Phil B at Green Pike Ltd

@[email protected]
14 Followers
74 Following
53 Posts

Director of Green Pike Ltd (https://www.green-pike.co.uk/ — a computer consultancy) and an information security manager (in the public sector). Former visiting professor and escaped academic.

Infosec, software engineering, F/LOSS and whatever else catches my interest…

BCS, CIISec and IMA

Green Pike Ltdhttps://green-pike.co.uk/
Phil B at Green Pike LtdJun 18
abadideaJun 18

I love fountain pens but you do have to be aware of things like “weather decided it’s a leaky pen day”

(Sudden changes in air pressure can cause fountain pens to blorp) #fountainpen

Phil B at Green Pike LtdJun 18

Another day, another instance of UK regulators forcing people to buy commercial software just to engage with them.

Companies House writing, “all companies having to file their accounts at Companies House via commercial software”, wef 1 April 2028, “our web and paper routes will be closed for accounts filings from 1 April 2028”.

Show threadPhil B at Green Pike LtdJun 17

@davidgerard Depends very much on your tolerance of local vs remote working. If local and the local economy is poor, then it's really hard. Remote gives you more opportunities.

Legal structure matters. E.g., do you or the company get sued if it all goes wrong? The bureaucracy could be easier; if you're making enough, just get an accountant to do it. (If you're UK based, you won't have much choice soon, thanks to unhelpful decisions by certain organisations.)

Staying below the VAT threshold is nice unless you really are making oodles.

I think some others have mentioned word of mouth as best. Getting out there and making connections seems vital (and I'm rubbish at it 😞 ). Search engines are worse than useless nowadays.

Probably all utterly obvious, but my 2p.

Phil B at Green Pike LtdJun 17
David GerardJun 17

god help us we're idly chitchatting about a sysadmin/dev consultancy

obviously a shit ton of you want precisely this, and i can see you twitching for the YES I WANT IN button - but DON'T do that yet there is no thing here

but how the fuck do we sell this? None of us have any fucking idea how to market a consultancy, we all find doing sales makes us want to die

so. how the arsing fuck does one sell one's tech services?

also if you’ve established a consultancy before and can give an overview of the process and stuff we haven't even thought of, do feel free to chime in

Phil B at Green Pike LtdJun 15

@neil One of the documents says "This consultation was analysed with Consult, an AI tool developed by the government specifically to analyse responses to public consultations." So I expect the thought put in by those who bothered to spend time and effort responding will been wasted when it was never read by a human.

I expect the choice will soon be "hand over ID or be excluded from huge swathes of the Internet". :-(

Phil B at Green Pike LtdJun 6
John Carlos BaezJun 6

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@11011110/116702037049926326

The rebellions continue!

The publisher Springer put pressure on a journal's editors to accept more papers, to make more money. The editors resigned and started their own journal, which is peer reviewed and 'diamond open access'. That means FREE to publish in and FREE to read!

And they did this with the help of Open Library for Humanities: an organization that coordinates 35 journals like this, and develops software to make it easy for you to set up your own.

The executive director, Caroline Edwards, says:

“It’s fantastic to be supporting another research community to regain editorial control of its journal and leave Springer Nature. At Open Library for Humanities we’re seeing a growing number of furious academics ready to withdraw their labour from unscrupulous commercial publishers like Springer Nature."

Phil B at Green Pike LtdMay 23
Derick RethansMay 23
@pauljrobinson No answer sorry, but an addition: governments making it harder to run your own due to silly "online safe" laws. Sigh.
Phil B at Green Pike LtdMay 17
Lauren WeinsteinMay 17
Peter G. Neumann, renowned computer scientist, ARPANET/Internet pioneer and expert on technology risks, working at SRI International since 1971, has died at age 93. Peace. He has been my friend and colleague for over half a century. He will be greatly missed.
Phil B at Green Pike LtdMay 7
...and another push on (UK) BBC Radio for #passkeys. Probably a good thing overall... but still lots of complexity, a lack of portability -- and only a very small minority of sites I regularly use support them (!).
Phil B at Green Pike LtdApr 29
@becomingwisest Thank you -- I will do some more testing, and see which technical policies they will fall foul of!