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Thursday 8th April 2021

Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot:

Technical Musings

Technology Topics

The discussion turned to enumerating technology topics, in a rare almost (but not quite) Shakespearian foray:

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

As you may know, as with many famous (mis-)quotes, this is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 43, and not from Romeo & Juliet, or any other Shakespeare play or sonnet. But it does highlight both the ways that technology is often misunderstood, mis-quoted, and where counting the ways can be awkward when you have overlapping terms like Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and others, that may cover all or some of a topic.

In a library, you might start by looking at the books in the 'Technology' section: which starts with the number 600 in the Dewey Decimal Classification system. You would find that the topic of 'technology' is further sub-divided into:

610    Medicine and Health
620    Engineering
630    Agriculture
640    Home and Family Management
650    Management and Public Relations
660    Chemical Engineering
670    Manufacturing
680    Manufacturing for Specific Cases (Blacksmithing, Printing, Clothing...)
690    Construction of Buildings

Which might surprise you: by what is included, and by what is not...  Trying to find a photo to accompany a blog post on 'Technology Topics' is an interesting challenge - particularly when trying to avoid obvious themes and achieving broad coverage. So no computers, screens, or mobile phones, or male engineers with soldering irons, or oscilloscopes...


Some of these book categories can be turned into modern tech-speak by just adding the suffix 'tech' to them:

AdTech
AgriTech
BioTech
CleanTech
ClinicalTech
DeliveryTech
EdTech
FinTech
FoodTech
GreenTech
HealthTech
InsurTech
MADTech
PharmaTech
PropTech
PRTech
RetailTech
TravelTech

But some technology topics don't fit nicely into this scheme (and to be honest, some of these 'techs' may be unfamiliar: PropTech, for instance (property, real estate,...)):

Ecommerce
Media

...and some technologies are very specialised. MADTech might sound like something to do with mental health, or nuclear armageddon, but you need to think of the TV series 'Mad Men' to figure out that it refers to Marketing and ADvertising - with the accompanying endemic gender bias of that era reflected by the 'Men'. There again, a 21st Century TV series called 'Mad People' might sound like a political drama, whilst 'Mad Human Beings' is surely SciFi (borrowing the antiquated term for Science Fiction), and 'Mad Fab' has to be an Austin Powers movie that never got beyond pre-production.

So where do you go to find out a broader range of technologies, particularly up-and-comping new ones? Here are a few suggestions:


Alternatively, you could approach this from a different direction. Pretend you are a Venture Capitalist or an Angel Funder and search out potential investments in specialist sources:


https://www.seedtable.com/ (analysis of sources like crunchbase)


It can also be interesting to see what not to do...:


Another useful technique is to look for where the jobs are...


Free Vulnerability Scans - in the past...

There was a time, back in 2017, when you could find a number of online resources that would scan a web-site for free and report back with how it fared against criteria like, for example, the OWASP Top 10. The idea was that you would be so impressed that you would go back to them for more information. Altruism was alive and running in those days. Sadly, these days are long gone, and discussion lamented their passing, and their replacement by 'Free Trial' offerings whose intention is to get your email and other contact details as a potential sales lead for complete security packages, consultancy, etc. The modern giveaway when something is 'Not Free Any More' is when a Google search returns a common search phrase like 'UK free online vulnerability scan' - this is a clear indication that too many people have searched for this term, and you might as well be searching for free unicorn horns. Some of these 'Not Free Any More' NFAM sites that attendees knew about included:

https://www.acunetix.com (Yep, 'Get a Demo' is your route through...)

https://appcheck-ng.com/owasp-free-trial/ (This web-site makes it very clear what it is doing!)

Some web searches lead to slightly misleading sites which are selling solutions, not giving information...

https://info.veracode.com/toolkit-secure-coding.html (uses keywords based on OWASP and Top 10)


These last two sites (there are more) seem to think that anyone who is searching for 'OWASP Top 10' is a potential customer, and so they tend to appear in search results above the OWASP web-site itself.

Technical Trivia of the Day:

What is the maximum file size for various popular file systems?

FAT16    2 Gigabytes
FAT32    Just under 4 Gigabytes (2 bytes less)
ExFAT   16 Exabytes
NTFS    16 Terabytes
NTFS5    Just under 16 Exabytes (1 Kbyte less)

The other notable feature of this list is that all of the file systems except ExFAT include a backup copy of the FAT (File Allocation Table) or an equivalent feature. ExFAT does not.

Recommended Movies:

30 Days of Night [ Sources in the UK - Prices vary ]

Near Dark   [ We couldn't find any UK streaming sources... ]

Mad City  [ Sources in the UK - Prices vary ]

Haunted Hotel [ Web-site Amazon Prime - Not free ] 
Filmed in what used to be 'The Great White Horse Hotel' in Ipswich...

As usual, we reckon it is best if you don't know anything before watching a film! So only click on a link if you want your experience to be potentially spoiled...

Recommended TV:

Amazing Hotels - Macau [ BBC 2 in the UK ]

Online Food:


Recommended Diversions:

It seems that there are many managers who require 'Mission Statements' and other blocks of word to promote companies, web-sites, etc. Often, it is not really necessary to spend a lot of your valuable time hand-crafting, hand-editing, and hand-polishing a beautifully composed response - instead use an automated generator:






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A lot of discussion happens at The Thirsty Robot. This blog is an edited, biased summary of just a small fraction of the conversation, links/URLs and references that were mentioned. It is an imperfect record and is definitely not complete - for that you should visit The Thirsty Robot!

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The next online meeting at The Thirsty Robot is on Thursday 22nd April 2021 at 7:30pm GMT.














 

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