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Articles by Andy Dent
The Three Tensions Preventing Trust-Building in Organisations
So why is it so challenging to build trust even though we know it is essential? What steps can leaders take to resolve the tensions that hold us back? Institutions and individuals who may once have commanded trust simply because of reputation and status can no longer rely on that certainty. Scandals have undermined public trust in organisations, from banks after the financial crisis to police forces and churches.
Scientists and Sticky Notes
My useful analogy for XML data, and how it breaks. Andy Dent · Follow Published in Sopwith Software Tales · 9 min read · -- Heavily folded rock image used on one of the reports I worked at CSIRO, Australia’s largest scientific establishment, for a few years, in the Predictive Mineral Discovery CRC. It was the most humbling time of my life, for someone used to being one of the smarter people in the room.
Homework helper vs lecturer
Andy Dent · Follow Published in Sopwith Software Tales · 3 min read · -- Back around 1988 I was mostly working as a VAX mainframe sysadmin, at Griffin Coal Mining. One of the geologists I knew was doing a 2-year post-graduate Masters to add computing skills. It was early days but Computational Geology was starting to become an important field. It’s typical in early programming courses for a lecturer to give you a skeleton program as an assignment, to add some features.
My first professional bug
A tale of lost innocence Andy Dent · Follow Published in Sopwith Software Tales · 4 min read · -- Durango F-85 computer from Sydex story about them I’m a college dropout (*). In 1981, I was studying Engineering at the University of Western Australia. As a massive Science Fiction fan, I was overjoyed to hear there was a club for us — UniSFA (40+ years later they probably still have some of my donated books).
Why Sopwith?
Andy Dent · Follow Published in Sopwith Software Tales · 2 min read · -- CC BY-SA Hugh Llewelyn Sopwith Camel at the Western Australian Aviation Museum, 04/06. In 2015 I was in Copenhagen for a couple of weeks, having recently joined the staff of Realm. I was working on the C# SDK to their mobile database, with the other team member and core developers mostly based there.
How does David Lightman in WarGames manage to hack a computer by dialing a number?
I corrected one posting in a comment "You basically had to dial the number for your ISP." is of course wrong - direct dialin predated ISPs. A bit of lengthy personal history below about the credibility of this kind of attack for the times. I was a VAX/VMS sysadmin for a mining company from about 1986 to 1989 and I had one direct dialin line which was a publicly accessible phone number - if anyone had guessed the number they would have been able to get a login prompt.
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