My November newsletter has just gone out.

It’s official! I’m an unusual person. Just 16% of IT workers are women.

Seriously, though, it appears that the proportion of women in IT is actually falling, as more leave the field than join it.

Widespread delays to the London Underground this week were caused by one of the Tube’s infrastructure operators installing new software.

The new software was loaded over the weekend, presumably to minimise any disruption.  There’s no indication of what actually went wrong, or whether it could have been prevented by better (or more, or any) testing.

A misplaced decimal point has cost Clerical Medical £17m. Apparently a wrong decimal point was input to some unit pricing data in 2002.

A white paper from Lepus Consulting on The Management of Spreadsheet Use in Financial Services. Despite the title, it considers only investment banks. It’s mainly anecdotal evidence from a survey (no numbers), with a short guide to best practice.

Another web-based spreadsheet. I don’t know how it compares to Google’s.

Apparently it’s possible to use them to hack into ATMs, as well as to annoy your fellow passengers.

Laptops can contain confidential information, and are inherently less secure than large machines: it is easier to take physical possession of them.

Nationwide building society recently had one stolen that contained customer information; and 3 laptops containing police payroll information were stolen from LogicaCMG, the UK IT services firm.

You have to wonder whether it was absolutely necessary for this information to be on the laptops in the first place. It appears that it may not have been, as Nationwide are saying that the employee who had the laptop stolen may not have been complying with the firm’s security policy. Of course, it’s one thing to have a policy and another for it to be complied with.

Firefox 2.0 is better than Internet Explorer 7 at preventing phishing, according to a study commissioned by Mozilla. A study commissioned by Microsoft found that IE7 is better than a range of 7 third-party security applications. The Microsoft study didn’t include Firefox.

“The Shuttle was never expected to be in orbit as one year gives way to another”. Unbelievable.