Diverse Reality

30/07/2018

Topic: Artificial Intelligence from the code perspective.

OK, I've pondered AI for a long time and while I'm a developer, in BASIC based languages, this is likely out of my reach. But it always comes back up so I want to discuss this from the practicality of using code/functions and their parameters as building block that construct the intellegance by, I suppose, a form of rotation engine.

So you have a function, this function can be used in a few ways when you break it down. As an initiator if an action or structure, but often also as the returner of results to another block (function). I'm trying to be visual in my musings and working in a very basic raw sense.

Im not pondering building a digital brain. I'm pondering establishing the basis for codes ability to discover what is possible for its self. I believe that if this is possible, extreme simplicity will be the key.

But who knows.... What are your thoughts?

30/07/2018

OK.... So Diverse Reality is no more in the sense of providing services. I have decided that I prefer the more structured environment of full time employment, even though I'm looking for a job at this time.

But... But but but... Why waste the space?!

So I'm going to change this into a detailed pondering site.

So how will this work?

Someone starts a post on a topic giving as much detail as needed. Then others chime in with ideas and extensions to that topic. Topics should preferably be technical in nature.

This is now a space for the free exchange of intellect.

Some topics will be practical, others theoretical and some fantasy.

Rules:

1 - Keep it clean. This is not an adult page and not a forum for people to speak in only insults and swearing.

2 - Respect everyone. People will often be wrong or approach things in a way you may not like, but this is a forum to learn and grow. By all means correct someone or debate what is correct, but do it in a mature way.

3 - If someone is a problem report it to me and I will review them and the relevant situation.

4 - No politics. Short of politics being used to illustrate a point or surfacing in a humourous comment, leave it at the door.

5 - No advertising. This is not a sales forum or an employment one. If someone likes your contributions and chooses to talk about a job opportunity, that is fine. But otherwise advertising is a quick route to being kicked/banned as appropriate.

6 - Talk to me if you are unsure or wish to request an exception be made. I can't forsee every scenario and will review all cases/requests on there individual merits.

7 - My decisions are final. Unless I choose to change them due to a change in circumstances. I'll always take in to account individual exceptions, but once a decision is made, thats it.

16/07/2016

Sorry I have been quiet but I have been on the run up to my wedding and am now using a quiet spot on my honeymoon, which will be over on Monday, to update you all.

Diverse Reality is still here and available if people wish to contact me with enquiries.

Starting soon I will be offing free technical advice over the phone. This will not include indepth diagnostic or step-by-step instructions/support but will provide an overview of your situation and general guidance to a level I choose on a call by call basis.

Keep an eye on this page for when the above offer starts. (hint: very soon)

03/06/2016

I thought it would be good to illustrate often overlooked network security concepts.

Most companies have their anti-virus checker and thier internet router/firewall and leave it at that. Indeed, in quite a lot of situations that is all that is needed.

But have you considered interdepartmental security?

Unfortunately some employees can be in possession of just enough technical knowledge to allow innocent curiosity to cross clearance boundaries when it comes to which computers and devices they can interact with over the internal network. Other employees can have far more sinister intentions.

Over the course of my career I have had to separate my personal and professional feelings on a number of occasions, reporting office staff, for inappropriate conduct of a variety of levels, who I otherwise got on very well with.

But, prevention is always better than cure. Just as your internet router gives you complete access to your internal network and restricts people on the internet to only enter in very specific ways which you purposefully allow, routers can be used to segment off departments. So you could have a projects department which handles the schematics for many of your client buildings. These are incredibly sensitive documents, because should they leave the protective custody of your authorised employees, they could end up in the hands of someone who is more than happy to look over them for weaknesses in security. The projects department would have their own internal network with minimal restrictions, but anyone else trying to access equipment in that area might be restricted to only be able to connect to a printer on a single network address, for example.

Of course, these kinds of security breaches don't crop up on a serious level often. But I urge you to consider two things. First, that you will be held responsible when your number comes up and you end up with an underhanded employee. Second, people are naturally curious and more and more people posses a little bit of technical knowledge, you might be surprised how often genuinely good employees have let their curiosity get the better of them regardless of if that has resulted in any noticeable problems.

The point is, plan your network structure professionally so that innocent curiosity is cut short and constructive work continues, and focused underhanded attempts do not end up costing you and your clients heavily.

If you wish to have a talk about how your company's network is set up, or already know that you want to change it, then my number is on the left side of this page. I will never recommend excessive work be done, each of my clients situations is treated uniquely.

02/06/2016

If you have any queries regarding your company's IT systems and policy please feel free to call me on the number provided on this page for friendly impartial advice based on over 18 years of practical hands on experience.

01/06/2016

An example of how I can help eliminate a bottleneck in a networked application.

We had an issue with our document management solution at the company I worked for at the time. Anyone requesting an image of a document, or even performing a search would have to wait until the service was free to provide their results. Sometimes this did not cause a big problem, but other times you could be in the queue behind someone else who had requested an 80 page document. Literally, 5 minute waits were common.

So I set about analysing how this document management system processed requests. This didn't just lead to the revelation that it had a very simple queuing system but also that it re-read the index files for the tables involved for 'every' page in every document.

Now I cant stop it making multiple reads of the index file, but I can tackle the horrendous queuing problem. I wrote a small program to sit on the server and listen for incoming requests from another small program I wrote to go on the end user computers.

Instead of clicking on the normal program icon, the user clicks on my client program, which contacts the server program I wrote causing a seperate instance of the document retrieval program to load on the server on a different port. The server program I wrote waits for the instance to load then passes the port number to the client program and the client program I worte launches the query software directing it to its own instance.

This solution eliminated the queuing problem completely. However it must be borne in mind that due the inefficient nature of how the document management program read its index files, this solution exponentially increased the load on the hard drives. I had considered this and as expected the benefits far outweighed the increased load on the servers hard drives, which it handled smoothly.

With a little analysis and imagination many cumbersome IT situations can be improved drastically.

01/06/2016

When planning a business IT infrastructure its important to consider collaberative working.

In a nutshell you want everyone and all of your devices connecting through the same systems to share data as seamlessly as possible.

I know of one company, who shall remain nameless, that wanted to save roughly £3000 on going with the recomendation that I made as there Network Administrator by going for an outside quote which seemed to promise the world for less.

I pointed out that this quote was only using small business server as the operating system, which has a hard coded limit to how many users it will support. I emphasised this limitation in great detail and that while it would cope with the office staffs needs perfectly fine, we would not be able to integrate even a quarter of our engineering force onto the same system as we would be almost at our user capacity from the day the new system went live. My wording was that it is madness to install a new system which will be running at almost full capacity in any area from the day it goes live...... And I firmly stand by that wording.

The cheaper price tag won out and when we hit the user limit while adding engineers, management were shocked that this could not be bypassed. As such we ended up with a fractured system with the office staff on the internal server and Microsoft Exchange, and the Engineers on corporate GMail. We could still communicate accross departments but we we lost that seamless integration, even when employing all possible tools to bridge the gap. Shared mail folders, address books and calendars all make corporate life just that little bit more fluent, and thats not even counting the many man hours saved administering one system with one set of tools instead of two or more.

Remember, that when planning your infrastructure and systems you should be trying to look 3 - 5 years ahead and make sure you have extra provisions incase things go further than expected, not just barely cover the current state of affairs.

I am always happy to give short bits of advice for free, at my own descretion, or offer a more complete consultation on request.

Please feel free to call (07891 742 371) to discuss your specific situation with no pressure or obligation. Calls are recorded for security purposes.

01/06/2016

I want to thank the people who are starting to engage with my page and my posts and say that its my goal to bring the experience I have which started on the Amiga all those many years back, now i feel old, to all types of scenarios from simple ones for home users to complex out of the box thinking and programming to help provide some clarity in the ever expanding world of IT.

I have a few recomendations:

Please note that I am in no way officially tied to or sponsored by any of the companies who own or are affiliated with these products. I always give independant advice and my preferences change as products do.

Kaspersky Internet Security Suite - For home users and small businesses. This nicely handles your web and e-mail security and realistically only places a medium load on most systmes. (Please keep in mind the wide variety of systems and their abilities)

Sophos - For medium to large and enterprise systems. This requires server provisioning but provides top range security and with a surprisingly low system load, especially on the end user PC's.

CrashPlan - A wonderfull cloud based backup system. Please try to stretch for the paid version because it gives piece of mind, multiple versions of backup files, so if you get hit by a ransomware virus you can more or less laugh at it.

Whatever programs you choose, there is an old saying that holds very true in IT, 'You get what you paid for'. The free versions of products will help you along, but the paid versions of those same products really do deliver so much more in performance, protection and ability.

01/06/2016

When examining efficiency in computing processes and determining the correct hardware and software for any solution, its important to understand how different parts of the computer interact.

"My system is slow" I hear.... so the normal response is to buy a a faster one. But have you looked at what is causing it to slow down. It is rarely the CPU (processor) and often the hard drive or RAM (Memory).

If you have too much accessing your hard drive and it cannot return results instantly then a queue forms, cute little animated cursors tell you that the system is busy, but not why, and tempers start to rise. As such you click again and again, when often waiting would be better to let the queue clear.

If you have too little memory for the tasks that your computer undertakes then it has to store some of the content of memory onto the hard drive to free up that part of the memory. When that memory information is needed again it has to be transfered bac off of the hard drive and into memory. This constant juggling can reduce a computer to a snail and a user to an angry bull, quite understandably.

Notice how the hard drive features as the bottle neck in both cases. Assuming you are using a standard spinning disk hard drive, then even though modern drives are precision pieces of technology, you have a comparatively small amount of ability to transfer data from it at the same time compared to every other part of the system. If you have a solid state hard drive then you are working with much less of a constraint, almost none.

But this doesnt mean that you need to go and upgrade your systems or hard drives.

First, how many anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-malware programs are you using and do they cross over functions? Because if you have two anti-viruses then every time you work with a file it will be accessed multiple times, increasing the load on the hard drive.

Second, how many programs are running in the background? It is always nice to have many fancy utilities making your system more personal and ready for anything. But are they really needed? Even mainstream respectable programs install Launchers to make sure that when a file associated with that utility is clicked on it is ready to go. For example, many PDF readers do this, but the main PDF reading program will launch anyway, so you are just clogging up memory from the start and placing a tiny bit extra load on the hard drive when you start up the computer.

By all means be protected, id never suggest anything else, but streamline and keep your systems as simple as possible, you might be surprised at the difference that it makes.

You can apply the above to all types of programs, even system tweakers than promise to keep your system cleared down and running optimally. They place load on startup and are clearing down mostly harmless logs and temporary files far too frequently, adding extra load to the hard drive. Im not saying that these things shouldnt be cleared down, im just saying that in my experience its very rare that it needs doing, and certainly not constantly.

31/05/2016

My website will be coming soon. But I would rather delay it than rush it out wrong.

29/05/2016