Tag: people

T.L.D. Richelieu

A.J. du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac, a.k.a. ‘Big R’ in quotes-land, was ahead of time to say “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”.

Surely, he meant to instate the ‘prove me’ idiocy that pervades the TLD prison found in so many organizations, where regular folks trying hardest to manage, aren’t allowed to because they first have to comply (completely, slave-style) with filing requirements that can only be read to deliver the above-mentioned six lines. If only it were the six lines! Books have to be filled with full proof of having followed each and every petty little rule, that like a spider web was only designed to catch the little bugs whereas the big ones just bumble through.
The joy really starts, for at least some — not the managers but the ‘auditors’ and other improductive on-lookers — when necessity (sic) calls for alternative execution and registration due to customer satisfaction requirements not aligning with the One-Size-fits-the-Universe design of ‘processes’. Where the accused has to deliver a guilty plea with perfect documentation, to a bigoted law. The latter qualification, because it runs counter to the ultimate and ulterior goal of the organization, proven by a deviation being necessary to serve the latter. In client requirement versus framework consistency, the former always should take precedence and the latter is a fallacy, also in view of the ever-faster changing external and internal world, but things are all too often the other way around.

So, “Here, we have followed to perfection a slight deviation from the once-planned process steps, in order to serve the customer better and hence raise profitability” is about all the six lines one needs…

I feel sorry for your loss of innocence (-disguise of evil spirit)… hence to sooth:
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[Intensive human farming; squeeze till dry then dump]

Comparatively innovative (Beetleroot)

There was this quite simple hack; in (very) pseudo-code: If 2-wheels Then { Rollerbank; diss up some fancy figures; }
Which calls to mind the Problem of BIOS hacking / backdoor/malware pre-installing, as explained here.

On the one hand, a solution is available: At a sublimated information level, encode, as here. In the physical, car, scenario this would be readily implementable as: Just test the emissions, not rely on data produced by the system itself. Prepared By Client is used pervasively in accounting (financial auditing part) as well so consider yourselves warned…
On the other hand [there always is another hand it seems, possibly because this is real life], in the VW scenario there will probably also be a call for source code reviews. Or at least, from the software development corners, there will be. But then one ends up in the same situation as spelled out in the Bury post: How to verify the verification and not be double-crossed? A source code review would be one part, but how to compare a clean (pun not intended at time of typing) compile / image to what is actually installed (continued, without change-upon-install-to-dirty-version or change-at-service) throughout in the field?

Another issue from this: How to overrule self-driving (or what was it; fully-autonomous) cars ..? The BIOS-hack and Car examples show some intricacies when (not if) one would have a need to overrule near-future “Sorry Dave, I can’t Do That” situations. Once no physical controls are left to take over manually, … Arrmagerrdon. Yes, that 2001 was a rosy, romantic, not horror scenario. And demonstrating that at a comprehensive abstraction level, Prevention still trumps Detection/Correction. But not by much, and the advantage will slip by careless negligence and deliberate deterioration efforts.

Oh well. We all knew that All Is Lost anyway, And then, this:
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[(digi)10mm wasn’t wide enough to capture the immersion in this… Noto again]

The definitive Top 2000 of 2015, already

Which of course isn’t; it’s the Top 2266 for one thing and Definitive is slightly understating it.
And yes, it is downloadable in plain Excel, for your own tinker and play, in this file; checked and clean (no subversive content).
Next, a few little notes (repeated from last year):

  • “That’s odd! The usual numbers 1 to 50 aren’t where they’re ‘supposed’ to be by common standards!” Correct. Because I‘m ‘Rekt. The list is mine; why put the Mehhh songs high up there? They’re in there somewhere, but its my list, my preferences..! yes I do like some almost-forgotten songs better, sometimes much, much better, than the expired old hands.
  • Especially.. see the notes, when the clip (much) enhances the song(s). Wouldn’t that mean the song in itself isn’t fully complete ..? No, it means in (since) the age of video, songs with clips (‘integrated’) can much surpass mere songs by themselves, for a cubed sensory experience.
  • There’s more than 2000 yes. Because, already after the first 500 or so, determining the relative rankings becomes awkward. Hence, the cut-off would be random …! (why not 2048, that would make more sense in this digital (i.e., binary) age).
  • If you would still have some (preferably wacky) songs you miss, please do comment them to me. I’ll see whether I’d want to include them still, or not. Hey, it’s my list so I decide, geddid?
  • The actual end result order is far from definitive (sic). It depends heavily on one’s momentary temper and the memories that spring to mind like Proustian madeleines. And on one’s ability to hear quality. Such is life.
  • When dabbling with the Excel file yourself, feel free to play around with the ranking mechanism. What worked for me, was to first split the songs into bins of about 250 size (designate some song to be in the first bin that will end up being ranks 1-250, another song to bin 5, which is around the 1000-1250 mark, etc.), then sizing down bin 1 etc. to 8 smaller bins. Then, numbers 1-50 get a personal treatment one by one to their end rank, the rest gets (got) a random allocation within their bracket. After this, sort and re-apply number 1-whatever. Through this, actual intermediate bin sizes aren’t too important.

Then, as a long, very long list. With a Moar tag otherwise it would be ridiculous… [i.e., for the complete list in the post, follow the link:]

Continue reading “The definitive Top 2000 of 2015, already”

1 Hustle Vann McCoy Yes, the original
2 Easy Livin’ Uriah Heep To power it up
3 Heart Of Gold Neil Young Hits the heart
4 Hide and Seek Howard Jones Same, if you listen well
5 Peter Gunn Emerson Lake & Palmer Just for the intro alone
6 She Elvis Costello Personal nostaliga
7 White Room Cream Nicely powerful, doesn’t wear out too easily
8 74-’75 (+Video) Connells The video sublimates the message
9 Windowlicker (+Video) Aphex Twins Incomplete, as a work of art, without the video
10 Nice ‘n Slow Jesse Green Calm down again
11 One Of These Days Pink Floyd Hidden pearl
12 Smoke On The Water Deep Purple Of course
13 The Man With One Red Shoe (+Video) Laurent Garnier Incomplete, as a work of art, without the video
14 You’re So Vain Carly Simon I think this song is about me!
15 Dancing Barefoot Patti Smith Hidden treasure
16 Right Here Right Now Fatboy Slim Oft forgotten, defined an era
17 The Great Gig In The Sky Pink Floyd Appealing complexity
18 All I Need Air Mindfulness in musical form
19 Dream On Aerosmith Heartburn
20 You Got To Fight For Your Right to Party Beastie Boys Appealing. Simply that.
21 California Dreamin’ Mamas & The Papas
22 Whole Lotta Rosie AC/DC

PIA is KIA and KYD (?)

Since the whole Privacy thing has gained new traction with both the European Data Privacy Directive regaining (some…) steam and the European Court finally deciding what all with any bits of brain already knew i.e. that ‘Safe Harbour’ was a sour joke (to put it mildly), I realized, when working on a presentation for a forum centering on/around Identity and Access Management, that any Privacy Impact Analysis work comes down to two things; an objects-side analysis in the form of Know Your Data and a subject-side analysis by means of Know your (authorised OR actual) Identities and their Access, with some Privacy By Design thrown in at the solutions end.
Since I just like sentences of the right length, being entities that contain a discrete but complete set of logically coherent and united concepts.

And for those of you in the know; the above contains all there is to Know. Sort of. Maybe add in a bit of this (in Dutch; from the FD newspaper), for implementation. For a lot of implementation…
And, things may change in the somewhat near future with the advent of drones, IoT, robotics (humanoid or abstract), and ANI/AGI/ASI, in the IAM sphere alone. Just read up your huge backlog on this blog, and elsewhere as I cannot really summarise it all here…

I’ll give you some time space for that now. With:
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[At the Ragusa Ibla end but of course you knew]

Alesia (This week’s Friday Folly)

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, Haha consectetaur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. … Hahah and some more: Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum of course as here.
And Gallia in omnes partes divisa est.

And the title, … just random. Would have been here or even here.

Or are these title (suggestions) a reference to your fate ..? Anyway, this:
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[Locking your ignorant self up, will help so much less… then, today, Tuscany NameThatCastle ..!]

‘bucks sailor went where ..?

Quite some time ago, I came across this, in Lucca:
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and considered it as grossy antagonistic “Starbucks opening soon here” sign.
Later, I read up what the co. has on their own site about the logo. Which has some vague story about a 16th century Norse woodcut.
The thing being: The church (it is) in Lucca was built, and veryveryvery probably decorated, long before. So, had some Norse sailor been there? This is much more possible than latter-day non-historians tend to believe… Norsemen even had kingdoms et al. in Italy for centuries, or at least raided there quite regularly so why not? Time to dig deeper; is there really no History major who’d like to do a thesis on this? The co. we speak of, should have some nice study grant ready, right ..?

And of course there’s the research already written out here (in Italian, only just (i.e., entirely) can’t read it) about the origins of it all in the first place — the last pictures referring to the coffee you get ?? [Hm, I’m still a fan for romantic reasons, of their freshbrew]

Trivial TLA Things-Tip

If you Thought This Time Things would be easier, as the universality of plug-‘n-play has spread beyond even the wildest early dreams into the realms of the unthought-of non-thinkingness, think again. Drop the again. Think. That was IBM’s motto, and they created Watson. No surprises there.
However… It may come as a surprise to some that now, an actual TLA has some actual tips, to keep you safe(r). As in this. Who would have thought… On second thought, this agency of note might have no need for the access disabled themselves anymore, as they’ve provided themselves of sufficient other access (methods) by now and just want to hinder the (foreign) others out of their easy access ..?

Oh well, never can do well, right? And this:
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[Another one from the cathedral of dry feet — only after, making sticking fingers in dykes worthwhile; at Lynden, Haarlemmermeer]

Complexity beaten by [The mechanics of Joe Average]

Yes it’s time to remind you again. And again. That the mechanics of the mindset of Joe Average (notice how that’s a he not she …?) will beat even the best laid-out strategic plans, Von Moltke-style. As can be read in this here piece; instructive both on the surface and in the sub-surface semantics, meaning. I.e., that JA is even ‘smarter’ than you thought when it comes to achieving JA’s actual objectives of GetOffMyBackWithYourStupidTargets. Through which it all reminds us, being you too, to build security around actually desired functionality — as desired by end users to get their in-tray empty. Nothing more, certainly not your lofty functionality goals, that’s just burdensome nuisance. If you hinder the former and leave space for abuse in the latter, you’ll be doomed doubly. All the pain, no gain.
Be reminded, too, that your efforts down the blind alley will result in complexity that JA will beat, but maybe, all too often, you don’t. Meaning even that, is for nothing and will leave you out to dry.

Hm, as a pointer, this point needs both much more elaborate thought, in your heads, and is depleted for write-up here. Go and do well.

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[In the Cathedral of Pump; Lynden, Haarlemmermeer]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord