Support With A Difference - Rainbow Trust Children's Charity

Sunday 14th June 2009

You have probably already guessed that Doc's Blog has been hijacked, but fear not as this isnt a form of social engineering, or any other type of scam. I'm Isaac, I have been working with SPEDI for just over 3 years. I initially started on the Helpdesk and was able to progress onto a role in SPEDI's Testing Funcions.

Like so many of us, I've been incredibly fortunate to enjoy a healthy life without any real hardship or serious illness. As you'll appreciate this is something we all too often take for granted. However I’ve recently had the great privilege of seeing the fantastic work that the Rainbow Trust do at first hand and felt so moved that I have now decided to take part in the London 10K run on 12th of July in support of the Rainbow Trust.

Rainbow Trust registered as a charity in 1986, founded by Bernadette Cleary it provides practical and emotional support to families who have a child with a life threatening or terminal illness. Rainbow supports over 1,000 families every year and currently has two respite homes in Surrey and Northumberland that have been set up specifically to provide a break for a whole family, allowing them to spend precious quality time together.  Rainbow Trust also has a nationwide team of Family Support Workers who join the family in their own home and are there to provide whatever practical support is needed.

What Rainbow Trust Support means to me:

Support means being with a bereaved mother who is on her hands and knees threatening suicide, but many hours later, is able to laugh at herself.

Support is comforting a distraught surgeon, after he's had to tell a family that their child had died while he was operating on her.

Support is making cakes with a child propped in a high chair, because he was too weak to stand, and only had a week left to live.

Support is reassuring a sibling that cancer isn’t a big bad monster coming to get him too.

Support is listening on the phone while a mother sobs her heart out, because the weather is cold, and her son has been buried without an overcoat.

Any family with a child or young person up to the age of 18 years who suffers a life threatening or terminal illness is eligible for Rainbow's Support, from diagnosis through to active and/or palliative care and bereavement.  At any one time there are 10,000 families in the UK who have a child with a life threatening or terminal illness, Rainbow currently supports 10% of these families and with less than 1% government funding. 

Rainbow relies purely on the generosity of its supporters who make donations and raise funds at events, these funds go directly to helping Rainbow give the support that is so badly needed.

Consequently I'd be really grateful if you'd sponsor me by visiting http://www.justgiving.com/isaacabraham, your money will make a significant difference to a great number of children and their families who are regretfully far less fortunate than the rest of us.

Have You Been Enjoying The Recent Warm Weather?

Sunday 7th June 2009

It may well be pleasant for us humans, but less so for our electronic equipment.....

There is little better than "Wall-to-wall" sunshine to lift people's spirits and help restore the feel-good factor, especially when it is accompanied by a light breeze to keep the humidity down.  In such conditions, it is easy to forget that they are often followed by spells of weather which, although warm and sunny, is also very humid and sticky.

One consequence of very warm or, indeed, very cold weather, is a considerably-increased demand for electrical power.  In summer, everyone's fans, fridges and freezers work overtime, while those fortunate enough to enjoy the benefit of air-conditioning equipment usually take full advantage of it.  In very cold weather, of course, large numbers of electric heaters are powered up.  The overall effect is that the National Grid has to support a massive surge in demand.  This can result in power cuts and power surges, as the power company engineers attempt to balance the available generating and distribution capacity against the demand.

Robust devices such as electric motors and heating elements are practically immune to mains-borne interference.  Electronic equipment, on the other hand, is very reliant upon a good-quality, constant supply of power.  Such a supply should not be taken for granted and instead be provided by one form or other of UPS or "Uninterruptible Power Supply".  Many different types and sizes of UPS are available, to suit every application and pocket.  At one end of the scale, there are the massive units which can protect whole banks of power-hungry servers, while at the other sit the small, inexpensive UPS devices designed for home use.  These latter devices are usually designed to eliminate the worst of any mains-borne interference, as well as to provide a few minutes' emergency power in the event of a total supply failure.  This is intended to allow the user to save their work and close down the PC in an orderly manner.

Don't Drive Your Suppliers Into The Ground!

Sunday 31st May 2009

Is it REALLY in your best interests to drive the hardest bargain you possibly can?

Haggling over the price of goods or services is normal practice in some cultures.  For example, in the soukhs of Morocco and Tunisia, none of the goods are priced.  When the visitor enquires, the stallholder will quote a price typically two or three times what he wants to achieve.  It is then up to the would-be purchaser to negotiate a mutually-acceptable compromise.  Nearer home, it is quite common to see items on eBay endorsed as "Buy It Now or Best Offer".  This enables would-be purchasers to have some fun and maybe even "grab a bargain".

In business, robust negotiation is all very well and, indeed, is often expected, especially in the current financial climate.  However, the resulting deal must be fair to both parties.  It is morally repugnant to all right-minded people when a purchaser attempts to use his position of strength to force a supplier, who is in a weaker position, to reduce the prices for his goods or services etc. to a grossly uneconomic level.  The relationship between purchaser and supplier should be based on trust and be fair to both sides, since it is surely in both parties' mutual interest that each of them should be able to continue in business.  What benefit does the purchaser achieve when he drives such a hard bargain that the supplier is forced out of business?  Any short-term gain he has attained will rapidly be eliminated by the costs incurred in starting the sourcing process all over again with fresh suppliers.

The same situation applies, of course, to wage negotiations.  How many unions have put their members out of work, by forcing unrealistic wage settlements?  In the short term, the increased wages are appreciated by the staff.  However, what benefit is such a settlement to them, once the employer has to declare compulsory redundancies or even goes into liquidation?

When Thinking About Data Security, Remember "CIA"!

Sunday 24th May 2009

No, not the well-known United States spying organisation - but a very appropriate three-letter acronym nevertheless

There are three fundamental elements to security: Confidentiality, Integrity and Authenticity.

Confidentiality means that the data is encrypted in such a way that it is incomprehensible except to the intended recipient.  This is nothing new - even the Romans used fairly simple encoding techniques to ensure that messages sent by Caesar to the commanders of his legions remained private.  During WWII, he Nazis famously used the Enigma machine for the same purpose.

Integrity addresses the problem of a message being tampered with during transmission.  It is typically achieved with the aid of a checksum, thus ensuring that any alteration to the message's contents can be detected.

Authenticity is the final element.  It is responsible for ensuring that the other party really is who they say they are, rather than a clever impostor.  A well-known example of this is the telephone caller who claims to represent "The Bank" and "There has been a problem with your account, so please may he have your username and password?".  As a human, one may put down the telephone, then call the Bank back at a known, trusted telephone number.  Alternatively, one may request information that only the real Bank could know.  Electronic communications can use a "digital certificate" to provide the certainty that both parties really are who they claim to be.

Those who ignore even one of these three elements do so entirely at their own risk.