Tag: controls

Are you scared of perfectionism ..?

Not of but to.
This dawned on me, suddenly – as dawning of this better kind is unenforceable – a lot of people list ‘perfectionism’ as their default weakness-read-humblebragged-strongpoint. But it’s a weakness indeed because any such feeling will be rootcaused by insecurity, of the angst kind.
When taken forward, from the latter, one sees: Fear of the unknown, uncontrollable impact on the edges (first), will lead to overzealous focus on those edges, the rougher parts, to prevent even the tiniest deviation from the all-of-the-world’s-plan that totally deterministically was supposed to be followed to not introduce Uncertainty of any kind. No quantum collapse of the wave function allowed; no wave function allowed – that’s all heretical deviation from a supposed Plan from up high (where ?); der Herrgott würfelt nicht in the least! Quantum entanglement is that each and every quantum particle was predestined to be and behave / move as it does. No Uncertainty!

Or else … bad things may happen to you, e.g., your career.
You may get fired, for not perfectly achieving your Personal Year Plan. You may get fired anyway but that’s Bad, the devil’s work, or the shareholders’ (his rep’s..!) wish for slashing by the FTE numbers. To prevent this, just be perfect. Or, more practically, (say to, only!) strive for perfection. Bossed might want to believe then, that you’ll do your utmost and give your life, to make that happen. So bosses’ year plans are achieved. Or bosses, just to be sure, revert to the inhumane micro-management practices … so very common still today…

Let’s hope that proper risk management wins out in the end. If only since the more Chaos, the universe’s drive to entropy, is suppressed, the more gigantic will be the outburst of the Uncontrolled energy because it will burst out. Better to be able to control that through not letting the pressure build so high, by allowing steam to blow off in much more benign, possibly profitable, ways long before.

So, embrace entropy! Embrace balance ..! Just don’t be ‘perfectionist’ like everyone else and then be found out to be the very average sloppy that one reads so much too much of, even in trivial non-control of basic writing skills. If you write without care for proper spelling, etc., and don’t proofread, you’re waaay off to the wrong side of the balance ..!
Plus:
[Discuss, progress to the dialectic third way – which is NOT in the middle by definition; study Aristoteles on that..! Ottawa, BTW]

Spelling test compliancy

Where of course the post title in itself gives away the clue of this little Friday’s short post, which is: If you spell it as compliancY (with some rule or regulation), you failed the test. And you’ll be earmarked as n00b, however long you are in the industry already. Since you don’t seem to know that it’s actually ‘compliance’ with an ‘e’ only, nothing overcorrected.
Just because it hindered me again, last week, when I discussed matters with someone who had the silly idea that using an ‘y’ would impress, would seem to make their point hover at ‘GRC’ levels as if that’s not an emperor’s clothes exposé already. And it’s just incorrect language period

Whatev’, I’ll leave you with:
[Yeah, it’s a bit of an old skyline (pic) isn’t it ..? Toronto, ON for no apparent reason and the horizon isn’t even straightened yes I’m that picky]

AVG is the Law

If you wondered whether (if?) I’ve gone besirk and declare some little anti-malware tool to be officially authorised: No. What then? A Yes. Because whenever you read ‘AVG’ related to the Netherlands, you’ll find it’s the Law indeed. Being a fumbled translation of the GDPR. And full of the lawyers’ stuff on detail, demonstrating incapacity to understand the issues that the GDPR was originally trying to tackle. Of course, these got watered down to ineffectiveness before even being officially issued (and that’s not per 25/5/2018 but already behind us ..!!). So we find ourselves now in a struggle on all sides for clarity and practically viable interpretations – vis-à-vis some specific law. From a legal perspective, this might work; just wait for jurisprudence (authoritative-case law) and all will become clear. From every other of the asymptotically-infinite number of sides (don’t even try to explain that to the eager beavers among various parties), jurisprudence means the death of their organisation and of all employment that goes along with, is built upon that including the livelihoods and perspectives for a decently doable pursuit of happiness of employees and their (extended) families invloved.
So NO, you cannot leave things to jurisprudence, to case law. Modern society has moved far beyond that, leaving all trailing in understanding that, in the dust of ignomy and ridicule. We the People (of the EU++, and of the world affected) need clarity upfront.

Awwww this is turning into a rant. Which wasn’t the purpose, which was   just to point out the irony of one antimalware-maker’s name being now wringed into something laughing-stock [ with an ? or an ! ].
Oh, plus:

[(From analog to digital when the latter wasn’t much good yet) sinking into the landscape, this time perfectly as intended, not out of shame; Melvyn Maxwell and Sara Stein Smith House, Bloomfield Hills MI]

Compare the innovation fruits apples and oranges, please

How is it that long-standing discussion-stoppers persist ..? Take, for the sake of argument and for reason of being the raison d’être of this post, the common “One shouldn’t compare apples and oranges”. Or ‘with’, or ‘to’.
What fun is there in comparing apples to apples ..? Since various species are still very much alike, the attention will go to the, certainly relatively, minor differences, losing the bigger picture. Even when including crabapples, mostly it isn’t worth the trouble. Except for a few experts.
Entrat oranges.
They are so different (Well, overall; there’s also many commonalities like being in your fruit salad with other fruits like tomatoes oh wait) that at once, both the main lines and subtleties of differences can be discussed. Because one compares to discuss, right? If not, just don’t compare anything and sit there like a plant.

Actually, this whole post is about the realisation that in business or other organisational life, we should do both when it comes to innovation. There, tradition has it that one competition in the apples-only markets. Slight differences are sought out, and marketed, as significant whereas usually, they’re not.
Until some orange disruptor appears. Then suddenly, the picture changes – for proper anaylsis, one should compare the apples and oranges, to see how they fit market demand including substitutes et al. And do follow that link to see at which touch points the surprise element rests. Or so.

Just sayin’. And:

[A morning’s comparison of premier cru and grand cru grapes, from Ludes towards Reims, is definitely worth the fine nuance ..!]

Stochastic culture (change)

This ‘personal research’ hobby of mine had taken me into the ‘From Security Awareness all the way to Behavioural Change’ alley(s).
Where it got stuck. Among others, through the realisation that ‘culture’ as such doesn’t exist, certainy not within larger organisations. Local cultures, yes. Overall cultures … maybe as the most degenerate common denominator; the more numbers you throw in a basket, asymptotically but very fast the common denominator will come crashing down to 1.

In infosecland, it’s worse. To actually adress and change the oft unconscious parts of personal culture (behaviour), one has to move away from organisation-wide awareness training ouch if you call it that, all are lost – into the realms of individual coaching, for each and every employee.

But then the stochastic cooling of particle physics rears its head, as a phrase that is. Can we somehow differentiate the to-be-learned from one-size-fits-all into separate sets of behaviours to be rote trained (in practical use; experienced) so the sets become unconscious behaviour(s), and then overlay these transparent sets [Remember, the ‘sheets’ you could stack on an overhead projector? You don’t – even know from a museum what an overhead projector is… Oh. ed.] over the organisation populace, according / in relation to the expectance to need such behaviour ..?

I’m rambling, as usual. Anyway:

[Not all grapes are evenly grown, still great wine is made without stochasctics…; Valle dell’Acate]

Deviate for Resilience

Well there’s an imperative. Deviate for resilience. Which goes waaay beyond mere ITCM or its linkage into BCM. What I mean here, though, is a reflection from the B side into the IT side.
Once encountered when it was still supposedly somewhat ‘cool’ (as it was called in the grandpa’s days) or so to work on … can you believe it, $AAPL infra. Where the Infosec staff had carved a corner for themselves: That they’d actually need to deviate from corp policies (the devolved kind) of using M$ stuff for alibi reasons of needing in ITsec par excellence, a fall-back that would actually work when all of the M$ infra would’ve collapsed due to some class breaking glitch exploit. Yeah. That meant that you did need a substantial budget to your own discretion without much transparency towards effectiveness of spend and no gadget and toys buying, right?
Nowadays, the coolness if ever it truly was (stupid sheeple), has worn off totally and is a tell for no comprendre qua cost/benefits analysis, sufficient tech-savviness to cut it in today’s world, and forward compatibility even to the cable mess (costing you tons). Predicting which unicorns will succeed, or fail, is easy; the former are on M$, the latter on … you guessed correctly. Nevertheless, the resilience argument still holds.

Which goes beyond the mere platform choice. It goes for global/local deviations as well. IF yes that’s a big if, if done right, not for NIH purposes (both ways ..!) but for resilience purposes. It’s not efficient to the max, but if you strive for that, you’ve done so much wrong already it might be irrecoverable. E.g., mission, organisational culture, risk management (incl analysis), control choices and implementations (case in point: multiple malware scanners), etc.

But remember: When done right, you very probably do need to deviate all over the place for resilience…

Just remember that to defend yourself, OK? And:

[If telecom fails due to clock synchro errors, it’s still a sun dial (really it is); Barça]

Some nuggets for social

Alas,dair MacIntyre may have scared off some readers in the first few chapters of his After Virtue, with reason to not offend the simpletons, the dunces though addressed, as ‘they’. When after a while, the langauge becomes more simple, but the content no less valid. As in:
It is of course that if social science does not present its findings in the form of law-like generalizations [z, sic; ed.], the grounds for employing social scientists as expert advisors to government or to private corporations become unclear and the very notion of managerial expertise is imperilled. For the central function of the social scientists as expert advisor or manager is to predict the outcomes of alternative policies, and if his predictions do not derive from a knowledge of law-like generalizations, the status of the social scientist as predictor becomes endangered – as, so it turns out, it ought to be; for the record of social scientists as predictors is very bad indeed, insofar as the record can be pieced together. … One could go on multiplying examples of the predictive ineptitude of economists, and with demography the situation has even been worse, but this would be grossly unfair; for economists and demographers have at least gone on record with their predictions in a systematic fashion. But most sociologists and political scientists keep no systematic record of their predictions and those futurologists who scatter predictions lavishly around rarely, if ever, advert to their predictive failures afterward. … it is impressive that in not a single class is the predictive power of the theories listed assessed in statistical terms – a wise precaution, … [pp. 104-105]

Since organizational success [shown to be dependent on mass individual flexibility and unpredictability; ed.] and organizational predictability exclude one another, the project of creating a wholly or largely predictable organization committed to creating a wholly or largely predictable society is doomed and is doomed by the facts of social life. [p.123]

The dominance of the manipulative mode in our culture is not and cannot be accompanied by very much actual success in manipulation. I do not of course mean that the activities of purported experts do not have effects and that we do not suffer from those effects and suffer gravely. But the notion of social control embodied in the notion of expertise is indeed a masquerade. … The fetishism of commodities has been supplemented by a just as important fetishism, that of bureacratic skills. For it follows from my whole argument that the realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively-grounded claims function in fact as expressions of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference. … For claims of this modest kind could never legitimate the possession or the uses of power either within or by bureaucratic corporations in anything like the way or on anything like the scale on which that power is wielded. So the modest and unpretentious claims embodied in this reply to my argument [the above, suggesting malevolent attitudes towards others; ed.] may themselves be highly misleading, as much to those who utter them as to anyone else. For they seem to function not as a rebuttal of my argument that a metaphysical belief in managerial expertise has been institutionalised in our corporations, but as an excuse for continuing to participate in the charades which are consequently enacted. The histrionic talents of the player with small walking-on parts are as necessary to the bureaucratic drama as the contributions of the great managerial character actors. [pp. 124-125]

O-kay, that seems to be enough for now, to consider and ponder, and to weep for your own part in the ‘charades’. How is your defence not a corroboration of the argument ..? Also:

[Actual Class, now bluntly demolished by technobureaucratic pauperminds; Clos Eugénie, Culmont]

Neo is right

When it is about the way The Neo-Generalist, Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin, is:

The Neo-Generalist is both specialist and generalist, often able to master multiple disciplines. We all carry within us the potential to specialise and generalise. Many of us are unwittingly eclectic, innately curious. There is a continuum between the extremes of specialism and generalism, a spectrum of possibilities. …
Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, our society has remained in the thrall of the notion of hyperspecialism. This places constraints on the way weare educated, the work we do, how we are recruited, how our career progression [say what? ed.] is managed [not; ed.], how we label ourselves for the benefit of others’ understanding. …
Our workplaces, governments, intelligence agencies and other communities and institutions constantly complain of silos, but that is an inevitable consequence of our promotion of hyperspecialism. So too the myopia of expertise that prevents us from seeing properly what is right in front of us, or connecting it in meaningful [sic; ed.] ways with other information, other people. [Preface, almost completely]

The institutionalisation of the label, and the constraints it demarcates, both physical and psychological, is an unfortunate legacy of the Industrial Revolution and its effects on society. The scientific management practices popularised at the turn of the twentieth century retain an insidious hold on how people think and organise themselves for manufacturing and knowledge work, even extending into Healthcare and education. It is a dehumanised and mechanical approach that views individuals not as people with unique charcteristics, knowldge and expertise but as replaceable parts. Their very humanity is occluded by the labels they are forced to bear. We remove this welder and replace them with that welder. When this accountant leaves, we will hire another accountant. Our project managers, nurses, teachers, bus drivers, are considered entirely interchangeable.

In the meantime, however, we have set up a conveyor belt of humanity that is geared towards squeezing people into the correctly shaped holes, ensuring that the label fits. Hyperspecialism is the end goal. … Educational choices made during our impressionalble teen years can have a lasting effect. To select is also to exclude. Opting for certain academic disciplines during high school limits what can be pursued at university or as a trade. For those who aspire to it, a higher-education specialism then narrows workplace possibilities. Qualifications lead to employment, whcih in turn leads to the constraints of a role and job description, the path towards increasing functional expertise. Measurement and performance assessments impel us to sharpen our skill set within the restricted field. The myopia of the expert sets in. The boundaries within which the specialist operates get narrower still.

The funneling has an inevitable consequence: it fosters silo-based practices and behaviours. Corporations, government departments, intelligence agencies and a host of other types of organisations bemoan the disjointness of their departments, the lack of interoperability between IT systems, the hoarding and protection of knowledge. Yet this is the end result of a system that encourages hyperspecialism and narrow, deep expertise. [pp. 24-25]

And so it goes on, with relevance. We may interject a full Book by Quote later, but for now leave it at this and encourage you to Study the work. To weep and learn, how you should not do it. I mean, tag along. Resist!

Oh, plus:

[Cordoníu the Beautiful (~ design by Puig i Cadafalch), San Sadurní d’Anoia Catalunya]

Dubbeltestje

Ubent nu onderdeel van een testje. Niet statistisch verantwoord, maar dat is sowieso vrijwel nergens te vinden; dát zijn pas unicorns …
Anyway, without further ado, let’s see how many (huh) hits this post will get when it’s half-Dutch. When you’d interpret that as half-baked, you’re correct…(?)

Terwijl er tegenwoordig héél wat luipaarden zijn, die nu dus voor de foute partijen kiezen contra het vage clubje, “ze”, die de leeuwen zijn in dezen. De welpjes, die hebben nergens benul van noch hebben ze ooit iets fout gedaan (?). Etc.; het is allemaal nog heel relevant vandaag de dag.
And, on a lighter note:

Museum of Software Mainstays of Yore ..?

The ‘terrible’ news (not) that Flash is about to be abandoned by one of its last if not the last pillar of support, reminds me of similar ‘developments’ of the past. Like, where did Dynamic HTML go ..? DEC, Sun (Sparc), Compaq, WordPerfect, Norton Utilities, 9-pin matrix printers, bulletin boards, portals. Etc.etc. Yes, yes, I know, some are still around, like OpenVMS is. And in software in particular, there may be many, many more of the lost ark items – where I’d like to see more focus on. Are they valued enough, for their staying power ..? Isn’t their staying a bit exasperated, in some dark corners of the usage landscape ..?
But more importantly (it is); is there some museum or so out there that preserves them for prosperity? I don’t mean just any ‘computer museum’ as they are (all?) of the scattershot type. I mean some museum that captures most of the essentials of the already many eras past, in IT. Like What the Dormouse Said is on paper, but then in software, running, and presenting systems as end users would experience them, a decade, two decades, -plus, ago. Without smartphones, without fastest Internet let alone actually working WiFi.

Edited to add, before scheduled posting: This, on a farewell to ‘screen savers’.

So, if you’d have some pointers, please..?

[Edited to add: A chunk of the above, here.]

Thanks in advance through:

[Once (??) was modern; Madrid]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord