pumpkinstrokemarrow

Where I used to work, we used to have plenty of IT security people making a very good thing out of improving our IT security. So ironic to learn that some of their relatives, a bunch of personnel security people, have been careless enough to lose a whole lot of sensitive personnel records. Clearly the need for IT security begins at home. Alternatively, further confirmation of the old adage that an accountant's own accounts are never up to much.

But computer records do present new challenges. While one can log everything and quite possibly find out everything about a leak after the event, such logs get very big and trapping the leak before the event probably beyond the wit of man. So if I have a personnel clerk who has access to the records to do his work, how do I get the log to trap him when he has a mind to flog the lot to the DT? One approach would be to require countersignature to every request for data. Another would be to require that any one clerk only had access to some of the data. Another would be to allow inspection but not to allow copy. Or inspection but not collection, collation or reporting. Another would be to ban exchangeable media. All kinds of wheezes. But like wearing safety clothing, they tend to get in the way and get discarded. And while we are sorting all this out, we remember that in the olden days a clerk pulling a whole lot of files and copying bits of them would show. There would be a lot of activity which would be difficult to hide from the prying eyes of management.

Presumably the fees office at the House of Commons is worrying about all this too. Have they or will they sack their leaker? Would they dare prosecute him or her given the public interest which has been generated?

Back at the PC, been having an interesting time with Excel. Now when Excel is busy, the PC does not keep the screen updated all the time. And when it does updates, it tends to do them in chunks. Or more specifically by chunk of window. If one was very bored one could probably work out Windows' update strategy for windows. But yesterday it played a new trick. While wading through a worksheet containing perhaps 50,000 rows using the sidebar, the update was very patchy. Now fair enough that the screen update cannot keep up with the unpredictable movements of the side bar. There is going to be some fuzz of some sort. But what I was observing was that update of some blocks of cells was taking a lot longer than that of other blocks. As if all the cells were kept in some underlying database. A database which perhaps had overflow areas from which retrieval took a little while. Or which was suffering from blocks from time to time. Sometimes one had to page off the offending cells and page back to get them refreshed. Furthermore, as it happens, the PC was not doing anything else at the time. It should have been entirely focussed on keeping my view of my worksheet up to date.

On a completely differant tack, the other evening, came across two collectors. The first, perhaps a twenty five year old female, was into collecting shoes. It seemed that she owned about fifty pairs at any one time with the excess finding its way into her mum's cupboards. The lady in question did admit that she had not actually worn all her shoes. Clearly purchase and ownership was the thing, not use. Perhaps the female version of collecting books. Individual purchases large enough to be interesting but still affordable. A activity of fine enough granularity that one can indulge it fairly often. I don't have to carry one indulgence for a whole year. Much more bang for your buck on a weekly cycle. The second, perhaps a forty something male, was into collecting comics, magazines and associated materials. Say a button given away as an extra with a special edition of some comic. Also film clips. This last appeared to mean that someone acquires a print of a famous film, say Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Preferably a first edition or something, whatever that might mean in this context. You then chop it into thousands of six frame bits. Each six frame bit is stuck into a snappy frame for hanging on the wall, further adorned with a certificate of authencity and flogged off. The stuff does not need to be old or even pretty, just time expired. To be something that you can no longer go out and buy new. He told me that there was an active E-bay market for all this stuff and one could make modest amounts of money - say tens rather than hundreds a time - at buying and selling it. I shall stick to books. Too old to change horses now.

Yesterday to Isabella Plantation on Richmond Park. My first visit for a very long time and FIL's for some years. It seems that BH used to adorn the place in her pram. Azaleas - the place's most flashy glory - rather past their best but good place just the same. Lots of interesting trees and shrubs, large and small. A lot of some kind of giant water leef beet; about twice the height of the allotment variety. At least that is what it looked like. Not brave enough to pinch a leaf for a trial cooking. Also including a very aggressive young duck which was very unkeen on even smaller ducks (of another species) scrabbling around for breadcrumbs in the same place as he or she was. On a couple of occasions grabbed an offender by the neck, only letting go when its mum had a go. Never seen such a thing before. Also jackdaws, magpies, crows, rabbits and deer.