• Telling the truth can be injurious to your health!
    Telling the truth can be injurious to your health!
    I came across this memorial at the top of the main street in Haverfordwest. It has a cautionary inscription:

    On this spot William Nichol of this town was burnt at the stake for the truth. April 9th 1558. (The Noble Army of Martyrs Praise Thee)

    No one ever likes to hear the truth. It is a human failing. It is always the messenger that gets shot.

    There is a subtle art to telling people what they don’t want to hear. The secret is to let them think that they thought it up themselves. Not an easy task, but that’s where storytelling comes in. Don’t tell the blunt truth, tell a story that sows the seeds of truth in the listener’s mind. They will water it and let it grow until they have to accept the fact of this new idea in their heads.

    If only it could be bottled and we could be sure that the contents of the bottle would work every time.

  • Having been seriously hacked recently, I’ve taken to checking 404s every now and then. These are files that were requested from a site but were not found in the site folder.

    I used to look at 404s to see how I could improve users experience of my site. Naively, I used to think these file requests would be coming from friendly users who are looking up pages from their favourites that are no longer on my site, or that they had followed old and out of date links. This is true, to a certain extent, but closer inspection reveals a more worrying truth.

    Most of the requests are trying to reach the previous insecurity, which was in the wordpress blog software implementations on my site. But now I’ve noticed pot luck requests. These requests are for files that could well exist on any website, in folders that come as standard in basic implementations of blogs or stores or contact programs that anyone can easily put on their site nowadays. Most sites come PHP enabled with MySql databases. Systems like fantasico allow any idiot to populate their web folder with powerful and sophisticated software. Sadly, understanding how to keep them secure is not so easy. Updating with security patches is time consuming and often confusing.

    I sense that there are robots trawling the web for standard implementations of software by calling up files that are standard to those implementations. When they find a live website and report back, then all the known security issues with that program can be probed on that site. This is all done automatically. Many millions of attempts must be made every day, if not every hour. Someone at the moment is looking for analytics information in a multitude of languages. Is this Bing, out to get info on Google or is the a more sinister motive?

    This is how the hackers find weaknesses and worm their way in to take over websites and run them for their own purposes, usually without the website owner ever knowing. This is what will bring the web down, eventually. Why bother with having a website, when website thieves and assassins are at you all the time, when there is no long arm of the law to protect you?

    If hackers broke into my house and began selling drugs or running a scam to steal money, the police would be there within minutes of my call. If someone does the same on my website, it seems to be fair game. Why bother with old-fashioned crime when you can get away with cyber crime so easily?

    But it is even more sophisticated than that. Hackers are probing my site, drilling down two or three folders deep, folders with uncommon names that I have chosen and often misspelt, and requesting files that might have insecurities if that is where I was hiding them, often with file extensions I’ve never heard of. Still, this is probably all automatic, but it does make one feel more paranoid, like I’m not just one of a group that they are trying to pick off, but that that they are after me personally. Paranoid? Not me – at least I wasn’t until the internet came along.

    I’ve had a couple of ideas recently, for sites that I could set up, but then I think about it and can’t be bothered. It’s too much hassle – not the work putting the sites up, but the effort I’d have to put into protecting them.

  • National Botanic Garden of Wales. The spectacular roof of the great glasshouse. Probably the best bit of the whole place.
    National Botanic Garden of Wales. The spectacular roof of the great glasshouse. Probably the best bit of the whole place.
    Friday I drove to Haverfordwest in the far reaches of Pembrokeshire, stopping off at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. It was a millennium project. My wife and I visited it the day before Prince Charles officially opened it in 2000. I was hoping it would have softened and developed, but It seemed to have been stuck in a timewarp. Gardens are supposed to grow – but this one hasn’t. I kept telling myself to be positive, but it was quite difficult.

    It doesn’t help that it is in the middle of nowhere, and a long way to go to visit. Its not connected with a university, and so hasn’t got that academic bustle about it and, being a botanic garden, tries not to be a visitor attraction or a pretty garden or place to show off gardening equipment and systems or what you can do with your gardens. I came away confused. Not knowing what it was meant to be. It’s quite nice, but…

    The walled garden was quite nice but it was filled with a jumble of things – bananas to pumpkins via the greenhouse, which was full of orchids and subtropicals. I could only compare it to the wild romance of the walled garden in Castle Kennedy near Stranraer, which I visited on Monday. No contest. Castle Kennedy knew what it was and did it superbly.

    The Haverfordwest Book Fiesta was very well advertised and organised – I feel the Library would have wished for more people to come out than did. We are so comfortable in our living rooms these days, it gets harder and harder to get people out to see something live – even when it’s free! Maybe that’s an element. We get so much for free today that we take things for granted.

    However what we had was a quality audience and I have a great time telling stories. It was great to see Bernard Ashley there too, who had had quite a journey getting there, following a fatality on the line.

    I was also pleased to meet Illustrator, Teresa Jenellen, who had a lovely way with watercolours – very dreamy and ethereal, and storyteller, David Pitt, who goes by the name of the The Crow Man. He was mixing storytelling with mask making. The trouble with doing events like this is that I come away thinking that maybe I should do masks and making things with children too. Never satisfied! I have to keep telling myself that there are only so many things in life that you can do and do well.

    Thanks to everyone in Haverfordwest for a great day.