest.

I’ve observed this phenomena a number of times, some of it within the Organisation where I work, some external.

There are a number of people within my own organisation who were outsourced into the organisation from a smaller organisation, or a small part of a large organisation. These people thrive in the new large organisation in a way that people from existing large organisations do not.

I’ve also noticed large organisations buy small organisations. Within a few years the senior management of the large organisation is dominated by people from the small organisation.

I’ve wondered for some time why this should be? I have come to some conclusions around experience.

The first conclusion is that it’s the breadth of experience that matters, not the depth of experience. People in small organisations need to be able to cover a number of roles, they can’t be a specialist in a small part of the operation. This breadth allows people from small organisation to understand the whole. In large organisations this holistic view immediately places them at an advantage over someone with a more narrow view.

The second conclusion is that it’s breadth of experience, not scale of experience that matters. Within a small organisation you get to understand a lot about many things but on a smaller scale. It would appear that scaling that experience up is easier than broadening the experience.

The next conclusion is that people from small organisations have far less respect for hierarchy than people brought up in larger organisations. If you have been in an Organisation where you know the Chairman and the Cleaner you realise that the difference between these people is very small. You’re also less likely to have a “not worthy” attitude when working with people more senior than you, something that they are likely to respect.

My advice to anyone thinking of starting out in a new career – start in a small organisation, it will work out much better in the long run.

My own experience is that I initially worked as a System Administrator for email systems before they were mainstream. This was in a large organisation, but a very small part of a large organisation. That experience put me in front of very senior people as well as shop-floor people trying to get the job done. This was in the days when we used to give people training courses on how to use a mouse. I was one of only 4 people who did what I did, it was a small organisation within the large organisation. During that time IT and email in particular exploded, businesses also became reliant upon IT. There are things that I haven’t done since those days which inform my understanding of customer today, some things haven’t changed that much. My broad experience within the small organisation still feeds my experience today, it was invaluable.

I have no scientific evidence to say these things, only personal experience. I suspect someone has done a study on it somewhere but I don’t have the time to go and find one right now. Even if I did go and find a study it wouldn’t be a fully fledged research of the area, it would be just me looking across the Internet trying to find someone to back up my own opinion. For now, though, personal observation will suffice.

I’ve had this discussion a few times recently myself. Storing a PST file on a file server is NOT a good idea.

Microsoft don’t really do anything to indicate to the end user that this might not be a good idea, but they certainly have made it known in the technical community for a long time. For some reason people haven’t picked up on this fact.

The Enterprise Platforms Windows Server Performance Team decided it was time to revisit it too.

At least once a week, someone on the Performance team will get a customer call concerning hangs or resource depletion on their file server.  The file server in question is used for user home folder storage and users are accessing Outlook Personal Storage (.pst) files stored on the server from their client.  The issue will manifest as either a server hang, or PagedPool depletion (Event ID 2020).  Oftentimes the issue will occur first thing in the morning – when users are logging on and launching Outlook.  In especially severe cases, the issue occurs several times daily.  Sometimes the server will hang for a few minutes and then continue operating for a few minutes – and then hang again.  Rinse & repeat.  The users are frustrated because of slow access to their data, the server administrators are frustrated because they are tasked with fixing the problem, and upper management is frustrated because everyone else is frustrated.

They have a load more technical information which explains why it isn’t a good idea.

In short, don’t do it.

The challenge I have for Microsoft, though, is this. Can you help System Administrators out here please? There is nothing in the Outlook UI to tell the end user that it’s a bad idea. Once they have been created there are no tools to help you move the PST somewhere else while maintaining an end-user’s access to the data. You don’t provide any tools to protect the server (by providing blocking of .pst files for instance). The policies for Outlook only allow you to stop people creating PST files altogether, but you might still want them to have PST’s just not on the file server.

Having a policy with no tools to support it is a bit lame. Remember people think that the machines are in control, if the machine doesn’t stop them, then it’s OK.

Today is a very sad day for blogging.

This type of behaviour is just not acceptable in any society.

I’m not going to say any more.

(If you can stomach the full story it’s here, but it’s quite gruesome).

We are a lazy race!

It’s actually one of our strengths, it causes us to seek ways of doing things that require less effort next time. We have a wonderful word for it, efficiency.

Laziness is also one of our greatest curses.

If I wanted to invade the earth, I wouldn’t come with an army, I’d come with truck loads of free stuff that appears to make our life “easier”. Each “labour saving” device would be constructed to help us in some area of life where we felt that there was labour to be saved. In doing so it would encourage us to abdicate all responsibility over to the machine. Within a very short period of time we would have learnt to rely upon the machines totally. Once we were completely reliant upon the machines we could be made to do absolutely anything to get the machines back.

Let me give you some examples.

When I am driving my car there are occasional times when I need to travel in reverse. Most of the time, 99% of the time, I am travelling in the forwards direction, but travelling backwards is tricky, it requires some effort. I can’t just sit in my seat looking forward I need to expend some effort to turn my body around so that I can see where I am going. This effort of turning around is something that I perceive as having a lot of labour saving efficiency associated with it. What I need is a machine to help me, I need reversing sensors. Now I have the sensors I don’t need to turn around the sensors tell me when I am approaching things, great! Initially I tell myself that these sensors are just there for extra safety, but soon I have abdicated all responsibility over to the machine, the machine has got me.

Then one day I get into my wife’s car, where the machines haven’t managed to infiltrate. I sit there and put the car into reverse. I completely miss the fact that the machine hasn’t beeped at me to tell me that all is well. I press on the accelerator and set off. The car is moving backward. I still glance in the mirrors waiting for the machine to tell me all is well, but it doesn’t. I continue travelling until…

You’d love me to say that I dented Sue’s car wouldn’t you. What actually happened was that I notice a wall appearing in the mirror rather fast and stopped, phew.

Keeping on the driving theme.

I noticed one of those ever increasing ”Satnav leads driver into…” stories. This one was a particularly fine example of the human ability to abdicate responsibility over to the machines:

The 28-year-old woman – apparently on her way to a Christening on 3 March – ignored signposts indicating the track was unsuitable for motor vehicles and gamely ploughed into the watercourse. Unfortunately, the river was “swollen after heavy rain in recent floods” and quickly overcame the Merc, “gushing through the car” and sweeping it 200 metres downstream “bouncing from one river bank to the other, as the woman frantically tried to smash the windows with her feet”.

That’s right she “ignored signposts indicating the track was unsuitable for motor vehicles”. It wasn’t her problem, the machine was in control.

Today the BBC is highlighting a campaign by Get Safe Online. The main purpose of this campaign is to get people to think about the things that they are handing over to the machine, encouraging people to take a survey “Just how safe are you?”. The survey isn’t focussing on whether Windows is more secure than Linux, it’s focussing on the human elements of security. All credit to them for raising it as an issue, but the problem that they have to overcome is that people have handing over responsibility for online security to the machines. The machines are in control.

I was listening to the radio this morning and one of the campaign spokesmen came on. He was asked a question that went something like this:

Interviewer: “One of the things you are highlighting is e-mail phishing. We’ve known about e-mail phishing for years now, surely it’s not still a problem?”

Spokesman: “£XX million gets defrauded from people every year via phishing. It’s still a very profitable fraud” (I can’t remember the actual number).

The machines are in control – “If the e-mail says it came from the bank, then it must have come from the bank”.

“The phone is ringing, I must answer it” – the machines are in control.

“My e-mail reminder has just pinged, I must read it” – the machines are in control.

“My blog reader has just told me I have new posts to read, I must read posts” – the machines are in control.

“The washing machine has just finished, I must empty it” – the machines are in control.

“Who’s that pinging me on IM, I must respond” – the machines are in control.

It’s time to turn them off. We are still in control, we need to take the control back before it’s too late. See that big button on the front that you rarely use, it’s the “Off Button”. Press it to find your freedom. Or even worse, ignore it, ignore the machine. Lets see how they respond to that.