You love Quake 2? Quick, check this!

Quake Done Quick’s Q2DQ2 is essentially Quake 2 done quick. That is, the entire game in one 21 minute, 2 second run.

Check out the run on their web site, and you’ll be amazed. Having recently re-played the game myself over the course of a week and a half, I was flabbergasted. Seeing the QDQ team barge through an area in seven seconds, where us mortals take an hour, is a combination of shock, awe and inadequacy.

So if you want to see someone who really knows how to kick Strogg ass, check out the Quake 2 run, and the team’s Quake web site at http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/qdq/!

Google Trends – Europeans spell it “minigames”

Today you’ll learn how to use Google Trends, if you didn’t already. Not that this is a lesson, but you will anyway, because you want to try Google Trends for yourself.

My personal experience: I found a video on the ‘30 Day Challenge’ website about using Google Trends for researching blog topics. The video is here.

So, I typed in “minigames“, and was surprised to find that most searches came from Germany! How strange, thought I. But then I looked up “mini games“, thinking it would be the same search.

But no, apparently while a search for “mini games” will include “mini-games”, a search for “minigames” is an entirely different thing to Google.

The Oxford’s divine instruction is that hyphenation does not matter, except where it is necessary to distinguish recover from re-cover, to avoid “anti-Darwinian” looking like video gamer’s nickname.

However, this interesting separation of searches gives rise to some important insights, as seen over the fold.

An inflexible IT security policy might only force open bigger vulnerabilities

IT policies will, inevitably, involve restricting or “blocking” various Internet services from employees. However, it is imperative that these policies have built-in flexibility. Furthermore, IT and business staff need to have open, frank communication about circumstances where an exception to the policy is simply necessary.

 

 

The alternative is that business staff will bend the rules anyway, and attempt to side-step your organisation’s security mechanisms.

 

 

Even quickly skimming the article ‘Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You’ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118539543272477927.html?mod=fpa_mostpop), you can easily predict that at least some of your employees are engaging in conduct such as smuggling software onto corporate computer systems, exposing sensitive information to the public Internet, deleting valuable audit trails, and generally risking the integrity of your organisation’s data.

 

 

Luckily, the answer is easy: flexible IT policies. Strict, inflexible policies make staff staff feel they must take matters into their own hands and circumvent your organisation’s online protection. Flexible policies focused on the real objectives of security and data integrity will help you lead your staff to engage in conversation with your IT department, and maintain best-practice electronic security.

 

 

I’d rather spend a relatively short time re-working our IT policies, than have to explain to our key stakeholders why their confidential information was leaked through an unofficial channel created by a frustrated employee.

Blackle, the best mini-site

Blackle is the greatest mini-site I have ever seen.

It’s so very mini, and requires absolutely zero maintenance, yet due to the brilliant idea behind it, people are going to come back to it again and again for years to come. They’ll set it as their home page, and run their every web search through it.

Not only that, but now and in the long-term future, a large proportion of visitors will spread the link to all their friends, family members and colleagues. In five years’ time, some poor sod will find Blackle, say to themselves “Oh cool”, and promptly email everybody they know. Talk about viral marketing.