Seamus K - Irish tech industry expat living in Sweden.
I am really enjoying Adam Zamoyski’s “Rites of Peace – The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna” (which reshaped Europe, cementing the position of the old guard, and gutted the aspirations for a new liberal order). It has loads of wonderful sketches of life back them. This one really amused me:
I am sure the lady was embarrassed at the time. But imagine if she knew that people would still be reading about it 200 years later!
I just had another blog post published at work. This one is in in support of an eBook I have been working on for a while – with Mads Becker Jørgensen and Michael Bennet Cohn of course! Lets call me the editor of it.
The ebook is about some things that are “hot topics” these days – the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain technology. Blockchain is often just thought of as something for crypto currencies. But the intrinsic nature of its distributed database, makes it an excellent platform for an integrity assurance solution. The eBook talks about that in the context of IoT.
In a lot of ways Integrity is the poor child of the security trioka. The other two being Confidentiality – is my stuff secret. And Availability – can I get to it when I want. Integrity is about do I trust it. Has someone tampered with it. These are the differences between “is the bank’s internet service up” so you can get to your money (availability), “have account balances and transaction details remained private” (confidentiality), and has someone changed my balance to read €0 (integrity).
Pretty important when you get down to it. But read the book for more information.
The important thing though is that this is a real application of blockchain technology. And it is in use today. It’s not just hype.
I finished reading JM Barrie’s original Peter Pan book this evening. My girls asked me to read it to them. But I quickly discovered the classic text wasn’t really suitable for a modern 4 and 6 year old. You do find it is not the book you think it is, especially if you have grown up with the Disney version. Peter Pan is a selfish shit. Tinker Bell is a scheming shrew who actively tries to murder one of the children. And the whole thing is laced with a rampant sexism that is hard to overlook even with the most generous eye (women/girls are just there to cook, clean and generally act as skivvies for the boys).
On balance I would have to say that it is not suitable for children today. You need to find some other sanitised version.
As an adult though, you can draw a smile from some of the slightly dated language. This passage amused me on the plane this evening:
“The little house looked so cosy and safe in the darkness, with a bright light showing through its blinds, and the chimney smoking beautifully, and Peter standing on guard. After a time he fell asleep, and some unsteady fairies had to climb over him on their way home from an orgy. Any of the other boys obstructing the fairy path at night they would have mischiefed, but they just tweaked Peter’s nose and passed on.”
I know the word meant something else a century ago. But if I read that to my 4 and 6 year old’s I just know that at some stage they would state in public (mortifying their father) that they wanted to take part in “a fairy orgy”!
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