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Patrick O'Beirne's blog, Risk Management, Data Quality, Testing, Spreadsheet check and control

Patrick O'Beirne
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Spreadsheet Hell!

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Eusprig 2008 Programme

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PraxIS June 2008

1) Risk & Security
     E-Voting Banned by Dutch Government
     Medical IT risks

3) Spreadsheets
     Eusprig 2008 programme announced
     Another Excel problem solved
     ICAI Spreadsheet Risk briefing

8 Web links in this newsletter

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25 Aug, 2007: BH200 Vista not working

Dell Bluetooth headset woes

I've read various forums such as
http://www.notebookforums.com/thread178221.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=137370
and the Dell support troubleshooter: "Problems With the Dell BH200 Bluetooth 2.0 EDR Stereo Headset"

I posted that method to the Dellcommunity.com forum but my question is:

Why do I have to go through this rigmarole EVERY TIME I turn on the laptop? Surely once installed it should recognise the headset the next time I turn it on? Bluetooth was supposed to make interfacing easier. With the old plug-in mike+earpieces all I had to do was plug them in and they worked. Maybe I should go back to them.

UPDATE: The method I described in my last post does not work any more. I downloaded what seems to be the latest patch, R140135, but when I run setup I get

 
---------------------------
Bluetooth Software
---------------------------
This installer be run on Windows Vista only.
---------------------------

I have an email into tech support, got the automated answer, still waiting for a specific answer.

Still waiting, 2 weeks later....

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Sep 27,2007: Excel 2007 float bug at 65535

multiply 850 by 77.1 and Excel displays the result to be 100000

David Gainer's Excel blog says: The Problem
This issue was introduced when we were making changes to the Excel calculation logic in the Office 2007 time frame. Specifically, Excel incorrectly displays the result of a calculation in 12 very specific cases (outlined below). The key here is that the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel's memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet. Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains "=850*77.1", and A2 contains "=A1*2", A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).
So what, specifically, are the values that cause this display problem? Of the 9.214*10^18 different floating point numbers (floating point on wikipedia) that Excel 2007 can store, there are 6 floating point numbers (using binary representation) between 65534.99999999995 and 65535, and 6 between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 that cause this problem. You can't actually enter these numbers into Excel directly (since Excel will round to 15 digits on entry), but any calculation returning one of those results will display this issue if the results of the calculation are displayed in a cell. All other calculation results are not affected.

Other posts on that blog show how the value of 100000 can be propagated rather than just be a display problem.
Joel Spolsky gives his explanation at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/26b.html

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PraxIS Feb 2008

1) Risk & Security
    Societe Generale 
2) Bank Direct Debit fraud
    Jeremy Clarkson's challenge taken up
3) Spreadsheets
    New certification on safe spreadsheeting being tested 
4) Off Topic
    Schadenfreude
15 Web links in this newsletter

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Praxis March 2008 newsletter

1) Risk & Security
     171,324 Irish blood donor records stolen
     Followup to l'affaire Kerviel
2) Quality
     Software & Systems Quality Conferences Dublin, 5th March 2008
     SoftTest Ireland events April 1,2,3 
3) Spreadsheets
     Jim Kaplan's AuditNet newsletter features spreadsheet tools
     OSU Spinoff RedRover launches its Excel audit product
4) Off Topic
     Interesting Photos of the day 
13 Web links in this newsletter

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ISSA Ireland Friday, May 23rd at 12:30

Sean Carey is Head of Internal Audit at Postbank, Ireland's newest bank recently launched by An Post and Fortis Bank. Sean has a keen interest in information security and on May 23rd will give an auditors perspective on information security, explaining how best to demonstrate compliance internally.

Mike Harris is Director of Risk Advisory Services for Ernst & Young and has worked in information security for over 10 years. At this event Mike will speak on the topic "Achieving Compliance by Improving Security", looking at how to develop overall security framework based on a standard such as ISO 27001 and how this can both improve security and demonstrate compliance.

Eoin Fleming leads the financial services security practice for HP Services and was formerly Chief Security Architect for HP Ireland. Eoin has recently worked with a number of customers to automate compliance checks and on Friday he will outline the possibilities and limits of automated compliance.

For more details or to register for this event please see http://www.issaireland.org/meetings. This is an open meeting, free of charge and anyone with an interest in the topic is welcome to attend.

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IIA Congress Social Networking Free Ticket Draw May 15

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Praxis May 2008

http://www.sysmod.com/praxis/prax0805.htm

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PraxIS April 2008

2) Software Testing
     SQC Dublin conference
     SoftTest Ireland events

4) Off Topic
     The Voice of the Tube

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171,324 Irish blood donor records stolen

How timely: http://www.issaireland.org/meetings Irish Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association Next meeting will be held on Friday Feburary 22nd and all are welcome to attend: Security Breach Reporting and Impact February 22nd, Ballsbridge Court (formerly the Berkeley Court), 12 noon

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Software & Systems Quality Conferences Dublin, 5th March 2008

9.00 - 9.45 Conference opening by: Tom Kitt TD Government Chief Whip and Information Society Minister

9.45 - 10.30 KEYNOTE The Quality Ecosystem Colm Butler Department of AnTaoiseach, Information Policy Unit

11.15 - 12.00 Testing During The Development Phase Using OpenSource Tools Richard Thompson Liberty IT

The Quality Challenge for joined up Government - A Criminal Justice Case Study Mary Scullion Northern Ireland Civil Service

Performance Testing - From Best Efforts to Best Practice Patricia Costelloe AIB

From The Trenches: A Microsoft Testing Perspective Martha Rotter Microsoft Share DSI's Experience of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition Peter Buckley DeCare Systems Ireland

12.00 - 12.45 Panel Discussion "Software Testers: Perceptions and Professionalism" Mary Cleary Irish Computer Society iCS

Test-Driven Development: Ensuring Quality From a Developer Perspective Jedidja Bourgeois Microsoft

Performance Stress Testing: Activity Profiling Fergal Downey/ Emer McVeigh HBOS

An intensive case study of test offshoring Paul Cronin SQS

12.45 - 1.45 LUNCH

Automation strategies for different lifecycle approaches Ken Brennock Insight

The Practitioner's View of Test Automation Jiri Machala QASight/Moravia IT

1.45 - 2.30 KEYNOTE Formula One is a Sport which Revolves around Testing and Quality Mark Gallagher Eddie Jordan's Formula One Team

2.30 - 3.00 COFFEE BREAK

The Application Performance Lifecycle Elma Cusack Hewlett-Packard

3.00 - 3.45 Testing in a Service Oriented Architecture Dave Rigler SQS

Making Sure Information Quality Matches Software Quality Daragh O'Brien International Association for Information & Data Quality (IAIDQ)

End-User Computing: Risks in Spreadsheets Patrick O'Beirne SoftTest Ireland

(repeats) From The Trenches: Share DSI's Experience of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition

3.45 - 4.30 The Truth about Outsourcing Looking Forward to Outsourcing 2.0 Arpit Kaushik Crystals Design Limited

Green Testing: The Race Against Waste Joan Jordan o2

Virtualisation of Test Environments Mark Scully/ Sean O'Sullivan Irish Stock Exchange

Caught In The Middle Testing - the 'No Mans Land' between Systems Test and UAT on Vendor-supplied software Adrienne Reddan Delphi Technologies

4.30 - 5.15 Successful Fusion of Tailored Process Improvement and Capability Building Oliver Lawrence British Energy

Running a centralised Performance testing service in an Ecommerce World Peter Pinto Friends Provident

SQuaRE standard Michael O'Duffy The Centre for Software Engineering

Requirements-Driven Testing: The Clear Solution for Improving Application Quality Fergal McGovern Compuware

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New Yahoogroup subscription hijack

Obviously spammers have realised that these addresses are genuine and can be used for a week or two, until the person returns, to attempt to get access to other lists of email addresses such as Yahoogroups.

On the other hand, unless they also have access to that email address to pick up the confirmation from YG, I don't see how they can access the group or retrieve any challenge email from the moderator - unless there's a way to sign in on the web using just an email address.

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PraxIS January 2008

1) IT Risk & Quality
Bad Health Informatics can Kill
HMRC manual on data protection was protected data
Frequently Avoided Questions about IT auditing
15th EuroSPI Conference, Dublin, Sep 2008

2) Euro Changeover
Cyprus and Malta switch to euro cash

3) Spreadsheets
Office 2003 update quietly zaps older file formats
Seattle Accountant offers free book on Excel for MBA
Dave Hawley's Golden Rules for Excel Development

4) Off Topic
My 2008 photo calendar

13 Web links in this newsletter

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Christmas greetings

Have a peaceful Christmas season and success in 2008!

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PraxIS Dec 2007

December 2007

1) Risk & Security
    The biggest data loss in history ... so far
     and more...

3) Spreadsheets
    Excel User Conference
    Excel tips & tricks
    Manager and Auditor perspectives

14 Web links in this newsletter

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Irish Java Technology Conference

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PraxIS Nov. 2007

1) Risk & Security
     Standard of Good Practice for Information Security download
     Cyber Security Awareness Resource Center downloads 
     Pirate copies of books
     Audit Technology Conference, London 20-21 Nov
2) Irish news
     Ireland Corporate Enforcer impatience with compliance
     ICS Security Professionals' Network Seminar, 5 Nov
     SoftTest Ireland Presentation by O2 and AGM, 8 Nov
3) Spreadsheets
     Excel User Conference Cambridge, Nov 29 - Dec 1
     SPRIG sleepless at INFORMS, Seattle, 5 & 7 Nov
     Did you spot a spreadsheet error from a mile away?
     Excel oddities, annoyances, quirks
     ScanXLS continues to be enhanced
     VBA Code Quality - Project Analyser
4) Off Topic
     Giveaway of the day freeware
13 Web links in this newsletter

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ISACA Ireland Conference 2007 Fri Nov 2, 2007

http://www.isaca.ie/

The ISACA Ireland Conference 2007 will be address the theme "Focus on Data Privacy: Threats, Enforcement and Opportunities"

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Excel oddities

• Maximum application.statusbar message length is 255 characters. Setting it to a string of 256 or more characters long gives error 1004.
• A Text formatted cell displays # characters to fill the cell (eg ##########) when the length of the text is between 256 and 1024 characters.
• Excel 2007 with European regional Windows date settings cannot import dBase dbf file dates correctly. Although the data is stored in the record unambigously as YYYYMMDD, Excel 12 imports it as mm/dd/yyyy so dates with days above 12 appear as text. It imports correctly when the regional date format is mm/dd/yyyy.
• Excel VBA once gave an error with a Double variable appearing as -1.#IND. In Microsoft C, that is an uninitialised variable, or Not a Number (NaN). I could not reproduce the error.

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PraxIS October 2007

October 2007

1) Risk & Security
     Nedap voting machines de-certified in The Netherlands
     Phishy education

3) Spreadsheets
     65535 calculation bug in Excel 2007 cell display

21 Web links in this newsletter

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PraxIS newsletter Sep 2007

www.sysmod.com/praxis/prax0709.htm

2) prax0709.htm#Quality
     Free Software Testing Seminars in Ireland

4) Off Topic
     Tech Gripes

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Final days of August 2007 vacation in Alberta

Banff Centre for the Arts

There were some fun events, such as an informal evening gig by the participants in the Richard Armstrong vocal workshop. We tried out some experiments at Look Again, a collaboration between the artists and the Science Communications people. I didn't enjoy the TV production which was a panel discussion. The chair did not pursue any points in depth, for example the comment by the sociologist - that calling for public debate about nanotechnology is little help because ordinary people are not up to speed with science - could have been taken up by the scientist on the panel, and the audience. A dancer described how a scientist helped her team incorporate dolphin movements into their repertoire; but the host then put her on the spot by asking her to do a dance about nanotechnology for the audience. She got the audience to make movements from large to small, which to my eyes looked like something from kindergarten. I suppose I was being too serious in expecting some audience interaction at a more cerebral level, such as taking part in the debate.

Calgary visit

However the correct Gaelic translation for the phrase would be 
*t-suthain shoilleir* or *uisge shoilleir*. 
Long before the formation of the NWMP, James Macleod had visited Calgary Bay
on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, where his sister's relatives through marriage
owned a small castle named Calgary House. 
The original name in Gaelic was *Cala-ghearridh*,
with the first part *Cala*, meaning "harbour" or "bay", and the second part,
*ghearridh*, meaning "preserved piece of pasture", "enclosed pature", or "farm".

The Glenbow Museum had a good exhibition of Native Indian life, Niitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life in the Blackfoot Gallery. The exhibition Mavericks shows the life and times of famous Calgarians, almost all white. The original inhabitants had a panel on some walls saying how it looked from the their point of view.

Drumheller trip

My Photos: Flickr.com/probeirne

My Videos: YouTube.com/probeirne

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Creative Zen Missing Feature

MP3 concept of Albums

It's amazing that a modern MP3 player like the Creative Zen VPlus can't do what disk changers have been doing for decades, right up to CD changers.

They say to use playlists, but that only works from a collection on the PC to the Zen. It does not apply to a Zen which has been filled from different PCs or where I did not store the music on the PC. The Zen only lists music by artist, not album so I can't even copy it back to a PC with album integrity in order to create a playlist.

Playlists are also double work - I'd have to maintain the playlist everytime I add or delete an album on the player.

All we need is a simple option:

Continuous album play Y/N

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Google Desktop annoying beep

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Frobisher: Three characters in search of an ending

I enjoyed the production of the new opera Frobisher by John Estacio & John Murrell produced by Kelly Robinson and the Calgary Opera at the Banff Centre for the Arts on Sunday 12 Aug 2007.

In the tradition of musicals about theatrical people, this Opera is based on movie people.

The theme is the American Dream, the belief in a new start, and a place to make it in.

Musically, it passed by without much sticking; unlike a musical, in opera there are no big tunes to go away humming. The rising tritone for 'Paradise' was pretty obviously taken from Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, maybe aimed at an audience raised on the 2001 movie.

The music sung was modern but accessible, reminding me of Britten. Estacio's musical language also depicted the Elizabethan court in a way that suggested the time without being a literal merry-down quotation. The chorus of unfortunate seamen had the simplest tune like a sea-shanty.

The performers' voices and diction were very able for this material, so I'd be quite happy to hear the Calgary Opera troupe again. If I saw this opera again, I'd like to pay more attention to the music. My main occupation the first time was catching the words. Although the diction was excellent, I still missed enough words to have to look up at the text display. If I waited until I knew I had missed something, looking up would be too late, it would have already moved on. So I took to glancing at it every few seconds to catch what was coming up. As I was in row C, third from the front, not only had I to crick my neck up quite a bit to see the text, but also the light for the conductor's podium was spilling into my eyes. So if you're going to the Eric Harvie Theatre, book well ahead to get the good seats.

The Wagmanites, the coterie of assistants to the film producer Wagman, was played as a tribute to big musical chorus numbers, entertaining, moving non-stop, very well staged. And ironically although the Elizabethan courtiers were just effete, the modern hangers-on chorus was given the job of stating the main principle of operation for all the characters: appeal to the heart, not the brain.

This key principle of salesmanship was used by Frobisher to get Good Queen Bess to open her purse and once again give the gold and the men for a speculative voyage. Frobisher pitched to Queen Elizabeth what she wanted – prestige, a way to China by the west. Michael projected his own dream on Frobisher, that of a new world where men (what, on their own?) could start again. Of course, we now know that if we humans did discover Paradise, we would be the serpent. He did capture Anna with this dream, though. Anna used the pitch to appeal to Wagman's vanity.

One line which drew a laugh from the audience which I am guessing would mainly consist of academics and Canadians is that of Anna's mother Jessica who said that Wagman would probably not know her because she was a teacher and Canadian. This reference to the self-deprecating Canadian character brought a chuckle.

The plot was fast moving and very well constructed – at no point were we confused between the then and the now, between Frobisher in the 1570s or his ghost  appearing to Anna now, and other cinematic cutaways in the plot.

Michael was dispatched from the story fairly quickly but not from the stage. He was portrayed as vain 'I have dreams to bestow on you, Anna', and self-centred, saying 'love you' (misremembered by Anna as 'I love you') while walking off leaving her alone, and foolish, going on his own without communications or distress signals.

The only moment that I wished would move on a bit was Anna's aria about her love for Michael. As his character had not been developed, except perhaps in the most unflattering way possible, we had no reason to see why she would feel that way for a guy like that. Unless, of course, we were meant to see that as her infatuation.

Anna was the romantic character, in love with an ideal. So was Michael and he projected that on to Frobisher, explaining his search for gold as a search for Eden.

The twist in the story was to offer us three endings.

The first was the classical tragedy, where the romantic heroine goes off to die in the snow pursuing a dream. In real life, anyone who did take off their clothes in the Arctic and lie on the ice would die in a few minutes anyway.

The second was the feel-good Wagman ending. Frobisher returns, apologies for not finding glory but Queen Bess decides that with his experience he's just the man to take on the Pope and the Spaniards in an Armada.

The third was the comforting ending where Anna was in fact alive. Unsaid, I assume that she was immediately rescued by the party of filmmakers, perhaps using modern technology. In older days, that scene would have to be shown, and would include her acceptance of her misguided adventure and her blindness, in true moral tale fashion.  Today's audience would be assumed to fill in that for themselves. The Candide-like ending showed her accepting that only in life can you dream, as her mother looked approvingly on.

Politics

In the third, bourgeois, ending, Anna was now shown as a tame domesticated woman (making stew, however inexpertly) rather than the wild spirit she was before.

For an opera set in the Arctic there was no appearance of an Inuit character in a voice role. Only the sanitised 'ancient Inuit voices'. According to the programme, these were the unseen chorus doing the heavenly voices background. That may have been clear to Canadians who might recognise the language but it was not explicitly shown as such in the opera. I wonder why Inuit voices have to be 'ancient'. Maybe ancient voices are safer, unlike the contemporary more uncomfortable voices. In New Age terms, a romantic like Anna would want to hear voices of encouragement anyway, rather than the more realistic voices of real Inuits who would tell her to get back immediately before she froze to death.

Perhaps one could imagine other endings, which maybe is the point of the opera – to start us thinking and speculating.

Patrick O'Beirne, 13 Aug 2007

Link: http://www.banffcentre.ca/frobisher/

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Banff music and dance

Sat 4 Aug, Young Dancers, an end-of-term presentation of what they could do in classical and jazz dance. Very impressive, especially as some were very young, aged 12 and 13. Only three male dancers.

Tue 7 Aug, Summer music in St. George's in the Pines, Banff. A nice mix of song and string quartet including an amusing piece "Don't let that horse eat that violin"

Wed 15 Aug, Mighty Popo. Blues, African singer, drummer, guitar. Easy listening for a summer evening, although described as 'acoustic' this was in fact heavily amplified.

Sat 18 Aug Banff Festival Orchestra conducted by Alain Trudel, with Anton Kuerti as soloist in Brahms' second piano concerto.
http://www.banffcentre.ca/media_room/Media_Releases/2007/0810_anton_kuerti.asp
The orchestra of young players was assembled for a four-week run. Alain Trudel looked to be just the kind of conductor I'd like to be in front of, economical and supportive. At this event, Anton Kuerti was awarded the Banff Centre's prestigious National Arts Award of a prize and a residency. The small orchestra, with reflecting sound panels behind them, was projected into a rather dry acoustic, and the piano also sounded lighter than expected. I am used to larger scale recordings of this piece with a heroic wash of sound, so it was like I was hearing the detail for the first time. The effect was that of a niche boutique wine rather than a heavy claret. The third movement was played almost like chamber music, in a contemplative manner.

The second piece was Shostakovich's 9th Symphony which gave individual members of the orchestra a chance to shine. They obviously relished the perky tune with a hint of the danse macabre.

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Dance, Talks, and more at Banff Centre

The Banff centre promotes artistic activity as an alternative to the hard-skills component of most management training centres. The marketing term they use is Leadership Development rather than the '80's Management Development. The programs are for corporate, government, Aboriginal, arts, and not-for-profit (NfP) sectors. The series on Leading Creatively included conversations on Leadership Jazz, Extreme Leadership, the Ecology of Business, Leading in a world of Climate Change, and the Dance workshop that we attended.

This was at the end of a weekend where about eight people worked with a dance company Motus O Dance to develop their attention to movement and body. The facilitator asked the audience to describe some situation they recently encountered on their way to Banff and the group improvised actions to illustrate it. They did well, and when I asked how they knew what to do together, one participant said that they had learned to pay deep attention to what was going on, and they expected the skills they learned here to be of use back in the workplace.

I asked a member of Motus O how they worked with engineers and IT people (think of Dilbert and Dance...) and he illustrated a way in which they elicited moves from a group recently that avoided embarrassment and withdrawal by playing back gestures natural to the people, actions which they were already able to own.

It was an interesting and enjoyable couple of hours.

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Banff New Media Institute

Aug 9, Aboriginal Animation.

Videos created by First Nations people using the facilities of the BNMI. Some were simple drawings with a voice track, others more complete animations. I don't remember the details now but it provided an insight into their lives and stories.

It was followed by a three-dimensional simulation projection of a story about a Raven. Developed in Maya, it used all the techniques - 3D glasses, immersive projection on three walls, and the floor will be worked on next. The person interacting used the joystick to control navigation, similar to video games. Afterwards some kids enjoyed playing with it while I went backstage to have a look at the technology. They intend that this could be made available over ordinary broadband, which in Canada means a lot, as it's one of the most connected countries in the world.

Aug 16, Interactive Screen

1) "Chain Reaction" (c.15 minutes) a performance by Animals of Distinction.

The audience stood around two black-clad girls lying on the floor under a video projector. A black-and-white animation started like a fractal growth, a Monty Python ornament, or a continuously growing plant tendril. Loud music pounded from the speakers. The dancers leapt every few seconds around the floor but staying to the floor plane, a kind of horizontal ballet. Towards the end, a cartoon of a bear was briefly projected and then the tendril drawing resumed. It was described as "a real-time game of snakes and ladders ... unfolds between animation and performers". I was not aware of any game element and lost interest when there appeared to be little variation in activity after the first few minutes.

2) "Streaming Video" (8:00) and "Winterscape" (15:30) by Jim Bizzocchi Ambient video is designed to be as easy to ignore as to notice. These videos showed a pleasing sequence of cleverly masked dissolves among water landscape and winter scenes respectively, to a xylophone background. It's a kind of video Musak, suitable for wallpaper in visitor centres or shopping malls or TV intermissions. It was very pleasant although in the darkened projection room where we had to pay attention to it, it was somewhat like having to watch screensavers.

3) "The Subliminal Organism as a Limnological Feather Vane" (19:00) by Noel Begin A ground-pounding machine was shown in closeup (so close you could catch the dust in your throat) and slow-motion, with the sound slowed too. Plants from the Banff National Park, and extreme close ups of insects featured. The bizarre sound track featuring for example phone answering machine messages raised laughs from the audience. Nice photography, but I think it could be cut to one-half the length.

4) Another piece was inserted here featuring routine and excessively long shots of the Rockies with very prominent road noise. If the intention was to make the point that this nature park is a noisy place by the roadside, all I can say is "Yes, we know", and the point could have been made in 30 seconds rather than 15 minutes.

5) "I have seen the future" by Cam Christiansen (6:00)

A story of bored street kids taunting a father & son playing tennis, told from the son's point of view, who reflected on his own younger life. The video was computer generated including mouth animation matched to words. The words were heard in a song played live by a guitarist. This was introduced as "experimental", which is probably a euphemism for "we didn't bother rehearsing the sync", as a musician accompanying a silent movie is as old as film itself. Still, it was relief to see a video that actually told a story.

My own pictures and videos of our trip to Banff are amateur but just for interest they can be seen at Flickr and Youtube

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PraxIS August 2007

1) IT Risk & Security
Risks from untested medical spreadsheets
Spreadsheets latest spam message carriers

2) Quality
Spreadsheet & Data Quality

3) Spreadsheets
Report from Eusprig 2007 conference
The Bug Hunt results

4) Off Topic
Spreadsheets considered harmful :-)
11 Web links in this newsletter

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PraxIS July 07: Audit Guides, ISO 27K Guides, Automation, Chance, Eusprig 2007

1) Risk & Security
     Global Technology Audit Guide (GTAG)
     Guidance to ISO 27K Information Security Management Standards
2) Software Testing
     Automated Scripts push my buttons
3) Just read these a second time
     
4) Spreadsheets
     Eusprig 2007 in Greenwich July 11-13
5) Off Topic
     'Canada' explained to foreigners
10 Web links in this newsletter

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PraxIS June 2007

1) Risk and Security
Quality Schadenfreude
Bogus reports of Canadian 'spy coin'
Ryanair check-in site exposes data
US Intelligence embeds spreadsheet in PPT

3) Web Content
How does your site look to a spam sniffer?
What visitors to your web site care about

5) Off Topic
How to write a scientific paper ( ...not)

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PraxIS May 2007

1) IT Risk & Security
     Raising awareness of Information Risk
     Profile of a Fraudster
     Oxley Unhappy with SOX
     Hidden in plain sight
  2) What does the data say?
     Social Statistics blogs
  3) Ireland
     Irish Computing History: the Digital Media Archive
  4) Spreadsheets
     MS Excel Quality Wish List
     On Error GoTo @##^! - sample chapter for VBA developers
     Training course, software, book
  5) Off Topic
     Two stories of customer service
     19 Web links in this newsletter
 

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PraxIS April 2007

2) ScanXLS 2007
     List all your spreadsheet files with an overview of their contents

4) Spreadsheet news
     New products, free downloads

20 Web links in this newsletter

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Iceland photographs and movies

and the videos to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/PROBeirne

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PraxIS February 2007

1) Risk & Security
The ISSA / UCD Irish Cybercrime Survey
'Certified' Cheque Scams
DST March 11 = Y2.007K ?
2) Quality
Fourth Information Quality Forum, Dublin
3) ICS News
When Irish I.T.s are smiling
4) Spreadsheets
Free contributions to the Eusprig yahoogroup
5) Off Topic
Google Map Trek
Solzhenitsyn's advice for life
16 Web links in this newsletter

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Seminar on Auditing Spreadsheets, Reykjavik

This seminar is by kind invitation of Prof. Ebba Thora Hvannberg, Ph.D. of the Computer Science Department. I was introduced to her by Prof. Oddur Benediktsson , a frequent visitor to universities in Ireland. His course in the Personal Software Process (PSP) of Watts Humphrey started my interest in software quality and process improvement.

TOPICS
1. The risk to organisations from the uncontrolled use of spreadsheets;
2. Surveys, research, news of financial loss or embarrassment from spreadsheet errors;
3. Ways of assessing and mitigating risk;
4. Managing the spreadsheet development process, using a maturity model;
5. Advice on knowledge worker training, data quality control, testing, and model audit.

Auditing spreadsheets: Motivation and methodology - Fyrirlesari: Patrick O'Beirne FICS Systems Modelling Ltd, Fimmtudaginn 22. febrúar kl. 16 í stofu 147 í VR-II
Málstofa í tölvunarfræði
Allir velkomnir
Fjallað verður um endurskoðun á töflureiknum. Meðal efnis verður áhætta stofnana og fyrirtækja af því að nota töflureikna sem ekki er stýrt. Kostnaður vegna villna í töflureikningum. Leiðir til að meta og minnka áhættu. Stjórnun á þróun töflureikninga og hæfnislíkan. Ráðgjöf um þjálfun, gæðastjórnun gagna, prófanir og endurskoðun.

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Iceland Feb 2007

I visited the Hofdabrekka Hotel near the coastal village of Vik (pop:300) in Southern Iceland. Naturally I took the usual photographs such as the Reynisdrangar (Troll Rocks)

And icicles in the Kerlingardalur (Witch's Valley)

But to give the feel of the place when winter snow arrived on Feb 8, so you can compare it with your own snow on that day, here is a one-minute 360° panorama

24 MB MPEG Video

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PraxIS January 2007

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