Cambridgeshire Council shared their Social Network and Blogging Policy on Public Sector Forums the other day where they have set out the rules for what they expect employees to do in terms of using blogs and contributing on social networks. Before even reading the policy, I can tell that this is a good idea. This [...]

This is a public service announcement. Sophos have updated their free rootkit detection and removal tool. If you have already got it, update it. If you’ve not already got it, download it. It’s particularly important to have protection against (or at least a way of scanning for) rootkits because of their stealth: Rootkits can lie [...]

I’m quite a fan of old historical buildings. This is partly because I love the idea that people used to introduce architectural features on buildings (seemingly up to around the 1940s) just because this would make them look nice, as opposed to the generally more ‘functional’ type building introduced after that. Old church buildings are [...]

Don’t forget, September the 19th is officially Talk Like A Pirate Day. Please do consider blogging your pirate talk and there are a number of resources available to ensure that your talking like a pirate goes smoothly. If you don’t know your belayin’ from yer Avast, me hearties, you can head over to the Pirate [...]

I’ve not done this before, but I have seen quite a few of them, so I thought it was probably time to bite that metaphorical bullet and produce my twitter mosaic. This is basically a set of images of all of the people who are following me on twitter. There probably aren’t many spammers on [...]

My old colleagues at Public Sector Forums have launched a new site with a BuddyPress engine — UK Gov OSS. This is a community (i.e. non-official) site set up to share information and ideas on open source and open standards for government in the UK. From the sounds of it, it is therefore aimed mostly [...]

I’ve been to a wedding. In fact, over the course of my lifetime, I’ve been to quite a few weddings, including my own. But the other weekend I was in Barrow-in-Furness for a family wedding. I’m not going to talk about who got married as frankly getting married is stressful enough without knowing someone’s going [...]

There’s an interesting post by Peter Barton of Lincolnshire County Council over at Public Sector Forums. If you’re in the public sector and you aren’t already a member, you might want to take the opportunity to wander over and register so that you can read up on the full details. If you’re not prepared to [...]

There’s an ugly rotting lump in Gateshead town centre. It’s a concrete block car park, designed by Owen Luder and described as a fine example of brutalist architecture. Obviously, different sorts of architecture suit different people, so that fact that I personally don’t find it easy to see how any example of brutalist architecture can [...]

Errornomics by Joseph T Hallinan is another non-fiction book, which obviously means it comes with a bonus free subtitle: “Why We Make Mistakes and What We Can Do to Avoid Them”. Talking of mistakes, Amazon said that the book was released in paperback on the 6th of August, but as I’d bought it, read it, [...]