The article discusses the various reasons why organizations may choose not to implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), despite its significant security benefits. These reasons range from cost and complexity to technical and regulatory challenges, emphasizing the need for a balanced assessment of MFA’s advantages and drawbacks.
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This article outlines Lester Dent’s Master Plot Formula, a systematic approach designed to help writers craft engaging and tightly structured stories. Originating from the pulp fiction era, Dent’s formula divides a story into four equal parts, each with specific goals and challenges for the protagonist, culminating in a resolution that ties up the narrative threads. It offers a practical framework for narrative development, emphasizing pacing, character predicaments, and a satisfying conclusion.
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This article outlines critical questions that cyber security startups, particularly those like Cyber Tzar after completing the NCSC’s “NCSC for Startups” Accelerator programme, should consider when seeking support from regional organizations such as the West Midlands Growth Company or Invest West Midlands. It emphasizes prioritising inquiries around funding and marketing to harness regional opportunities for development and expansion.
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Backing up and restoring a WordPress website is a critical task for website administrators, ensuring that website data is not lost due to unforeseen circumstances such as server crashes, hacking, or accidental deletions. This article will guide you through the processes involved in backing up and restoring your WordPress website, an overview of popular backup and restore plugins, help you to choose the appropriate backup and restore approach, and hopefully help you recover your site quickly and efficiently when needed.
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Understanding the fundamental principles of statistical analysis is essential. This guide aims to provide a clear, no-nonsense explanation of the basic concepts of mean, mode, median, range, and average.
Continue readingLast Sunday I hosted a barbecue for the Committee of the BCS Birmingham Branch and thought I’d share a few of the photo’s that we took with you.
After the Branch Committee’s request for new Committee member applicants I’m very pleased to say we had five people come along and take up new positions on the Committee. We’re fortunate to be joined by Martin Froggatt, Rob Gilliam, Steve Harris, Dawn Peers and Hugo Russell, and most welcome they are too!
This bring the size of the Committee back up to a healthy twelve members, which is excellent, however we on the Committee thought that it would be good idea to hold a small event to help everyone get to know each other, and hopefully build a sense of camaraderie, outside of the usual Committee meetings and BCS Birmingham Branch events (one of which is on Tuesday the 15th evening). I was happy to host and for my part I wanted to say ‘thank you’ to the long serving members of the Committee for all of their dedication (as well as a couple of long serving ex-Committee members too).
We’ve also recently started to reboot the Branches approach to social networking technologies and will be refreshing the BCS Birmingham Branch facebook page, please consider joining if your a BCS member and either associated with or interested in the Birmingham Branch.
And here’s those photos I mentioned, as you can see we all had an excellent time, and as Peter Crouch had to say “Thanks also for posting Donna’s photos on the Web, now everyone can see what the Birmingham Committee does on a Sunday afternoon!”.
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Apologies to all my blog readers I’ve been lax of late and haven’t posted a great deal recently, and I’m afraid that in an attempt to clear down all the draft blog entries I have prior to the transition and acquisition (of Sun by Oracle, of course) I’ll be posting a number of blog entries in quick succession, some of which I expect may need expanding upon in the future.
Topics I have to complete include part three of my provisioning article series, a number of posts on Google and the Google architecture, a number of posts on UK Government messaging systems, specifically DIS, a number of posts on the continuing issues with the economy and innovation and science spending in the UK, as well as a few others.
On the economy side, I was hoping to follow up my articles “DBERR’s views on the future growth of the UK economy ‘New Industry, New Jobs’” and “Industry contributions to the UK economy and investment in R&D; by industry” with pieces which might include looking at:
But for now I’ll see how I get on!
You’d imagine Twitter integration in Disqus couldn’t get any better, however speaking with Daniel Ha at Disqus I hear even more improvements are on the way.
If you haven’t seen how Disqus integrates with Twitter (and incidentally what Disqus integration looks like with blogs.sun.com, or any other Apache Roller Weblogger based blog system) have a look at this blog entry which has generated a few traditional comments, but quite a few tweets, and see how Disqus displays them all as part of that conversation too:
http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/reasons_projects_and_programmes_fail
You’ll need to scroll down to the bottom of the page, but as you can see Disqus has captured a lot of the tweets and retweets about the article, which I think is pretty cool. Disqus also does the same for Facebook and a host of other social networking platforms as well.
Talking to Daniel he said that tweet and social networking metrics and “count” was on the way as well as other advancements, so I am firmly looking forward to those when they arrive.
The great thing about Disqus is that it is firmly becoming a conversation catcher and conversation engine, which is really what I want, to capture disparate conversations about what I write in an aggregate manner.
If you are interested in integrating Disqus with your Sun blog or any other Apache Roller Weblogger based blog, I have a tutorial and overview over here, along with the code and code examples you need to use:
https://horkan.com/2008/09/09/disqus-integration-bsc-roller-weblogger
Thought you might be interested in the the web analytics used on this blog; in total there are five pieces of technology collecting data and then used for performing web analysis here. They are:
Why use more than one? Frankly web analytics is more than a shaky area, none of them ever seem to catch all hits just as I’d like, nor measure them in a similar fashion, so I use differing web analytic software to ‘triangulate’ the best view possible (for instance one will count some spiders traffic as hits, whilst another won’t, frankly I want to know the difference between humans and the web crawlers, etc.). Furthermore some have functionality which the others don’t and some produce quick to see ‘snapshots’ whilst others produce detailed ‘drill-downs’.
For instance Sun’s web analytics is the same as the corporate one, so it’s enterprise grade and highly flexible, sadly this means it’s extremely large scale and quite hard to manipulate because the amount of configuration you have to do is just horrendous (but it can give you the most detail).
So SiteCatalyst / Omniture is too much hassle to produce quick updates and ClustrMaps is really eye candy for users, therefore I only really use SiteMeter for quick updates without logging in, and StatCounter and Google Analytics for more detailed, but quickly available, reports on what constitutes readers favourite articles and pages.
For 2 to 5 above you’ll need to sign up for online accounts and add the tracking code yourself, this isn’t too hard, it just takes a little time.
For 1 it’s already there on all the Sun websites and blogs, however you need to request access to the corporate Omniture / SiteCatalyst web analytics system to get access if you are a Sun blogger, then you have to learn how to use it, then you need to use something else as well (see problems I describe above, because you might prefer a quick info ‘fix’).
Most of all this is about personal preference, and what works for you; for about two years after starting blogging I was a data demon, wanting to understand and interpret the stats, and now, well I’m a little more relaxed.