At work last Wednesday we had a talk from Eugene Spafford, a professor of Information Security at Purdue University. It was about the current state of security in computer applications, systems and networks at the current time. Essentially, he made the point that it is pretty woeful at the moment: all of us are besieged by viruses, malware, spam and phishing attacks. Following are my thoughts on his talk; I’m doing this from memory so hopefully I haven’t made errors.

On Sunday 1st of October I travelled over to see Patrick Wolf at the Oxford Zodiac. I’m seriously pleased that I did: the gig was absolutely amazing. Mr Wolf put his heart and soul into it. It was an energising and magnificent performance. Mere superlatives cannot do it due justice, so I put some photos on Flickr:

In the absence of a recent pithy nothing, I decided to write about the current state of tea at work. The State of the Tea address would go badly, should it be made into speech form.

HP, in their infinite money-saving opportunity wisdom one supposes, have decided to move from Twinings to Lipton tea bags. I had no idea such vile tea was available. To summarise, I think that Lipton tea is made from the sweepings from the factory floor (if it is actually made from tea leaves at all).

I found out some obvious-in-retrospect things this week when doing a little optimisation work. This is work in C#, but I’m sure it’s applicable to many languages. If you want to skip the details, but want the take-home lesson, here it is: if you want reasonable performance with large-ish data-sets (I was working of the order of 5 million elements), use primitive structures — i.e., arrays and hand-coding — rather than the convenience classes provided by your framework of choice. Now, on to the examples.

I made my first alterations to a Wikipedia page today: I added (hopefully correct) references to the Mary’s Room page in the section about Dennett’s refuting the thought experiment.