Security Transformation: Digital Defense Strategies to Protect your Company’s Reputation and Market Share by Stuart Campbell is a book aimed at upper management dealing with the general security issues affected by modern companies. The book is good in that it deals with not only the tech side of things, but the human side — all the firewalls in the world makes no difference if the attack comes in the form of someone wearing a photocopier repair uniform. Unfortunately, it was written in 2001 and has aged very badly. There are lots of occasions of “…as soon as 2005″ and the final section “Peering Ahead” is useful only in the way that Tomorrow Land at Disney World is useful to see how we thought the future would look like in the 70s.

All that said, here are the snippets I caught when reading it (most are obvious, but I’ll list them to jog my memory at some point in the future.
(more…)

One advantage large companies have over smaller ones is that they can use the economics of scale to install unifying systems for large portions of their operations. Think SAP or Oracle Applications. One step along the maturation process of a company is to recognize the need/want for this type of system, but not being able to afford it. This post is how I see a small / medium size company could use Bugzilla to manage their software from both an internal perspective, and from a partner management perspective.
(more…)

Iframes are a pretty cool bit of html. Basically, what they let you do is seamlessly include another webpage in your existing page. Couple that with a reference to a CSS that a partner provides and you have a recipe for easy integration into a partner site with limited requirement for maintenance.

Unfortunately, nothing is ever as easy in practice as it is in theory.
(more…)

I was talking to someone the other day and where I derive my test cases from. This is an encapsulation of that discussion.
(more…)

Hugh over at Gaping Void has been publishing a series of user generated Manifestos. The catch is they must be 500 words or less. While it is not likely that mine will be as infamous as the Unabomber or Agile Manifestos, here is my first crack at a Quality Manifesto.
(more…)