About Me

I dunno what I want to do

One of the most annoying interview questions is “where do you see yourself in five years time?“. I hate it. I have no vision of the future like this. Hell, I barely know what I want to do tomorrow. I’m good at foreseeing the future, honest! So my first job, straight out of uni, was with a small Greek shipping company. I learned a lot there ‘cos I had to do it all.

Career advice

I get email… What are your thoughts about making a career out of specialising in Unix? It seems like you’ve done quite well… Interesting question… Realise that I started doing this 30 years ago. At that time there was no Windows (Windows 1.0 was around the corner). We had DOS. Networking was mostly serial based; if you were (un)lucky you might have had Banyon Vines or Novell or some other proprietary network stack.

What made me start thinking about security

Back in 1984 I thought I was pretty good at writing programs for my BBC Micro. I could write BASIC programs that worked; I was learning 6502 assembler. I could hack on programs, break copy protection. I definitely knew more than my teachers. But my brother was able to break my code. For example, I wrote a simple “football” program for him. The idea was that he’d select two teams and the game would simulate a match and generate some scores.