Personal Blogs

Spent eight [my waking] hours today following random wikipedia links [gosh, some of it is a bit iffy]. This cannot be good.

Or can it?

Tomorrow I have to train the admin, and perhaps some other, staff at my school how to upload documents to the school's website and link-in said docs. Aaaargh.

I'm not worried that I'll make an idiot of myself [I probably will, but that doesn't matter], or that I don't know what I'm talking about. What worries me is that I'm going to have to try to teach other people to use something that was built only to be used by me.

There are things that I've built that even I find difficult to use. What on earth are others going to make of the thing? And if they bring along a Word-only type mentality to the party we're talking recipe for trouble.

I'm not looking forwards to this.

I could blame me for this pass, but there isn't really any blame to be divvied up—when I built the thing there weren't any choices, it was me doing it or nothing. So I built it for me, I had to.

This is a common problem: you start something, it works, you are now out of your depth because of unexpected success, how do you mainstream it? It's called scalability; what worked when you were small is positively toxic when you get big. [Think lactose intolerance.]

The big boys can throw money at this, alas my school only has me. And me doesn't have the time to build the interface between a product of my mind and normal people. Even if I could.

Still, I get to stand up and waffle-web at people, so a win for me at least.

Because you can do something is not a good argument for doing it.

Yesterday I spent valuable minutes doing something that I knew was wrong—diddling with the print-styles for the school's website; I did it because I'd been dared. Dared in the sense that my headteacher said, "you [ie me] can't do [in HTML] what Word can do".

Well I can. And did. But that's what's wrong—we can all paint, doesn't make us Goya.

The real trick, and it's not a trick, is to know what to paint; to be brave enough not to do what others would have us do.

How do you teach people not to be taught?

Every so often I read all of this rubbish that I write about a course [it's the main reason that I keep a blog]. Usually only before I write a course review, but sometimes at other times. And today I did so. What did I find?

[You have to realize that I am me, and my own words have a different effect on me than they will have on you.]

Aside from the usual moaning and the fact that I've always seem to have been scrambling on this one, something stands out: that I'm beginning to wonder if I'm up to maths. And that's not right.

Having got to the end of this course, except for the exam, I now know that not only do I love maths but I can grok it. There may come a time where it will get beyond me, that time is not yet. And that time may never come.

I don't say this to big myself up, I say this because the most serious problem that we face as students is to think that we can't do something. 

The usual work/life overload occasions—they come with the territory, if you don't want them to visit, don't play here.

The idea that your mind isn't up to something is a far more sinister problem, it's all too easy to project this belief onto some other excuse—"the pace is too fast for me". Don't.

One of the best things about blogging is that you have to write around your own lies—and the worst lies that you can tell yourself are the excuses that you make to avoid doing something that you can do because you don't have the bottle to admit that you could.

My wife and I have just spent the afternoon with my mother and father, where we were treated to one of my mother's classic peices of logic, "I thought that he was deaf, but he rides a bike so he can't be".

My attempts to get her to explain the basis for this statement were brushed off with...

[I should explain that, he, was a teenager who lives on M & Ds' street, who was planning a party and who's mother was wondering if my mother would mind. It's a funny kind of street.]

... ,"so I told her, of course not, I would love it. Once upon at time my sons were notorious for their parties".

Which rather put me on the back foot. In more ways that one.

I've got my M208 exam in less than a month, then for the first time in what seems like years I have several months off of the OU-type stuff.

A couple of years ago I had a similar break, I remember the cravings. I suspect that this time it will be worse. I need a project to be going on with. One that involves computing and maths.

I suppose that I could work on my "let's recreate MathCad" effort. But, to be frank, it's a complete mess, and it's a complete mess because I don't know how to plan a software project properly. Well I know a wee bit, it's just that I don't do it. In part this is down to the fact that I don't know how to work the tools that would allow me to plan properly. I suppose that I could learn said tools, but as I intend to take M256 this seems a wee bit like 'double handling'.

The sad truth is that anything non-trivial is beyond my abilities. I could build something that works, in the right wind conditions, but ... I have quite a few bits of code that I need for my work that I have to use with my fingers crossed—and the code [mine] is so awful that I can't even consider maintenance. Once-upon-a-time I didn't know my limits.

So I'm caught in a trap—I know enough not to "do an Icarus", but I don't know enough to "do a Wright brothers".

All this was brought home to me today after a discussion about the school web site. Which, because it's slightly less-than-awful, has become something important to the parents, and thus Important.  

The problem is that the web site has a bus-count of one, me. So me training others was considered. Then I re-considered this in private and began to have second thoughts, the site is bespoke [ie quirky, ie designed to be used by me], I'm a crap teacher and I ha' ma' doots that the people concerned will be happy about what they will have to do. [Normal people freak when they see HTML, never mind editing it] So a content-management system then?

I could build a CMS [I don't want to lose control, given options people will do awful things to my site!] but it would involve a web page file-upload to an already insecure server. Not an idea that I like, all the city's school sites live there.

Once upon a time I would have just built it. Now I know better, it requires thought. And having thought...

If in doubt build an interface, not a workflow. So a content-management thingee it is then. But...

This post is approaching the rambling/incoherent cusp so I'll sign off now...

Time to download that Java stack and build the ultimate lego guardian robot.  

It's no use pretending, there will be times when you feel like it's all too much—times when a desperate ennui seizes you and you just want to stop.

After all, what does it matter? We're all just tears in the rain. But Xerxes blubbed about the same thing and we can still read about his tears thanks to Herodotus. So maybe it does matter.

I have a metaphor that I use when such times come—I've fallen off a tall cliff and although I just want to lie and ache I need to stand up and climb the stupid thing again.

So at seven o'clock on a Monday am, under a cloud-sharded sky I'm smoking a fag and preparing for yet another climb.

I want to understand it. Won't, won't stop my striving.

How stupid am I?

Well the penultimate TMA is off. So I'm, now, scanning the photocopy to spot my flaws. There's a bit of me that sees this as a metaphor for my failures—sensible after the event.

I've now got two weeks to complete the revision TMA. So am I revising? No.

I'm trying to work out what this means. [The basic problem is that I can [maybe] promise you that nobody else can eavesdrop on our conversation, but how do you know who I am?] So the web is broken when it comes to security? Perhaps, but secure is an odd concept; security features often make things less secure.

I expect that you are now saying that neil is a cretin but I'll give you some examples...

• The stronger the required password, the greater the temptation to write it down somewhere
• I work in a school where the doors are open, there are schools where you have to buzz in. What happens is that people piggy-back on a genuine in, and once in they must have a right to be there. They suffer many thefts.
• Most locks can be picked, but better and faster is to go round the lock. A lock is only as good as the container that it is locking [I had to put quite a good lock on a room recently, it would take me all of two seconds to kick my way through the plaster-board wall].

Security is about slowing people down so that the humans have time to get involved.  If you think that things can ever ensure security, well, I'll have your stuff.

The important things to learn are:

• Put your money into a bank: hand-off security to others, and perhaps more importantly don't store stuff that you'd be embarrassed to lose. [This has bitten wikileaks recently, moronic to store this stuff behind any type of lock.]
• Don't tell people that you have a secret to keep. Once they know that you have a secret they will find it.
• No hiding place is safe
• Keep a watch on who is looking for your stuff, and move it if they get close

In short, there is no shortcut...