Russell Mickler 3/17/15 Russell Mickler 3/17/15

Assumptions Are The Enemy

Small businesses suffer from big assumptions when it comes to their IT spending. The best management practice questions assumption and validates capability.

As a technology professional, you'd think that my daily problems concern hackers, viruses, and glitches. Actually, that's not true. My biggest problems concern assumptions.

Owners and managers of small businesses will assume that their systems are secure; their backups are being performed; their policies and procedures for managing IT are working; that what they're doing today is the best strategy for tomorrow.

I like to work with people and organizations that question their assumptions and push in to their own comfort level to see how things really are. Proving or invalidating assumptions is just good management practice, but it's the only way to verify and improve upon your technology investment.

Russell Mickler 3/12/15 Russell Mickler 3/12/15

More Progress on Swift App - SQLite and TableViews

More testing and creation of an iOS app. Good results today, manipulating SQLite and creating a tableview from a query.

More progress was made on my application today and, wow, it took me about six hours to do this, but I finally got it ...

The animation doesn't really do the code justice, but what it's doing is:

Opens a Navigation Controller with the FMDB overlay for accessing SQLite structures - this will allow me to access a SQLite dbase and populate a TableView.
It looks for the dbase in the documents directory of the current user and, if it exists, drops tbl_contacts, re-creates tbl_contacts, inserts some bogus records into tbl_contacts, and cycles through tbl_contacts to append to an array that's passed to the tableview. All so I can get a selection of humans, as you see here.

The hardest damn thing was to get the code right for appending the values read from the SQL query into an array:

// And populate the array

if let rs = contactDB.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM TBL_CONTACTS", withArgumentsInArray: nil) {

while rs.next() {

// self.contacts = [Contacts(name: rs.stringForColumn("txtname"))]

contacts.append(Contacts(name: rs.stringForColumn("txtname")))

println("Cycling -")

println(rs.stringForColumn("txtname"))

}

} else {

println("Select Failed: \(contactDB.lastErrorMessage())")

}

println("I'm done cycling")

Anyway, it was crazy how long it took me to get the syntax right, but now I've got a tool to open a dbase, create a query, cycle through the query, populate an array, and pass it to a view ... huge progress today. Much happiness.

Russell Mickler 3/10/15 Russell Mickler 3/10/15

Start Worrying About EMV Transition in October 2015

Starting in October 2015, EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) liability for credit card data breeches will shift from the processor to the retailer.

Technically, the language reads that the "most insecure" in the processing chain is responsible for breech, which extends financial liability back to the business accepting the credit card.

If you're a small business in the Vancouver, Washington or Portland, Oregon area that accepts credit cards, this transition affects you. There are three components of this transition that you must be aware of:

1. Your POS Readiness. The software and hardware that runs your point of sale system must be upgraded to support upcoming changes, including accepting new chipped cards. You should understand your vendor's upgrade schedule and look for gaps in that upgrade process.

2. Your PCI-DSS Compliance Status. The Payment Card Industry have implemented technical and administrative standards that help reduce risk of data breech. Not understanding your PCI-DSS status is a demonstration of managerial negligence that can expose your company.

3. Training. The way you accept credit cards is going to change. With the new chipped cards, you dock the card instead of swipe it; phones will become methods of payment; banks are in the process of replacing cards and activating phone payment solutions; very soon, consumers are going to be showing up at your door expecting to use these new systems. You and your team should be ready.

Mickler & Associates, Inc. can help you with all three components of this problem. Please contact us for a no-cost discussion to see how we can help out.