Who am I?

I'm currently a Systems Security Auditor and have been carrying out Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audits for telecommunications and financial orgnaizations in Toronto. I'm currently an independant consultant at System Integrity. I focus on Risk Analysis and Management and Regulatory Compliance.

Along the way I've variously been a Military VLSI chip designer; Military Avioincs S/W architect; Power Generation & Distribution S/W development manager; Military ATE s/w designer and project manager; UNIX Guru, Maven, Wizard and device driver writer in the V6/V7/SYSIII/SYSV days, DotCom entrepreneur, and a wide number of more recent roles in System Security and Auditing, mostly in Finance and Telecomunication. My emphasis has always been on high integrity systems.

What can I do?

I can code, I just don't like it. I much prefer to use specification tools and generators. I make great use of knowledge mapping and other automation tools

Oh, you mean for TWiki. Right. Well, I seem to be good at breaking things. Sort of like a software "bull in a china shop". I suspect that it is because I make very different assumptions from the people who build systems, such as they (the system) should do what they are specified (or documented) to do, or that they should do thing that a user might expect them to do. Call it 'Quality Control"

For example, in creating this topic, I found that the link at DevelopBranch has a URL parameter that reads:

   templatetopic=TWikiContributorWouldLikeToCheckInTemplate

Why do I want to do it?

I like Wikis. I'm a great supporter of collaborative communities in a number of spheres, and wikis are a wonderful tool. I make use of TWiki as a "database" and presentation tool for developing Information Security policiy databases for client. It is an excelent content management system, as are all Wikis, but its plugins give better control over presentation, linkage, scope, classifications, searching and feeback. It makes the "does this apply to me" and "what am I suppoed to do in this circumstance" issues much easier to deal with. (In reality, most of my client have only ever just copied their 3-ring binders to a intranet as PDFs. The step up to a Wiki is amazing for them!)

The plugins make TWiki a great base for such applications in that area. and I want it to get better.

I seem to have a knack of uncovering problems with the Dakar/DEVELOP branch, ranging from small, cosmetic things to real showstoppers.

Its not that I desperately want SVN access - who knows, I may find problems there - but the developers I've been dealing with keep telling me put the fixes and changes into SVN myself. Most of the fixes are likely to be clarifications and the corresponding changes to documentation. The sort of things that the developers tend not to want to do and don't like me bugging them about.

-- AntonAylward - 26 Mar 2005

Absolutely. Anton has been a really constructive tester, and it is really irritating that he can't check in the little tweaks and fixes when he wants to. Please let him check in.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 26 Mar 2005

I agree!

-- MartinCleaver - 26 Mar 2005

Agreed. Anton, you are a professional addition to the team

-- PeterThoeny - 30 Mar 2005

Welcome to DEVELOP Anton!!

-- SvenDowideit - 02 Apr 2005