port7 – co – uk

Got a strange task today, was asked to review a Satelite Internet Thingy for the owner of the company I am currently assigned at. Basically this guy has a boat and wants to access the company VPN and do Video Conferencing from the boat.

So while doing this we thought we would have a look at the boat it’s going on. Some people just live in a totally different world! This thing is bigger than my house!!

Working on PCI: DSS at work atm, and I getting frustrated with the wishy-washy statements from our QSA and the PCI Council, that really don’t help me in convincing the exec that we need to take this seriously. They are under the impression that the PCI Council don’t really have any ‘teeth’ and so can’t really justify the spend to become PCI compliant, and in a way I agree.

So I decided to submit a petition on the petition website to ask that the government make it a legal requirement that companies become PCI compliant.

I don’t know if it will do anything but its worth a go, so when it gets approved and I get the URL, I will let you know what it is so you can sign it

This is for the contracters out there…

Interviewer: So, Steven Crony, you are the newly appointed Minister for the Knowledge Based Economy. What exactly does that entail?

Crony: Well, John, its all very exciting. We have to encourage the flexible, knowledge-based workforce, stimulate e-commerce, and take this country forward into the 20th Century.

Interviewer: Er, 21st Century?

Crony: Is it? How time flies!

Interviewer: Um, and you yourself have considerable experience in the knowledge sector?

Crony: Well yes, for many years I worked for ScrambledEggs.com. Until they suggested I …, er I mean, I decided to move into politics.

Interviewer: So what exactly is knowledge-based working?

Crony: It’s really quite simple. You take on computer whiz-kids straight out of college and hire them out at, say, 1000 a day.

Interviewer: that would be, … er … 200,000 a year?

Crony: 200 K. Right. And you pay them a salary of, say, 25 K. They travel all over the country, visiting your clients and doing very clever stuff on those computer thingies. And every month you invoice the client and get a nice big cheque.

Interviewer: So that’s … er … 175K profit then?

Crony: No, obviously it’s not all profit. There’s expenses. Secretaries. Directors salaries. Directors Cars …

Interviewer: … Buildings …

Crony: Well, you don’t need many offices because the staff are all out working for clients …

Interviewer: … Computers …

Crony: Good God no, the clients have those. But its very expensive to run a company properly. Big board rooms, shiny oak tables, that kind of thing…

Interviewer: … I see …

Crony: … and then you have to make sure there’s some money left to pay out to the shareholders.

Interviewer: Such as yourself.

Crony: Quite.

Interviewer: Well that sounds great. But surely it can’t
be that easy. There is some risk involved?

Crony: Well, the risk is that after a few years, the whiz-kids will wonder why they are only getting 12.5% of the money they earn. Then they leave, and set up their own companies. As independent contractors they might charge as little as, oh, 60,000 to do precisely the same job.

Interviewer: But you’re not going to take that lying down?

Crony: Obviously not. As a minister, I won’t stand for it. The thing is it’s all about tax avoidance. Once they have set up their own companies, they can make all the profit. Then they can take the profits as dividends without paying any National Insurance.

Interviewer: You mean, just like any other businessman who makes a profit?

Crony: Exactly. Just as if they were real entrepreneurs!

Interviewer: Which … I suppose … they’re not?

Crony: Oh no no. These people aren’t entrepreneurs. A real entrepreneur, you see, borrows stacks of money from a bank, and hires staff to do the work. If it succeeds, he becomes a millionaire, and makes a large donation to the Labour Party. If it fails he sacks the staff, and borrows more money, from a different bank, and starts all over. Whereas these people…

Interviewer: … the independent contractors …

Crony: … the independent contractors, they do the work themselves. And they expect to be treated as real businesses!

Interviewer: And they pay less tax than if they worked for ScrambledEggs?

Crony: ScrambledEggs Dot Com. Well no, actually they pay more tax. Because obviously if they worked for us, they wouldn’t earn very much, so wouldn’t pay much tax at all. But it’s about fairness you see.

Interviewer: But some of these independent contractors say that you are going to make them pay income tax and National Insurance on the entire fee they charge to a client, and not allow them any company expenses before tax.

Crony: No that’s not true at all. We only want tax on 95% of the fee.They will be allowed 5% for all their expenses. That’s more than generous.

Interviewer: But, … let me see if I have got this straight … a company like ScrambledEggs dot com would pay PAYE and National Insurance only on that part of the fee that actually goes to the worker as salary, say 12.5%, and would pay all its running costs before tax.

Crony: Yes.

Interviewer: So won’t the independents end up paying much more tax than the large companies?

Crony: Oh, much, much more. But they don’t have our overheads. Offices, Secretaries …

Interviewer: … Shiny oak tables …

Crony: … Shiny oak tables … I think I’ve made my point. Big companies like ScrambledEggs.com can’t possibly be expected to compete if the Independents continue to operate under the same tax rules as we do.

Interviewer: And they say that you won’t let them pay their training costs before tax?

Crony: Training? … Oh, training! Well honestly, if people are going to be extravagant they can’t expect the tax man to help.

Interviewer: So to recap, the Government is concerned that these independent contractors are paying less National Insurance than a full time employee?

Crony: Much less.

Interviewer: And they’re still getting all the benefits, like sick pay, maternity pay, unemployment benefit, when they are not paying their fair share?

Crony: Well no, since they are directors of their own companies, obviously they don’t actually get any of those things. But they should be willing to contribute for those less fortunate. Its about fairness, you see.

Interviewer: But you can receive dividends from your 3.7% shareholding in ScrambledEggs.com, and not pay any National Insurance on that?

Crony: Well obviously that’s completely different (laughing). I don’t do any work. You see dividends are unearned income. Since I don’t do any of the work, I get the dividends.

Interviewer: Whereas the contractors do the work …

Crony: So it’s quite wrong that they should take dividends.

Interviewer: I see. But, er, well, some might say that it was a Labour Party principle that workers should be able to profit from their own labour?

Crony: Now there’s really no need to bring up that old Bennite nonsense. We were elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour. We are fully committed to capitalist principles. It’s the bosses make the profits, you see? If the workers start thinking they can do the work by themselves, without any bosses, and keep all the profits for themselves, where would we all be?

Interviewer: Mr Crony, thank you.

Currently looking at ways to reduce costs at work I am investigating using Skype for international communications.

It seems quite good though it is evil in the fact that it’s a propriety protocol. It also is quite horrible network wise, it seems like you have to open lots of outgoing ports on firewall’s for it to work sensibly. Needless to say that if I can’t find a way round that little ‘feature‘ it will not see the light of day at work!

So I have Skype installed on my iBook at home, so if anyone wants to contact me, my Skype name is portseven

Funny quote of the week, read in a document about handheld terminals….

Windows CE.NET 5.0 OS – the most open OS yet developed for Mobile Computers.  A development environment almost identical to Windows, with over 5 million application developers worldwide

Looks like someone has been at the Kool-Aid

Well it’s been over a month now in my new job, all is going reasonably well. I do think I still have a slight ‘rabbit in the headlamps’ thing about me, as its a steep learning curve.

This is quite different from my previous job, as it’s a much more mature IT Department. It is structured ITIL like, and so there is lots of procedure and documentation, as is needed in an IT department of such size. I no longer get called at the weekend when someone can’t login, it just all gets sorted by someone else! I must say I don’t miss the IT support side of the job.

The current thing is preparing the IT budget for next year, as the Technical Architecture Manager I have a big input on this. So I am currenty writing lots regards what I want to spend next year and why. Everything needs a business justification, which can be sometimes tricky given the technical nature of some projects. Still it’s all good experience, and quite interesting.

Just had my 1st day in my new job as the Technical Architecture Manager for Matalan, as with all 1st days in new job’s there was a lot to take in, and I know I will be in learning mode for a good few weeks yet.

Other than that it’s been really good, the people are nice. The infrastructure there looks reasonable, though there are a lot of servers, but thats due to porley written Windows apps. There are a bunch of cool things coming up that I am looking forward to getting involved in, such as a virtualisation trial, move of some apps from DGUX to HPUX & Solaris and an upgrade of the SUSE Retail Linux till systems.

In sad news, I am reeling from the loss of my Thinkpad. Looks like I will have to save up, I need a laptop and nothing other than a Thinkpad will do

Last night before I went to bed I thought I would just check my E-Mails as I had not done so all day, but like the geek I am, I got drawn into something.

3 Hours later at 1am, I had iFolder installed and configured at work. So far I am reasonably impressed, the admin is very slick, the windows client is shiney. I wonder how it scales up, as I might consider using it for our 320′ish depots.

I have just come back from a weeks residential course in Chester, I booked it through GBdirect a few months ago.

It was a course on the PRINCE2 Project Managment methodology and included sitting the 2 PRINCE2 exams, Foundation and Practitioner. It was a great week, I passed the multiple choice Foundation exam on Wednesday with 68 out of 75, then I took the scenario based Practitioner exam later today. Though I won’t know if I passed that for another 6 to 8 weeks.

The week was quite intense, there was loads to take in but the teacher Alan Lloyd was really good and presented the material in an entertaining way.

I am glad it’s over as now I can read a good book without feeling guilty by thinking I should be revising! I also need to work out how I can apply the stuff I learnt to work as they need to feel that they got some value out of paying for me to go on the course. You didn’t think I just did it for my CV did you?!?!

A strange mixed week, a few different things have happened that might be OK to blog about.

* We got a new carpet! It arrived on Wednesday and we are happy with the result, the colour was a bit of a gamble with the new wall paint, but we think it worked out well

* I am moving from Zen to Bytemark for my broadband provision. I was due to be disconnected from Zen yesterday on the 28th, but my connection is still active. I think this is because my router keeps the connection up constantly, so they might have removed my entry from their RADIUS servers so if I disconnected and tried to connect again it might fail. But as my current ‘session‘ has not dropped I am still OK.

* The new bed is due tomorrow! The old one has served us well for the past 7 years and so we think its time for a new one

* I think we will be moving from Debian Woody to Ubuntu Breezy for our new depot PC image. The reason being we are wanting to have things like nice handling for people plugging in Digital Cameras and more hardware support for the range of PC’s we are now having to support. We could have used Debian Sarge for this, but to get all we wanted we would have had to pinch bits from Etch and Sid. So instead of having a platform that is a patchwork of several different distro’s we have just one single distro to manage. Will this be the largest corporate deployment of Ubuntu yet? It would be interesting to hear of others that have done something similar

* I was informed by the tax office that my tax code is changing for the worse, meaning Gordon Brown will be getting more out of me! They claim that they didn’t know I was getting the fuel allowance! So UK Plc is taking more money from me and yet my brother over in Canada is being given money from his government! I need to move out of this country!

Interesting week all in all….