Books
Finished Ross Anderson's "Security Engineering, A Guide to
Building Dependable Distributed Systems" - a must-read.
Covers everything from crypto protocols to "How to Hack a
Smart-card", "How to Steal a Picasso", military systems,
banking, telecoms security and nuclear command and control
systems. As he points out, if you deal with one part of a
security system (or design it), you really need to
understand how all the other parts work, too, as they'll be
interacting with your bits. Heartily recommend this book -
you'll find a slightly longer review of this, and some
others I've been reading, at
www.p2ptrust.org.
Music
Barenaked Ladies are excellent. Just got
Maroon, the last album that I didn't have, and I'm listening
to it at the moment (whoo - "Tonight is the night I fell
asleep at the wheel" is wierd!). After that, it's Bill
Jones' Panchpuran - I loved her first one, and this has got
excellent reviews, too.
Phd
We're getting there - I've got two supervisors, and one
referee for definite (I need to decide who to approach to be
the second). I'm looking into the issues of funding, and
getting accepted to do it part-time, which is more difficult
than you might expect. Went Cambridge University
Library yesterday to find out about getting a card
again. It was strange being back there after so long, but
great, too. Booked a time next week to get a card, and I'm
seeing one of my supervisors on Wednesday to discuss the PhD
proposal. Once it's a bit more refined, I'll post it on www.p2ptrust.org.
Work
I was in Paris for some of this week at a trade show. A
complete wash-out - though got to meet a couple of
interesting sets of people. My boss and I left early. The
poor organiser had such a cr*p time (two laptops got stolen,
to just help things along) that I ended up buying her
flowers. Seemed to go down well - a little later, one of
my females colleagues came round to mention how bad a
day she was having, and didn't she deserve flowers,
too? No, but (-8.
Life
Catherine's away for a week and a half in Portugal from next
Wednesday, but as I've got MBA work to do, and my sister and
her husband (Polly and Lee) are likely to be coming to stay,
I'll probably have enought to do anyway.
Had contact with a long-lost friend (sort of an ex-) from
about 12 years ago. She had better memories of our time
than I might have expected, which was nice, as I was very
fond of her, and felt that things had been somewhat
unresolved. Catherine was amused by some of the comments
about me "confident and cultured" in particular. Heigh-ho -
she (Catherine) was the one who described her first
impression of me as "an arrogant b*st*rd", but then again I
thought she was "prim and proper", so at least one of
us was wrong. And she did marry me.