Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. This is theCUBE coverage, SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Keith Townsend. Our next guest is Baskair, who's the CIO for Dell EMC. CUBE alumni, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you. Sorry about NASA, tennis before we came on. The digital world is a complete converges with the analog world, so people's interests, how they work are really key, and one of the things I would like to get your perspective on this morning is a lot of the announcements we heard from Pat Gelsinger specifically was about workspaces, but endpoints. And that really speaks to how people want to work. The bottom line is that I got a phone, my phone, now it's a work phone, those days are over, long and gone, but now what are the challenges for digital, as the workplace becomes digitized? You got to make it run on time, keep the lights on, but also put in an environment that has empowerment, has all the right software, and meet the expectations of the now enterprise consumer. What are the challenges now? Yeah, I think, first of all, IT industry has been changing in our generation, more or less, right, it's a young industry. When I started running trains on time was important, and it's still important, so you can't say I don't want to run train trains on time, but that's just the basic stuff right now. So a lot of people are worried about getting Uberized, what happens to my business, and so on. On the end point, the issue is, people want to talk to things now. So I thought mobile, last time when you spoke, we talked about mobile, mobile, mobile. And mobile is still not really there much in the enterprise. People still rely, a lot of things are not available on your mobile other than email and calendar. But home, I'm talking to things, and we didn't think we would do that, but next year, a couple of years, you're going to be talking to your refrigerator, you're going to look crazy talking to it, but you are going to be talking to your refrigerator, your Alexa, your TV, and so on, right? So I think it's a unique combination where enterprises have to be consumer-like. People come and expect to do that. Pretty much like, I'm sure your son, I do it sometimes, I go to screens and touch it, expecting to be a touch screen. So you and I are going to come and talk to things that work and expect it to talk back. My Mac doesn't touch, but Dell's do. So I got to ask you, so now that you expanded your role for all of Dell as a CIO, it's a cultural integration between two different companies.  What's it been like? I mean like, has it been a firestorm? Has it been smooth? Share some insight into the CIO's role because none of you are going to bring people together through software, but systems, you got to operationalize multiple companies and cultures. Yeah, I think you have to pick a few notch stars, right? So what happens is, we kind of accentuate our differences. That's human nature then, talking about commonalities. And I work for J&J, Glacier, Smithline, Honeywell, Juniper, VMware. So to me, this looks like, well, same code of conduct, we want to do good things, we want to make money, but we want to do the right thing by customers. But people tend to kind of exaggerate the differences in the companies a lot, right? So some notch stars help. The first thing is, we're not going to put the customer in this confusion. So in holding an integration, one of our notch stars is, whatever happens, the customer is going to get its way. He or she is going to order what they want from Dell Technologies and get it. They will not see the confusion. So having a few things like that, and then surprisingly the code for VMware, Dell, and EMC is very similar.  It's kind of common across. So I think we are gravitating towards the common, but, you know, inside the sausage making, there are always people who say, I work for this company and my company was better. It's just natural. It's going to take us some time for that to settle down. But externally, we want to make sure none of you feel like you're working for, you know, several companies. That's the goal. So the customer experience, knock that down first. Yeah, absolutely. You always wait in line, get used to your current email systems, no media radical changes. No, no, that's right. The first focus is, you know, you want to order anything from Dell Technologies, you can get it, you want to work directly with VMware, you can, if you want to choose to work with one account person, you can, billing and everything we take care of.  There will be a little more frustration as we bring collaboration and technologies together But the key is non-disruptive operations. It's very non-disruptive. We're not stopping production, we're not stopping that and so on, right? So in that vein, last year we had you on for VMware, and you predicted, I want to say you predicted the oncoming of VMware on AWS. We asked you the question, what tools did your internal developers use? As you're making this transition to a much larger organization, Dell is known as a branded shop, so I'm not going to show up in Dell with my MacBook, necessarily. But let's talk about the difference in tools from a VMware culture to Dell culture and how you're enabling that new workforce, the combined workforce, to basically get the job done. What's been some of the challenges and some of the victories? So I think VMware maintains a fierce ecosystem, right? So you want to make sure VMware software runs on every hardware possible, every database possible, every storage possible. That's why me as a customer bought VMware and it continues to have that independence. But some customers wanted to be put together, like I'm an audiophile and I want to assemble my own stereo system, I want to buy the right amp and I want to buy the right speakers and so on. It takes me years to put that system together and I listen to one song in a year that is beautiful. My wife goes and buys an integrated system. A lot of customers want that integrated system and they say don't explain how it works, put it all together. Then Dell Technologies makes a lot of sense for them. But VMware is going to say, we'll run on anything that you want. So there are customers who say I prefer this and prefer that. So it's to be natural. But we find more and more customers want to get a cloud in a box. I don't explain that. I don't have time to put it together. So I think it's making that transition. On my mobile technology, yes, VMware will support Apple, will support Android, will support Dell, will support everything else. That is the power of that. And the Dell ecosystem allows you to do that. But we did that though. Remember with EMC, we were selling, we were enabling other storage devices to work on VMware. So that's the way it works. So Pat Gelsinger talked about the VDI thing on stage and I kind of had a flashback. Oh, it's finally crossed the finish line. So it's been the promise for, I mean, I'm a decade, but it's been a changing market. So it's not really a negative on anything other than the fact that people do want to have an end to end full environment and have that. What does that mean, that VDI announced, because it has a little VX railing, which has been tooled up and it's looking like it's doing very well. Are you guys VDI'ed up within Dell? What's that announcement truly mean to customers? So there is a place for it. I mean, if you blame, the reason VDI hasn't taken off as much as you wanted is, you can blame it on Dell. Our PCs are getting so much more better and better. People want that, right? So VDI has always been racing with the laptops to deliver what you want. But you can't force it. So here's the use cases for VDI. If you have a school environment, you have a training environment, you have labs, high security environment. If you have contractors working over your network and want to work on joint development, VDI is perfect. We use it all the time. Banks who have branches, and they don't have IT people in that branch to go fix it, VDI is perfect. Libraries is perfect. Now it's even easier and it looks and feels. Now, you know, we also have some products that you can use Macintosh to run Windows if you want. Those things are perfect, right? So I think that if you try to mandate it as a CIO, if I try to mandate it, if I say you must use that PC or you must use the notebook, you would deliberately use something else. I've learned that lesson. That I have to enable you on every device possible. Any device, every device possible. And, you know, we have to win the hardware based on competition, making the right device. Yeah, and software's going to be the key there. So I got to ask you on the digital transformation question. As you guys are transforming as a company, the combination certainly has got its own CIO challenges. But one of the messages on stage yesterday and today is we want to make it operationally efficient for IT. And I won't say reduce the number of jobs, but in the side effect of automation is to shift resources. So the question to you is, in your digital transformation, where are the areas that you're automating and creating simplicity? And where is that talent creative and also operational talent being deployed into? Yeah, I think data centers clearly. I mean, my definition of a cloud, a non-technical definition of a cloud is, if you have too many people running a data center, you don't have a cloud, right? If you have very few people running your data center, then you have a cloud more or less. So automation data center. Just from an operational standpoint. Yes, from an operational standpoint. I mean, that's how you get the costs down. Is, you know, you totally automate it. So there clearly automation is working. Now, those folks could be used, in my own case, those folks can become spokespeople for my company, they all come and talk about how to automate it. So they become pretty useful. A lot of work on development, so I can actually add value for development. And then security. Security is an area that investment is going on pretty high. A lot of the infrastructure- And there's not enough talent there either. So you need to deploy some people on the security front. Yeah, and the infrastructure guys know security very well because they've been fighting the battle. So you can retrain and redeploy them.  People who say, I don't want to do the same job again tomorrow. I want to automate it. And in our experience, the best people do get better opportunities. Why would you want to do mundane things, you know, over and over and over again? Yeah, I mean, that's the, that is the Facebook meme. I've saw, hey, highest IQ, people are the ones with the laziest because the points, they're smart. Yeah, maybe, maybe I'm very high IQ. You have to tell my wife. They say if you have a glass of wine a day, you must have a high IQ as well. So that's why I drink a lot of wine. You know, good point. Now, back to the data center, this is another point that's come up, not just here, industry-wide, modernization. The modern era where they're calling it, we're calling it on theCUBE, you know, playing IT in the modern era requires different tactics. What is your definition of modernization of the infrastructure? What does that actually mean and how does that become a reality for customers? Yeah, I think the first thing is the things like deployment backups, recovery, disaster recovery and so on, highly scripted and automated. That's one example of a modern. You also have, I mean, products like all flash and so on in data centers, which is pretty cool because the recovery time to go and get a data is much faster. But the main, I will start with automation. If I go to a data center, we've talked about lights out data centers. We haven't delivered on lights out data centers a lot. There's still a lot of people. What does that mean by that? Lights out means there's no humans, right?  What we did is took the humans out of the data center but put them somewhere else. They're still working on them, right? So I think not having too many people, so if the company grows from six billion to eight billion or 10 billion, you don't want to add infrastructure folks to them, you should just scale with it. So I think that is still the number one clue thing to do. The other thing is we're sometimes stuck with legacy systems and we try to sweat the assets for the longest times. My experience, the technology changes so fast. So you can't take an artificial financial numbers and say five years, six years. You have to look at it and say, if I just throw this off and update it to the latest one, how much money and time would I save? Typical CIOs don't do that. I mean, I'm one of the guys who said, let me sweat the asset for 100 years if I can. But the tech changes so fast that it doesn't make sense.  But primarily you've come from a software CIO background. What has been some of the surprising differentiators as Dale has backed you guys up internally? What have been the things that you've like, you know what, maybe infrastructure, physical infrastructure does matter. Where's the key differentiators? I think the first is from a business standpoint, it's a lot of work to be a hardware company. You know, in the software, you develop something. Now you need a supply chain. You need to be global. It feels more like a real company.  It's complicated to do that part. I mean, from an IT standpoint, so we had set up this, you know, I think we talked about the private cloud in VMware. I was very proud of it. It was one of the best private cloud. All the hands-on labs that are run on our private cloud. So it feels like a public cloud to most of our customers, but it's really running in our data centers. Well, the Dell and EMC are in different stages on private cloud transformation. Great opportunity for us to say here's the world's best and biggest private cloud. And by the way, Wikimon just put out research yesterday. I tweeted a piece of it that the true private cloud market is going to be about 260 billion. So it's not like it's experimental in any capacity. And I think hands-on labs are a great example of a great use case. I think we see it here at the show all the time, but can you talk a little bit about how massive hands-on cloud is and some of the technology you've got as a laboratory name? So the same cloud that runs my SAP, my engineering applications and everything else runs the hands-on lab. The beauty of hands-on labs, I don't know what they are doing to my cloud.  Do you have people? I didn't even know they were putting this up, right? They just put it up and when they put it up, they have customers coming and banging on keyboards, creating virtual machines and so on. My system has to be elastic to scale it up, right? So private cloud, you can do all of that and you can do it at scale. I still believe if you run a good private cloud, it's going to be a lot more cost competitive than a public cloud. If you run it the right way, because it's automation that you do it. But with the Amazon and other kind of links that we're building, you don't have to make the decision. You can say these things have to be in a private cloud and these things have to be in a public cloud. I always kind of, you know, twitch when people say everything should go here and everything should go there. It doesn't, if you and I are a startup, we have no money. Of course we've put it in a public cloud. But if you have a little bit of a scale, you know, you should look at both. Right? We talked about it on our intro package today. We think multi-cloud is a little bit way out, but Ivory Cloud is a gateway to the multi-cloud. My final question for you is really more of a strategic one that ties into the theme of the show and a practical day-to-day operational issue that you face. And that's IoT. Obviously Dell is manufacturing. They have suppliers. A supply chain is huge. And besides blockchain being potentially a great solution for a supply chain, IoT instrumentation is important. How are you looking at IoT? Can you share some color into how you're thinking about as a CIO, architecturally, and how and if anything you have in motion today relates to that theme? Yeah, I think this is a big wave. And I always tell CIOs, we always seem to, a lot of us seem to miss the waves, right? We kind of miss the mobile wave and then we are trying to catch up with it. We miss the bring your own device wave and then we try to catch up with it. Because some of us are conservative in nature. This wave is coming. I'm telling them this is coming like a ton of bricks. Don't be passive about it. What's going to happen is all your facilities, guys, are installing IoT devices. They don't call it IoT, unfortunately. They call it building automation systems. It's all sensors. There are coffee machines that are going to tell you that the beans are going down and so on. It's probably already happening. Every factory's got these things that are hooked up. So this wave is coming. They're IP connected. They're all IP connected now. Because they want to offer a service now. If you're a coffee vendor, you want to say, how about I fill the beans for you? And I know when it's done. You know the printers did that with toners. So why not I offer it as a service? So it's coming. And it's all there. The thing for IT is better get on top of the architecture and security, right? I mean, because these devices are all communicating back and forth. You get a lot more attack vectors. So how do you protect them is number one. Better think about it right now.  So it's better to be cool right now and say, let me help you be successful. It's like surfing. You know, you got to get in shape. Then you got to jump on the next wave. So catch up. Catch up now. Don't wait for the wave to go past you. I think we actually used that quote last year too. Best thank you for coming on. Thank you. Great to get the CIO perspective. Real practitioner also happens to be transforming in real time at Dell EMC, formerly with VMware. Great stuff. Here in theCUBE, catching the waves here and Las Vegas for Dell EMC. We're breaking it down, all the analysis and coverage and commentary and opinion here on theCUBE. Go to youtube.com, so that's SiliconANGLE. Check out my interview with Michael Dell. Go to wikibond.com for research and of course, siliconangle.com. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more of day two live coverage after this short break.


Yn yw'r ffordd o'r cyffredin iawn mae'n gwaith hon yn yw'r ffordd o'r mentheu a'r ffordd o'r gwaith yma? Felly mae'n cael ei ffwyaf i ddweud yma ymlaen i'r ffordd o'r ysgrifennu, mae'n gwybod o'r ffordd o'r gwybod yma yn y gweithio i ddiogelio, mae'n cael ei ddim yn ogymell. Ond o'r ffordd o fod yn ymlaen i'r ffordd o'r cysylltiadol o'r nôl, o'r ffordd o'r 1st 99 i'r peir, the building had already been turned effectively into a death trap. That all the fire safety provisions within the building had been compromised. So the fire they faced was unprecedented in the UK, I'll come on to foreseeability in a moment. And we don't think you can really assess that without looking at how it was put into that state. The decisions, what's the regulatory regime, what's the inspection regime, who agreed the contracts, all of those issues that actually created the situation that fire spread in such a way. That said, in terms of the recommendations we are broadly supportive of the recommendations. Our criticism would be that they are, some of them are directed to the London Fire Brigade, we think they should be national, that these buildings are all over the country, so it shouldn't just apply to the London Fire Brigade. Where we have some concern is around the narrative around decision-making on the night, particularly on the issues you've touched on. ond, gyda'n siwr sydd yn rhan, mewn i'r gwblfawr iawn, yn syniau'r plannu ond a'r lle ond. Felly mae'n gwybodaeth os ym hunain o gyda'r plannu am y bydd hynny, ac os ym hunain o'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu, a'r rhai o gwell o gilydd i ddechrau rhai o'n deti tickets the selection of people to change longstanding policies that have been trained for that are national policies on quite junior levels in London and the I'm struggled to see how it could have happened and I think the the stay put advice that had been given by the Fybrigade. Did cause more depth, so so regardless of who's fault it was that that stay put advice was given, that was a mistake. I take understand the point, but I think the the conclusions that the report reach aren't actually based on evidence that he sets out so there were various expert witnesses who gave evidence to ymdweud o'r ysgolwyddiad, yn ymweld Professor Barbarol Ayn, ac mae'r ysgolwyddiad i gyda'r ymdweud i'r bwysig, yw'r ysgolwyddiad i'r 146, a'r ysgolwyddiad i'r 146. Mae'r cyfnod ymlaen i'r ymdweud i'r ymdweud i'r ysgolwyddiad. Ymdweud i'r ysgolwyddiad i'r 146 a'r 150. O'r ysgolwyddiad a'i gwn i'r ddechrau, phobrol yw ysgolwyddiad i'r 14-20 mwyn, ac mae gen i eich berthynas erioedd o resynol am some botadau. Mae ydw i'r expert yshoddon ar gyfer iawn i ddau hyd yn iesaf, mae gen i ei ddweud o fonti, a yna bod yn fwy o gen i unrhyw pwysig ar y sydd cymaint ar gyfer yrhywun dros ychydig. Mae'n hynny. A'r llwyddo sydd wedi bod yr hyn sydd eisiau yn עin i'r rhywbeth. Mae yna rhaid diwrnod i'r sydd ar gyfer yrhywun dros yr ymgyrch. Mae gynnig rywbeth sydd wedi gyd yn iesaf yr yrhywun dros ymgyrch. Mae eu ddau'r fflaes yno yn rhoi'r lleiaf. Mae'n fwyllt ped gripiau yn yúsiau yn rhaid i ffyrwyr ar gyfer, mae'n dda i dylunio. Mae'n ddau'r ffeirio cheisio gyda'u ffagoriol yn cael ei ffobor o'r llan o'r newydd a'r gair eu llan o'r llad. Rydym ni'n wneud yw'r cyffredin. Bydd y gallu fflaes ei wneud yw'r cyffredin. Ond yna'r bwysig rydyn ni wedi cael bod rŵan gweithio sgwrdd, ac yna fflau'r hynny, Ieithio'r bwysig. Rydyn ni wedi cael y bydd yn ei symud i'i gweledd yn fwy o'r ystafell sy'n gwahoddiol. A tôl iawn i'r byw hynny, rydyn ni wedi gweledd o'n cael ei gweld o'r byw, Cyfudddiad, o'u llrichio, o'u llochio, o'u'i gweld o'i ddryl a'u cyffredigau? Yn cael ei ddweud i ystyried, a yn 28 ymwneud yn y chweithio, mae nid oeddi, mae gennym'r gweithio rhai yn rhan o'n rhan o'r cyffredinol, ac mae gennym'r gweithio'r cyffredinol i gyd-dynnu'r cyffredinol. Rhaid i'n gweithio i'r cyffredinol i'r cwestiynau gofyn yn y moment. Rwyf wedi gynnig i'n gwneud hynny, rwyf wedi gweithio'r gweithio, rwyf wedi yma'r cyffredinol i chi, Gwyddo ddyn ni'n gweld i'r dda chi, Danie Cotton, ddyn ni'n ddwy'r llyfr yn y Cymysgol, gallwn ddyn nhw'n cael ei ddim yn gweithio'r gweithio'r ddwy'r ffordd yw'r ddweud yw'r gweithio arweinydd, ond oedd yr ymdill. Dyna'r ddweud ar gyfer y byddai, ddyn ni'n gweithio'r cyfrif yw'r ysgriff, yn ymdill, am yw'r ymdill, ymdill yn i gweithio'r ddwy'r ddwy'r gweithio ar bobl yn ddweud. Oes bod y cyfnod wedi'u gweld cyfnodol ar gyfer y gafodol Llywodraeth, yn gweithio gael y cyfnodol amser. Byddwn ni oedd yn cyfnodd o ganfodol ymlaen, lle i'r ffair yn Brytyn a ffair yn y rhan. A'r ffair yn y ffrifysgol dros hynny'n neud o'r gwaith newydd, ond mae'n gweithio'r gair o'r ddau, gallwch yn gallu hwnnw, gallwch yn gallu'r glwmp, gallwch yn gallu'r gilyniad ddau, yng Nghymru yn ymwneud y Daug Llywodraeth i'n bwysig o'i llwythau. Nid yw'r ymdeg ar y Lleidio Lleidio Lleidio Llywodraeth yn Llywodraeth a'r unrhyw o'r cyflwyllfa yn ni dweud, a'r cyfrannol ymdegau cyflwyllfa yn ni dweud, ym ddwy'n ddweud ymdegau Llywodraeth, ond a'r ymdegau Llywodraeth yn ni dweud i'r ddweud a'r cyflwyllfa.  Mae'r rhaglenu ar y diolch yn Y Ffair Bwrg Fawr? Rwy'n credu rwy'n credu bod yn rhaid yn ddechrau'r ffordd o'r rhancofile o'r llai gyfnodd oedd yn gweithio rhancofile ar y ddechrau. Mae'r cyfrifiadau oedd yn ddod am hyn yn y pethau. Mae'n ddod o'r rhanncofile, oedd rhancofile'r ffordd oedd yn rhancofile. ac yn ymgyrch i'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd, a'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd. Rwy'n cael y rhanig o'r Lundin fibre Gade, yw'r rhagleniadau ar y llyfr yn ymgrifennu gyda'r cyfnodd o'r rhanig o'r organiol? Yn ymgyrch gyda'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r Lundin fibre Gade, ceisio ymgyrch yn 96-97% o'r ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, y ffordd yn ymblodd. Felly byddai'r cyfnod rhaid i'r cyfrifolau Cyfrifolau, ond y pethau'r cyfrifolau yn cyfrifolau ar y cwrs, ac yn ymblodd, gan y cyfrifolau, yn ymblodd. Gael, rwy'n gweithio, rydyn ni'n cael eu cychwyn o'r cyfrifolau yn y Unedig Unedig Unedig Unedig yw ymddiadol Cymru, yn y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, yn ymddiadol Cymru, yn y Ymddiadol Cymru, Boris Johnson's mayoralty embarked on the biggest ever cuts programme in any fire service in the history of the UK. We oppose that. We've opposed the deregulation of the fire service, which we think lies behind a lot of what happened at Grenfell Tower. So we have a dialogue with chief officers and commissioners. We often have disagreements. There are areas on this issue where we probably share some views and there are areas where we think actually there's a fundamental breakdown in the system that needs to be addressed. In terms of this review, I know you've said that you think they've done it in the wrong order so that they've looked at the fire brigade first and what happened on the particular night instead of the systemic reasons that led to that fire and the people who were implicated in putting flammable cladding on a sky rise building, on a high rise building. Do you think that ordering there is, is there some logic to it even though you critique it or do you think this is a stitch up and that it's almost a bit of a conspiracy to try and scapegoat the fire brigade as opposed to people who might have more structural power in society? You can make a case why it's in that in a way. I suppose it's an easier bit of the inquiry because we're going to then move on to legislation contracts and so on. That's a far more complicated area possibly. My fear is considering the length of time it's taken to get to the phase one report, how long will it take to get to the phase two so people assume, present that we're going to see major changes after phase two, well that could be five or six years after the fire and the idea that we have to wait five or six years for fundamental change to the fire safety policy regime in the UK is pretty alarming. It's a big broad question but what is your principle as general secretary of the fire brigade union, as someone who was a fireman, as someone who's got... Firefighter we say. Firefighter sorry, who's got advanced knowledge of these systems. What's your analysis of how Grenfell was able to happen and how it can be stopped from happening or how a similar tragedy can be stopped from happening in the future? I think it is a story of deregulation. People ask if it's about cuts. Cuts are a part of it but it's far more about deregulation and the scrapping of standards. So we had a fire service in the UK that was linked in to systems about building control, you know how you build buildings, the regulations around that, the inspection of buildings and then the fire services role in that. And from 2000, well actually the process started under 1980 under Margaret Thatcher of saying that our regulations are too strict, we need to free up regulations to enable businesses to invest and develop and develop as to develop. For example as far as I understand it used to be the fire brigade that would sign off a building to say that it was fire safe and now the developers allowed to do that with their own contracted self-regulation system effectively. And so people think the fire service can stop things happening. The fire service has very limited powers to stop things happening. Looking at it from just from our point of view of the fire rescue service, we used to have bodies which set national standards so that would be how you respond. Let's just take the issue of how you respond to a fire in a block of flats. Today you, and this is post 2004, today you will go to a block of flats in London fire and you will get a response of X number of fire engines. If you go across the board into Essex you will get a completely different standard. You go to the west and it is a complete postcode lottery in that respect. So no national standards, no national standards in terms of appointment, recruitment, different policies of how you fight fires even creeping in. The bodies that we used to have, we used to have a take at the issue of lucky horizon scanning as I was called it. We did have a body, the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council which existed from 1947 until 2004 and that looked at all these issues of standards. How do you train, how do you train the question of moving from Staport to Evacuation? They would have assessed how do you do that and then how do we transfer that into the real world of training firefighters on the ground to do it. That doesn't exist. So every fire service is doing this in their own way. A complete fragmentation of the fire and rescue service used to be described as a national service delivered locally. Now you've got a localised fragmented service and that's part of the picture. Then you look at the fire safety regime, a shift towards self-regulation, self-assessment, systems where, and I'm not saying this is directly right to Grenfell, but systems where people who are fire risk assessors can set up in business with no qualifications at all. That's the world that we're living in. Has anything changed since then? What's been learned, what's, have buildings, I'm of the understanding that there's still a lot of high rise buildings with this flammable cladding on the outside of it and that action has been kind of disgracefully slow, I suppose. Is that an analysis you- Yeah, I think it's painfully slow. So there are, the government is looking at things like the building regulations and the regime around that and the flammable cladding. There is a programme to remove flammable cladding or sorry ACM cladding. There's different types of flammable cladding. Again, painfully slow. We've got from the fire service what is called an interim policy of how do you deal with these very high risk buildings now knowing that Grenfell has happened, but it's an interim policy that's now been placed for two and a half years. That's not really an interim policy. So in our view, in terms of the fire and rescue service, nothing substantial happening on any great scale. I mean, your members must be, I mean, because no one wants to be in it and especially in an emergency service where they feel like they're going into an environment which is unsafe and where they're unprepared. I mean, your members must be, you know, getting really frustrated with the situation. I think there's different smooths. I think London members are angry, but some just had enough of Grenfell, you know, they feel that some film people most painful night of their lives and probably don't want to talk about it. Outside of London a huge interest in some of these themes about what's, what are the different standards. If Grenfell had happened outside of London, the disaster would have been far, far worse because the London Fire Fire Brigade is one of the best resourced fire brigades in the country and was able to get large numbers of people there very quickly. If that had happened anywhere else, they simply would not have had the personnel to deal with it on the same scale. So our members imagine what would have happened if this had happened here. Again, a frustration, I think there's a big concern, cynicism about politicians generally among a lot of our members and not convinced that actually anything serious is going to change. Aaron, you want to come in? Yeah, you said it was more of a national service previously. When did that sort of transition take place? The big change was in, there was a dispute between ourselves and our employers 2002-2003 under the new Labour government. I suppose my take on it would be that was used as an opportunity to make fundamental changes to fire and rescue policy and legislation. So I mentioned the act that created, in reality, the modern fire and rescue fire brigade, as it was called, fire service, was the 1947 act set up under the post-war Labour government. In a way part of the post-war consensus and so on, that was in place from 1947 until 2004, a 2004 whole series of new legislation in the different parts of the UK, the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. But all those bodies were so we had an inspectorate that was scrapped at the same time, the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council scrapped at the same time, National Appointment and Promotion Regulations scrapped at the same time, National Standards of Fire cover scrapped at the same time. All these national standards went at a stroke in either 2003-2004 and a shift to a very localised system. So now that each fire service sets its own standards and then measures the effectiveness of their own standards. What was the argument for that? I mean, that seems just utterly crazy. The argument, and I think again this lies behind some of the debates around Grenfell, is there has been in the UK and in many of the advanced economies downward trend in fires. So you know, if you think the way we heat our homes, smoking, not using chip pans, all those things have had an impact. Also the work of the fire service in preventative activities has had an impact. So there has been a downward trend in the past three or four years that has plateaued and actually we've seen some increase. But then from central government, there was an endless mantra of because the number of fires has declined, fire itself is therefore a declining risk and therefore you should reduce the number of firefighters and fire stations. My answer to that on a very simple basis is if you used to have 100 fires in a community and you now only have 80, that's great, but it doesn't to us mean that the people who have the 80 fires should have a lower standard of service. But that is the logic, is a very supply and demand led argument that has driven these changes. And I have to say, again, where we part company with chief officers, they have gone along with this for 16, 18 years. They've helped to dismantle the structures that, in our view, maintain standards. And who are the sort of chief engineers of that policy? Obviously that's during the sort of later Blair years. Are there any politicians? I mean, not to sort of lambast them, but just to sort of put some meat on the bone in terms of where this was coming from politically. Well, this emerged from fire ministers at the time Nick Rainsford being one in 2002, who started some of this debate. They then commissioned a so-called independent review of the fire rescue service under George Bain. It was a professor of industrial relations and much of what happened to the fire service emerged from that review of the fire service. The fire rescue services act was based on Bain's review of the service and they criticized the fire service of being slow to change. I think big criticism of the union, very highly unionized. They think that we have slowed down change and so on. So a big part of that agenda was against the Fire Brigades Union.


Yeah. Hello everybody. Welcome to the next session of the Compendency 2. The next tool is Securing Command Line Application with KeyClone. And it will be presented by Ramakrishna. I would like to just let you know if you have any questions during the talk, you can use the Q&A section in Hopin, here in Hopin. So let me begin. Hi everyone. Thanks a lot for attending the session. And I hope you're all doing well. I'm Ramakrishna Patnaik and I work as a software engineer for Red Hat Bangalore with the Middleware team. And currently I'm tuning in from Bhubaneshwar. Today in this session I'm going to talk on the topic Securing CLI Applications with KeyClone. Command line interfaces aren't talked as much as the web user interfaces. However, the CLIs remain popular among the developer community due to their flexibility and their granular control. We'll discuss about how KeyClone is, how it works, and how we can secure a command line interface using KeyClone. Before we start, I would like to draw your attention towards the where some questions will be we're going to have in the polls. So please remember to cast your vote. We'll go through the results toward the end of the talk. So let's begin. The GitHub page of KeyClone defines it as an open source identity and access management solution. An identity and access management solution defines and manages user identities and access permissions. Other features that sit with identity access management are SSO, which stands for single sign-on and MFA, multi-factor authentication. So single sign-on is what allows users to securely log in to multiple applications that they're authorized to access. And multi-factor authentication sets an additional method of user verification other than the passwords. So this MFA could be anything from a facial ID or even a one-time password that we receive as phone message. So KeyClone can also be referred to as an identity provider. An identity provider or IDP is a service that can authenticate a user. It provides identity management as a service. Some popular identity providers that we encounter on our day-to-day life include Google, GitHub, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, etc. The example in this slide is from the login page of Stack Overflow. So to use Stack Overflow, either we can create an account there or we can use it via the different identity providers, which here are Google, GitHub, and Facebook. Now let's discuss about the workflow of an identity provider. The workflow of an identity provider happens in three steps. The first step being the request step. Here the user enters credentials from another login like Google, Twitter, etc. Then comes the verification step. Here the service determines if user has access and to exactly which resources and after verification comes the final step unlocking where user gains access to specified resources. This takes mere seconds and most users don't notice all the hard work that's happening behind the screen. Now let's discuss what are the various advantages of using an identity provider. The first one is improved security. An identity provider is a tried and tested third-party tool to handle the security. There's no doubt about that. Then comes improved user experience as users will only need to sign in once for multiple service providers and won't need to remember different passwords. It is also easier to maintain the service providers as we don't have to maintain account information across the multiple services. Also the auditing and reporting becomes easier for the IT team as they can keep a track of where the credentials are being used and where it got compromised. Now let's discuss what is KeyClok. According to the GitHub page of KeyClok, KeyClok is an open source identity and access management solution for modern applications and services. Users can authenticate with KeyClok rather than individual applications. The applications don't have to deal with login forms, authentic user and storing users. KeyClok is also the upstream project for the Red Hat SSO. Now let's discuss why should one consider using KeyClok. So first of all, KeyClok is a free and open source software. It has a big community support which guarantees that there are a lot of examples of how to do something. And it comes with a web-based graphical user interface which makes configuring easier and it supports social identity providers like Google or Facebook out of the box. So now let's discuss some important terminologies of KeyClok. So first let's start with RL. So RL serves as a management space where one can create users and give them permissions to use applications. RL manages a set of users, credentials, roles and groups. RLms are isolated from one another and can only manage and authenticate the users that they control. A user belongs to and logs into a particular RL. So by default, KeyClok has the master RL. Users will create new RL as masters should be used for the sole purpose of creating and maintaining other realms in the system. Now let's discuss what is a client in KeyClok. So a KeyClok client represents an application or a web service that uses KeyClok to authenticate and authorize the users or they can just request access tokens so that they can securely invoke other services on the network secured by KeyClok. So here is a screenshot of the configuration of a KeyClok client. And yep, I have included a demo of how authentication works with this client configuration. We'll go through these one by one. So this is not the entire configuration of a KeyClok client. It's just a small part of it and probably one of the most important sections. So yeah, to see more of the configurations, you can just use the web GUI of KeyClok. So the first three fields, client ID, name and description, they are pretty much self-explanatory. Then comes the root URL. So the root URL is the index page of the application. And then comes valid redirect URIs. So yeah, they store the patterns for URIs of valid redirection. So suppose we are using a redirect URL in the application, it should match the patterns that we have specified here. And after that, we have the base URL. So base URL is supposed to be used if the authentication server needs to link back to the client. And admin URL is the URL to the admin interface of the client. And you don't really need to worry about all these jargon terms. I know this could be getting a bit overwhelming. Even I don't know most of the stuff here. You can just use the web GUI and hover over the help icon just right next to the field names. And it will give you an explanation of what they are. And this one more field that I would like to talk about is the access type. So unfortunately, it hasn't been captured in the screenshot. And access type defines the type of the OpenID Connect client. And it is of three types, public, confidential and bearer only. So public access type is for client-side clients that need to perform a browser login. And confidential access type is for server-side clients that need to perform a browser login and require a client secret. And finally, we have the bearer only access type, which means that the application only allows a bearer token request and forgoes any kind of browser login. So an example is like we send the access tokens with the request while interacting with the server. Yep, that's where the bearer only type comes in. And for clients such as CLI and websites, the access type should be public. Yeah, so as discussed earlier, Keycloak allows us to use multiple social identity providers. They're configured at the realm level using the admin panel. Each provider needs to be configured with a client ID, client secret, redirect URI and other relevant information. So you can see the drop down in the slide. This is the list of all the social identity providers that come with Keycloak. And suppose you want to add GitHub as an identity provider, you will need to create a new OAuth app from GitHub's developer settings. And from there, you will get the client ID and client secret. So in today's demo, I have used the GitHub identity provider only. So let's discuss how authentication will be handled for the client we have discussed till now. So first, the user will see the Keycloak login page asking for credentials or to sign in via social providers. So it is the first screenshot here. And once the user selects sign in with GitHub, user is redirected to the GitHub login page, which is the second screenshot here. And it says sign into GitHub to continue to Keycloak demo. Keycloak demo is the name of the application I have given in the GitHub settings. So yeah, and user can just sign into the existing GitHub account or create a new one just like we normally do. And after successfully logging into the GitHub account, user is redirected to the authorized application. And the redirect URI will have code as a URL parameter. We'll discuss about it later. And client will use this code to generate tokens against the OpenIDConnect token endpoint. This is the GIF here showing how Keycloak works with websites. So yep, this is a recording of console.redhead.com. While it doesn't exactly use Keycloak, it uses Red Hat SSO. It's downstream, but the flow is pretty much similar. So when we try to navigate to console.redhead.com, we are redirected to the SSO login page. Upon successfully logging in, we are redirected back to console.redhead.com. And if you observe the URL closely, it has some URL parameters for very few moments right after the redirection. So things can get tricky when a command line interface app involves a browser login. The easiest way to us might seem to simply copy paste the authentication token and pass it as an argument with the CLI. This approach can get problematic as credentials will get stored in the terminal's history. In the slide, you can see that it is a screenshot of the Docker command line app. And Docker login command has the ability to receive username and password as flags. So which is not something we should encourage. And an improvement here is the password, STDIN flag, which allows to take password from the standard input. However, the user should authenticate only using the authorizing servers web page. Now let's discuss the correct approach. So first of all, the CLI should build the URL for authorization and open it using the browser. And then an embedded mini HTTP server needs to be run concurrently that will handle the redirection part. And the redirection URI should be registered in the client configuration. And the embedded server should get the code as URL parameter from the from the redirection and use it to make another request to get the authorization codes, close server and transfer the control back to the script. Once we extract the codes, they need to be stored in a configuration file. A preferred location is the is the path xdgconfig home, which for Linux is usually the dot config in home home directory. So I'll be switching the screen to show a short demo of the approach discussed. Let me increase the font size. Yeah, so this is a small command line app that I have built using the Cobra library of Golang. So it is a popular library to build CLIs. Some popular CLIs that have been built on top of Cobra include kubectl, which is the CLI for Kubernetes and also opens if console management. And even the CLI of Istio has been built using Golang's Cobra. So this is a small lightweight CLI app. And I have the key cloak server running in the standalone mode in the terminal. I can show it to you here. Yeah, so there we have it. There are also other distributions of key cloak, like a container image and also an operator. You can check them out. So let's go through some of the important code snippets here. Yeah, the first part is like CLI should build the URL to the authorization server. So here it is. It just involves some transformations of the key cloak client configuration. So once we have that ready, we need to open it using the browser. So this is the method that I'm using to handle it, the open browser method. So these are just different implementations for the different operating system. And once we have the browser open, an embedded server needs to be run concurrently. So we have defined it here. We have achieved concurrency using go routine. So yeah, it just starts when the browser opens. And this is the redirect URL that I have used for this demo. And yep, if you go through the if you go through this handler function, what happens is like first we need to extract the code from the URL. And once we have that, we use the method build token exchange request to make another request to the endpoint of open ID connect token, which gives us the authentication code and I mean, authentication token and refresh token. Sorry, I mean the access token and refresh token. And once we have it, we need to store them somewhere, which as I discussed is a good recommended path is the exchange config home. So let me show you how the exchange config home looks like. Yeah, forgive me for the mass history. Yeah, so activity config home for Linux is this the home, the dot config in the home path. So as you can see, there are some familiar familiar names here like JetPrint, Cypress, Electron. So this is the place where we should store user specific data. Yeah, you can see there are some CLIs as well like Katzpy. For this demo here, I have just named it CKP, which is basically the acronym for Cobra Kiklok POC. So yeah, we have, so in that directory, we have saved the, we will be saving the config.json file. And since I've already run this before, it should be populated already. Let's see how it looks like. Yeah, so the config.json file stores our access token and refresh token. So that's pretty much all there to it. Let's just run the demo once. I'm using the login command to handle the authentication part. Yeah, so it opens up a browser. Yep. I'm selecting GitHub. Yeah, and it has been successful. So I didn't need to manually type in my credentials because I had already logged into GitHub using this browser. And this is the redirection URL that you can see. You can see this is the code. We are, we receive it as an URL parameter and we use this value to get the refresh token and access token. So yeah, that's pretty much all there for this demo. Let me switch back to the slides again. Yeah, so that's pretty much the correct approach of securing the CLIs. I mean, there could be other approaches, but this is the best one that I have been using till now. And to learn more, you can go through this following links. I personally found them very useful while preparing for this talk. And for this demo, I have, for this demo, I have uploaded the code to my GitHub. You can have a look at it to know more. Yeah, so that's pretty much the end of the talk. Now let's go through the poll results. Can you see the poll results or not? Yeah, I can. Okay, okay, let's make that. Okay. Yeah, so the first question was, have you worked with KeyClub before? And we see 57% is no, 28% is yes. And I would like to explore this 14%. So yeah, I was actually expecting a more on the yes side. So yeah, I think KeyClub is an awesome thing, awesome library and tool. And everyone should just have a look at it if they want to secure their applications. And the next question was, if you build a service, what would you prefer as an end user interface? So command line interface got 19% of the votes, website 9.5. And both 68.2. So yeah, I actually didn't expect so much popularity of command line interface over websites. Because CLIs are basically, I mean, the users who are more familiar with CLI are day to day Linux users, they're not very popular in general. So yeah, I think the poll results are a bit surprising, I'll say. So yep. Now let's, I think we can jump to the Q&A section now. Yes, sure. So we have a bunch of questions, I'm not sure whether we can handle all of them. Do you want to pick any of them? Or shall I pick one for you? You can just start with the. Okay, there are two questions with some likes. So I will start with the first one. And the first one is high. What kinds of security analysis did the key clock passed? What, what were the results? What did it failed in? Yeah, so I'm not actually really expert in key clock. I don't, I mean, I don't work on key clock size of stuffs. But yep, I think that it has a pretty good reputation when it comes to security and everything. Yeah, I will have a look. I'm not sure about the exact answer. Okay, thank you. So the next question is, there is no way to bypass the browser then all together. What if you are in the CLI on the machine with the other window manager, or any browser installed? Yeah, I will agree that it's impossible to bypass the browser I mean, it's not impossible. Sorry. Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, we can't get rid of the practices where we just pass the token as a flag, because obviously there are some environments that don't have a browser. And there I think the only way out is like passing the token as a argument or flag. Yep. Thank you for the answer. The next question is is there any open source CLI app that uses key clock? Yeah, I, yeah, there is one actually, it's the one I work in. It's the CLI for Red Hat OpenSafe application services. I can just give you a link to that CLI. I'm pasting the link in the chat. Okay, thank you. So the next question is, are there any ways to debug what information will client receive from the CLO in case of OpenID and SAML? I want to find out the data and its structure the client will receive so I can configure client. Yeah, I think there is a way to debug, but I've not really explored much in that direction. I need to explore that. Okay, the time ran out. So thank you very much for your presentation. If you want to discuss further discussions, you can move on to the work adventure. It's a great platform, virtual platform where you can have all the fun. So I feel free to go there. Alternatively, you can use also Discord. So thank you very much for your presentation.


It's with a guy named Chris Birch. Chris is a entrepreneur. He's a business owner. He owns a print shop. And it's kind of unique this show because we do podcasts with people all over the country. Chris is in like my backyard. He's in DC. Guys like many of you that are thinking about getting into real estate investing or you're a real estate investor now. A lot of you already have jobs or businesses. So the neat part about this show is Chris is going to bring it to you in a way that comes from how he got started as a business owner and having a job. There's so many different ways to do real estate. You don't have to just be the traditional, you know, W-2, 9 to 5 worker that qualifies for a 30 year fixed. Guys we're doing something a little unique on this show. We're going to talk about something that's dear to my heart Baltimore. It's where I was born. We're going to talk about what we see in real estate that makes us excited and why we should invest. There's really three different types of real estate in Baltimore. The inner city down by the harbor and then the east of the harbor. You also have the far west side and then you also have the real estate in the counties. There is a vast difference between those three different types of real estate in the Baltimore region. No matter where you live, you'll have something to learn from this podcast. We're going to bring it to you live. It's on April 13th, 8 p.m. Eastern time. And you can find out on Sax Realty's YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Hope to see you then. Sax Realty, Maryland broker number 607720. Office number<PHONE_NUMBER>. Equal housing opportunity.


Welcome everyone to the studio nights show. I'm Katie Chang and in tonight's episode We're gonna be highlighting some public art exhibits around Arlington by watching three video montages created by a CMI members It's really I'm really looking forward to these three videos coming up in just a few minutes If you want to learn more about Public art in Arlington, I suggest you check out this website arts Arlington org It's the website for the Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture and It has everything you need to know about art in Arlington There's also a calendar. So if there's like upcoming events and stuff You definitely check this out to find out what's happening in Arlington But right here on their website They have these four exhibits that are kind of currently going on so The four here we have persistence, which we do a video montage on in one sec Go outdoors which features these like painted doors around town our boy up our boreal attire and the sort of a collection of projects along the Minuteman Pathway so I wanted to get started by watching a short video montage about persistence that are member a CMI member producer Margie de Monte Edited together. So here's kind of like a little sneak peek But let's take it away and watch our video. Awesome Margie Thanks for that great video. It was really great to see the Plarn art in the trees and even some clips of the arborist putting up The sculptures. So thank you so much for doing that. That was our by Michelle Luji the artist in residence for Arlington right now I also wanted to bring up the fact that Michelle is actually doing a new exhibit right now through the Boston Sculptors Gallery and she's requesting some new pieces of plastic for her exhibit she's looking for water water and juice bottle caps small medium large any sort of like plastic lids bread tags those little tags you get in your bread packaging any sort of small packaging that's completely plastic such as little containers that hold disposable Contact lenses those six pack holders for for seltzers and beer Pen and marker tops and any sort of like interesting Plastic pieces that you might find you can bring any of those pieces of plastic to two drop-off points in Arlington One is the greater goods collective in East Arlington The address is 212 a mass av and you'll see it there on your screen The second location is at our AC my studios at East at 85 Park Ave Again address below So please keep on hold on to your plastic pieces and give them to Michelle Luji for her upcoming sculptor project Next on our list I Wanted to bring up my website again next on my list. We're going to the pathways project So the persistence project was a part of this something you can see from the bike path But I want to look at these dots and dashes by Johnny LaPam and this was a project that a gas station on mass av the the owner commissioned this artist to do these dots and dashes but this upcoming video highlights a newer piece that was started because of COVID thanking essential workers So let's take it away Again, that was a great piece edited by our AC my member Rodrigo Sosa with images and video provided by arts Arlington That's a great a great project that you can still view at the gas station on mass av in Arlington Coming up let's go back to our website arts Arlington org again where you can visit and learn a lot about All sorts of art stuff going on in Arlington Next I wanted to go to the transformer boxes in town. These have been Around for many years. It was originally started in 2014 With an old committee that's no longer around called Arlington Public Art and the committee commissioned artists to paint these utility boxes in town and then a few early years later, I believe later when it became Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture the Commission asked local businesses to sponsor some new boxes. So here's another new montage coming up again Coming at you from studio nights here. We've highlighted three video montages about public art in Arlington I hope you enjoyed that again I wanted to remind you guys that the artists and residents in Arlington Michelle Luzy is looking for plastic donations any sort of small pieces of plastic bottle caps Container lids contact cases Send them her way for her current exhibit going out of Boston Sculptor's gallery She'll need those pieces by the end of February. So get them to her soon There are two drop-off boxes in Arlington. One is at the Greater Goods Collective in East Arlington There's the address below at two and two a mass av. That's a new anti-plastic store By the way, if you didn't realize and the second location for plastic donations is at ECMI at 85 Park Ave Again, I'm Katie Chang. It's studio nights. Thanks for joining me today


I taught a creature class at the Academy of Art which is done and I'm currently teaching a creature class at Animation Mentor and the thing about creature classes is that a lot of the creatures and the rigs that you can get are very realistic but a lot of the jobs out there are for cartoony styles and there are not that many cartoony rigs out there and one of the things that I recommend to my students is to add cartoony creatures onto your reel as you look at the amount of movies that feature creatures is really something that you should take advantage of but then I get the questions from the students well there are not that many cartoony rigs out there well it's very easy you take an existing rig you add the eye rigs you change the textures and you're done and this is where this clip comes into play so let's go into my eye and I can show you how you can take any realistic looking creature rig and make it cartoony looking and the example that I use was the Diablo rig by Truong and that is this one you can find on the animation beefy site I will have a link in description and the eyes that I used were these so it's a combination of a rig and this but you can grab any separate eye rig that you can find you can also take eyes out of an existing rig but like this one because he has eyebrows as well so now that you look at this creature you can see a lot of cool stuff a lot of cool textures but it's not very cartoony looking so what do I do you open up the textures and you can see what's in there you can just assign new textures or you can also be clean and just delete whatever you have if you do that you can see that this happens to your rig all the textures are gone and but that's okay so in order to get this look I'm gonna sign new colors so I want one for the body so let's just call this body and I'm gonna make it the same color like in my example more or less and I'm using a blend texture just because I want some shininess I'm gonna use another one and that one is going to be the tongue and this is off-screen but I'm going to the photo and I'm picking out the color of the tongue I'm going back and forth and again you can use this manually but because I have this and I want to replicate this I'm gonna choose what I have then I'm also going to use a color for the nails and you can always turn down the specular color you can do whatever you want to do here so I'm gonna do nails and this is fairly white like in this case I can just make this white and specular color also maybe bump that up a little bit and then you have those little horns on top and on the tail that's a different color you can use again whatever material you want and I'm gonna go in there I'm pretty much pick up what I have all right so I'm gonna put these colors here this is my dragon and of course if you keep the textures will be easier to see if you feel like this is a problem just select everything assign the default Lambert and you can see what's actually going on here oh did not select all of them so I want the body I'm gonna select this and apply the body shader then I want the teeth now sometimes you have geometry pieces and you can select them one by one in this case it's a bit tedious so you can go into the outliner and see what's going on here it's also a bit of a pain and you can also use a name selection so I want to select everything the star that has the name teeth and all those numbers I can go in there and I'm gonna do star I want to select everything until the double colon and then T and then another star which is gonna select everything and again you can see this if you open on the outliner it has only selected all those pieces and this by hand will be quite a pain you can see this is the selection so I also created a tooth shader a sign of material go back and here we are now I want to do the same thing with the nails which are called horns here so you can do star double colon horn another star and what are you gonna see that is gonna select all of this right I'm gonna go back in here gonna select the nails like such go back to textures and you can see this but I do want to give those horn on the top a different color so I'm just gonna select all of these little horns deselect this and you can see I have only deselected so there are many ways how to select this through the naming or just direct say a selection say horns and then there you go and then last but not least at the tongue go back in there select the tongue there you go to now you have these colors more or less I can go in there and give this a bit more of a lighter orangey color but again it's completely up to you so basically that's the rig but as you can see something is missing the eyes and that's the big thing so just changing the colors is not gonna make this cartoonish it's gonna make it a bit more simple looking so now I'm gonna import those eyes and then as you go down let me collapse my outliner you can see all so that's the rig here and you got the overall eye controller and brought them up but you have to do show nerves surfaces and put the textures on and here are your eyes silly looking but already kind of funny I want the lids of the eyes will have the same color so you go back in here and you can find the eyelid mesh here's one and here's one go back in here and select the same body color and there you go so now what I would do you can see all the options here in terms of scale and then you can do the blinking of the eyes I would not go in there and place them and you can do whatever you want to do with the size and placement like I said let's say we are happy with somewhat of this placement right now what you can do if you go back here and show the curves you select the controller and besides the unibrow option if you want you also have placement turn this on and you have extra controllers that show up and then you can place these again outside or a bit lower so I'm gonna place these a bit to the outside maybe you want to keep where that ridges here of this rig turn this off still feels a bit low I will probably go with just a bit higher and maybe a bit more like that so now that you placed it you gotta find either a joint or controller so in this case you can take this and this is your head controller there's nothing else underneath there's nothing where there's a subcontroller select this control select this not the top note but the controller of this eye and say constrain parent and now and you go back in there you can just select the head you can see everything moves with it and go to the root and you can see this is following so now that you have that you can do something where you can change the eyebrows you can bring these just a bit lower to the face open that mouth change the head down a bit take the controller make it look somewhere else grab the lower eyelids to kind of replicate what I did here to some degree but there you go I know it completely looks like you just added a little eyeballs to a rig but if you do something like this where it's just a bit further away all you can do now is concentrate on a cartoony pose and it's all about the bottom mechanics that will still give you cartoony eyes and you can do some basic lip sync and caricature the movements and it's all with a rig that now looks like this instead of this and that's it it's a simple thing again this might be tricky if it's a close-up you can see those you know added on eyeballs but for a faraway bottom mechanics shot where you have a little bit of Muppet style lip sync you can still go in there and do cartoony style animation where really where you just take the movements caricature them stylize the movements and concentrate more on a cartoony approach for creature animation and just by changing the textures adding those eyeballs or whatever eyes that you can find you can tweak any realistic looking rig into something cartoony there you go nice and simple I hope this works and I hope you can use this and create some cool new animations and speaking of which if you want to do that with me and you want me to help you and create something awesome as always I have workshops and the workshops are always open for sign up link in description with all information just email me you can start at any time speaking of time you're still watching this thank you so much thank you for your patience feel free to hit the like button feel free to subscribe and hit that bell button so you get notifications for all of my uploads other than that I will say thank you and I'll see you in my next clip


What makes me a credible authority on this topic? Well, like many English language teachers, I've spent some time abroad. I've had English in Japan. I've worked in Kuwait in the Middle East. And for the last two years, I've been back home here in Ireland, and I've been interacting with students from a variety of cultural backgrounds. And now I imagine that's the case for many of you here. So as you're aware, that often demands some tact and some intercultural know-how. My personal background, in so far as it relates to this topic, is that my parents originally immigrated to Ireland from Iraq. I myself was born in Kavan, the most exotic of cultures. But I grew up in Dublin, and I grew up in a very traditional Middle Eastern household. So negotiating intercultural harmony, integrating cultures, that's something of a necessary life skill for me, and something that I feel colors the way that I interact with my students and the approaches and strategies that I tend to adopt. Okay, so I'll start by telling you a bit about my time in Japan. Only because that was my first real immersion in a culture that was completely alien to anything that I'd ever known or anything that I'd ever been exposed to. And that demanded real adaptation in my part. And while ultimately that was a very enriching experience, it had its share of awkward moments. So any of you who have worked in Japan or traveled there will know that it's a stunning country. Japan is a very unique culture, and it also has a very robust sense of formality in ceremony. So on my arrival there, I was placed in a very middle of nowhere town called Otsunomiya, where I was a very conspicuous minority. On my arrival, I was informed that there would be a ceremony to mark the occasion. And the whole school would be assembled and I would be expected to deliver a speech in Japanese. Okay, now I can speak Japanese, I still don't. So this was the source of much anxiety. I genuinely contemplated just taking a flight home, cutting my lashes and just knocking the whole thing on there. But after a lot of hyperventilation, I took to the podium, there was a sea of faces and I had my phonetically transcribed speech in Japanese that one of the teachers had written out for me. And I just read it out. Now, any of you who do happen to speak Japanese will know that it's a very intonation-based language. So it's all about the inflection, it's all about the cadence. And here I was just reeling it off in a monotone. So I should or to imagine what I must have sounded like. And I'm not certain they really knew what I was talking about, but they laughed it off. They loved it. And now you could say they were just trying to be encouraging to this foreigner to stand up over here. But what that experience established for me is that if you make an effort to embrace someone's culture, in this case your student's culture, and you show a genuine willingness to understand their beliefs, their customs, their traditions, that goes miles towards facilitating your relationship with them and in turn adds significant value to your classroom environment and your learning culture. Now, I know that's not exactly a profound revelation. In fact, that's plain common sense. However, I would argue that it's something that appears to be overlooked in terms of our administrative policies and our teacher training. So I know that in my initial teacher training I received very generic strategies towards integrating students. So for example, we all know that we don't pair students from the same country, because we want to maximize their speaking practice. Or if we're introducing a new topic, we tend to personalize it. So maybe students will talk about their customs, their traditions, festivals in their country. But as far as I can see, it doesn't appear to go much deeper than that. So for the purposes of this talk, I did conduct a Google scholar search, and I discovered an abundance of articles that talk about the intercultural approach, which is a teaching approach you may know that emphasizes the importance of equipping students with the competencies to communicate effectively within their host culture. But very little that addresses the cultural relationship between teacher and student or students between themselves in a diverse classroom. So if anyone does know of any articles that investigate this issue, I'd be very interested in hearing from you. But I think we can all agree that that is something of a risky oversight. Okay, so that was my lengthy preamble. What I'm going to do now is describe five strategies that I use in the classroom to boost cultural harmony. I have no elaborate tricks. They're all very straightforward things that you can do. And my measure of their effectiveness is very much based on my perception of class dynamics and of explicit students we have received. Okay, so strategy number one, their L1. Okay, so what I do here is I learn to say something in their mother tongue, and I ensure that I use it over the course of the semester. So as we've established, language is the main carrier of culture and identity. So this is a very simple and effective way of acknowledging their background. And I don't do anything too fancy. Just stick to phrases like hello, goodbye, thank you. As far as my experience goes, students love to hear you say something in their language. Now, I know that the classroom is strictly an English-owned zone, well, we do discourage the use of the L1. So if you are a straight ace to back this, there are ways to do this. So for example, if you're teaching students idioms, which tend to have a cultural context to them, you can ask them if they have any such phrases in their own language, and you can attempt to say those if you're feeling a bit adventurous. I do have a 30-second audience challenge. Listed here are kind of the dominant L1s that correspond to the common student profiles that we have here. How many of you can produce a phrase in these languages? Some, if not all. Are my slides big enough to have Jap Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian? 30-second challenge? No, we will. Ready, guys? Okay, I can say Masalama, Kefalik. Excellent. Okay, any other languages, please? Ni hao, mo jao, abiana, mo si, bao si, ren. Okay, one more. Ready? I'll take one more. Yes. I'm Russian. I think it's how we pronounce it. Okay. I can say Masalama, Kefalik. Excellent. Okay, any other languages, please? Ni hao, mo jao, abiana, mo si, bao si ren. I think it's how we pronounce it. Okay. I can't verify that, but great. Okay, let's do a strategy number two, the quiz. Okay, this one is a universal hit. I'm going to recommend that you try one thing today. It's the quiz. So, what I tend to use quizzes for is to kind of consolidate lesson material or for lesson review. And I just kind of organize students into teams and I just do a quickfire of questions. So, I include a cultural element to kind of up the fun factor. And so, what I'll do is I'll ask, say, the Japanese students, what's the capital of Saudi Arabia? Or I'll ask the Nigerian students, can they say something in Japanese? Or I'll ask the Saudi students, name two tribes in Nigeria. And what this effectively does is it prompts them to kind of ask each other. And it's very hard for you to kind of see their responses and their engagement. And with classes that I tend to really hit it off with, I'll actually extend this activity throughout the term. And you really see them get fired up. And this is my absolute favorite strategy. Okay. Strategy number three. Okay. Now, this strategy almost didn't make the cut because it's very much rooted in my own personal opinion. And having investigated it a little more thoroughly, I did discover that it's not as black and white as I imagined. But maybe you're familiar with this trend with our Chinese students. On the register, his name is Zangian. We're going to call him Gary. Okay. This is something that I've always been quite uncomfortable with. And I've had heated discussions in the staff room about it. But I did kind of research it a bit more deeply. And I did discover that it is actually a common practice in China to kind of have a Western name and a Chinese name. I, as a rule, always say their Chinese name. And for the most part, students do tend to appreciate that, even when I butcher the pronunciation. There is a significant number of students who do like the brand identity that comes with their English name. And in that case, I do respect it. But as a policy, I do advocate using their real name. That's just my opinion. Okay. Strategy number four. We address the elephant. Okay. So we all have our biases, our preconceived notions, our kind of snap judgments. That's just how we operate. Okay. So for example, if you have a female student in your class wearing a face covering and you're uncomfortable with that, I think that's understandable. However, what's not acceptable is to carry that into the classroom. Okay. Because as you're aware, we are the primary model of behavior for those students. So the best way to deal with that is to address the elephant. So for example, a couple of semesters ago, I had a group of students, Japanese students, Saudi students, Kuwaiti students. Dynamic was just really awkward. Just really stiff. I had the Saudi girls clustered over here. I had the Japanese students huddled over there in fear. And there was all the gender politics going on. I couldn't kind of pair up some male students with some female students. So it was really just quite an uncomfortable class to teach. However, one week, one of the Saudi girls gave her weekly presentation about women in Saudi Arabia. And she discussed, okay, why does she wear a headscarf? Her beliefs, her customs. And they were all sitting there in a wrapped attention. And these are like the weekly presentations. We're all just counting them in until the stitch water. But they were all asking questions. They were all really engaged. And it really kind of opened up the dialogue. Honestly, after that, the dynamic completely changed. There was a shift in the energy. And the class was just a much pleasant place to be. Much more pleasant, basically. Okay, so address the elephant, especially if the elephant is your own biases or your own uncertainties. It's vital to address that. Okay, so strategy number five is not really a strategy. It's more of what would you do? Here I have three scenarios that I've encountered in my classrooms and that I've dealt with in my own way.  How would you deal with these situations? And maybe we can discuss together. Should I read out loud or should I? Who on the backing team? Okay, so strategy number one, you have a Chinese student who wants to conduct a survey on honor killings in the Middle East, okay? It's a mixed class of Chinese and Middle Eastern students. How would you handle that situation? Tell me how they would deal with situation number one. He'd let them do it. Anyone disagree? I'd ask the Chinese student to talk about Friday eat dogs. Ooh. Okay, fine. Ask the Chinese students, do you think that's appropriate? Is it gonna be okay? So ask them, what do you know, consider who's in the class? Do you think that's appropriate? Exactly, it depends on the student and their motivation to find your perception of why they're doing this. I think I would suggest it as an essay topic that's more private but I wouldn't suggest it as a presentation topic in front of the class. Okay. I'm not killing your motivation but I'm redirecting, redirecting if they're really passionate about doing that research. Okay, I want to make a complaint about this free movement spread. Do you think that you could explicitly say that? So if you did that. Oh, he's a bright student. That's a good approach. Okay, so do I know how I dealt with it? Okay, so it depended on, was the student himself was quite belligerent. I think his motivation for doing this was to kind of incite a bit of controversy. So I just kind of subtly steered him away from the topic without making it seem as if I was kind of impeding his freedom of speech because I don't know how I dealt with it. I don't know how I dealt with it. I don't know how I dealt with it. I'm not impeding his freedom of speech because I didn't think it was a constructive topic for that particular class. But obviously it depends on the individual. And then do I have time to go to strategy number two? One minute. Do you want to do? Okay, strategy number two, we'll leave it at that. The student is unfocused in class and has missed the submission deadline. He is observing Ramadan and offers this as an excuse. How would you handle it? Yes? I think, again, it depends on the student if it's the first such time something has happened and it is indeed Ramadan. That's what I'm saying. Then fair enough, if he said it five times already and it just happens to be Ramadan then hopefully there's something else going on. Precisely. And yes? Personally, because I do observe Ramadan and I think the best thing is just to really look into it, what's Ramadan about? Is it really about being lazy? Okay. Question is moral. Yeah, just really to say, okay, what's behind Ramadan? I mean, I understand I'm not observing it or whatever it is and then just say, it's an excuse. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So could you have any questions? Thank you.


So, let's talk a little bit about Linux support and when I'm talking about Linux support, I'm talking about you need technical support for your operating system, for the Linux distribution that you have installed and you expect, you know, to be able to call upon people for help along the way when you need it. You have to understand if you are new to Linux, if you're new to how free and open source software works is these things are typically community driven. There's not a lot of corporate backed free and open source software out there. There's a little bit out there, but they're definitely the exception. They are not the rule when it comes to Linux distributions. If you want enterprise level support, then you have to have a corporate backed Linux distribution. So, the ones that offer support for business and enterprise customers, of course, would be Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, those three in particular, they have, you know, enterprise level support. Many of the other distributions out there, even some of the really popular ones, you know, things like Debian and Arch and things like that, they are mainly community projects and as community projects, you're not going to get any kind of support as far as I'm going to buy a support contract for me or for my small business or anything like that. You know, that kind of stuff, a lot of times doesn't exist, especially on the really small distributions that have very small development teams. Sometimes the teams are as big as one person, you know, that person can't sell support contracts, you know, because they're only one person and of course they're going to have a real life outside of developing the distribution themselves. And of course, this leads to the fact that most of these community-based distributions because they're created by the community, who actually supports the distribution, also the community, right? The community contributed code and artwork. It was a collaborative effort among a lot of people that were freely, in most cases, donating their time to create this Linux distribution. Also the support for these distributions is going to be very similar in the fact that their support that they're going to offer is also going to be freely donated in their spare time. They'll help anybody that comes to their forums or IRC chat or whatever, the GitHub, GitLab, whatever it happens to be. You'll find people that are there willing to help you out to support you. But again, it's done in their spare time, right? And you know, this is a little different than the corporate world. For those of you that are, you know, used to the way Microsoft Windows, for example, does things where you can buy support contracts for Microsoft products, for a lot of their enterprise stuff, cloud stuff, Microsoft office and things like that. That really doesn't exist in Linux for the most part. And it's kind of a different kind of mindset that you've got to get into when you switch over to Linux and free and open source software. And the reason you have to change your mindset is when you switch to an operating system like Linux, which is free and open source, right? For the most part, you are expected to be your own support channel, right? I mean, people will gladly help you out. But for the most part, you need to be a do-it-yourselfer.  Or if you receive help from others, you're grateful for it. But at the same time, you're not necessarily going to be dependent on others, right? If you're the kind of person that has always been dependent on others to solve your problems for you, your Linux isn't great for you, free and open source software for the most part probably isn't great for you as well. You often hear this saying that there's nothing free in life or there's nothing free in this world and that is entirely true. So those of you that are wanting corporate level support, that kind of support where you can immediately call somebody on the phone or send an email or open an online support ticket on some kind of professional website or whatever and get immediate response from some kind of support team. Well, typically, those proprietary operating systems that offer that, whether it be something like Windows or Mac or some of the proprietary Unix operating systems, some of these operating systems, you had to pay money $400, $200, sometimes thousands of dollars for some of the really niche specialized operating systems out there. And of course, they offer the support contracts for you, it's kind of built into the price and some of these operating systems. So you paid for that support. You didn't pay for anything with Linux, right? It was all freely given to you. So don't be upset if you switch from a proprietary operating system like Windows or Mac and come over to Linux. And you're shocked about the level of support that's there, the community-driven support, right?  And I just, I want people to understand that because I do see people that get frustrated online.  And I think that frustration, I can understand the frustration, but don't vent that to people that really don't deserve that kind of backlash. Again, there's nothing free in this world. One thing, if you're one of these people that have to have support, like instant support, when I need it, I can call somebody and they're there, then you have to understand for that level of support, you do have to pay for it, right? That's not free. It may be free as in freedom as far as free and open source software. Somebody gave you a piece of open source software, but free as in beer, free as in monetization. No, you're going to have to pay somebody to be on call 24-7 for support. And if that's what you need, then that's great. But if that's what you need, then you need to be willing to support some of these developers. You need to be able to actually pay money to the maintainer of your Linux distribution so that they can be a support channel for you or hire extra people to help be a support channel for you and maybe others that also want this. The same thing with standalone programs, free and open source software. If you want that extra level of support, make sure you're actually giving these people money because if you're not giving anything at all, how can you expect anything in return? Just some food for thought. Peace, guys.


Without water we don't have life, we don't have industry, we don't have farming, we don't have food. So ensuring the water quality for future generations and ensuring the reef for future generations is so important. With the recent impact of climate change on the Great Bay Reef and the recent coral bleaching it's now more important than ever to bring more people to the table to improve the resilience on the reef. In the Paddock to Reef program we sample water quality in our creeks and streams at discharge water to the Great Bay Reef. We're monitoring our waterways and we can assess what condition that they're at. We also look at how dirty the water is, the sediment that's in the water and we also assess it for pesticides and what the pesticide concentrations are. Paddock to Reef program has a modeling component and it can forecast and assess where investment is needed so that the government can invest specifically in certain areas and get value from their investments. So the team based in Brisbane work with regional stakeholders everywhere from the Burnett Mary region all the way up to the Cape York as far as Pasco. The team spent some time with the farmers, they teach them how to sample the water quality and how to record all the metadata and the information about the sample. The Sandy Creek Farmers are an active group of farmers south of Mackay and they actively put their hand up to be involved in taking samples themselves so they can learn from that water quality information and then take that information back and collectively as a group try to improve their local water quality. It's quite encouraging to see them take that data and then go back to their farms and tweak their practices to have a positive effect. The Paddock to Reef program is definitely not about policing. Ultimately we're all trying to improve water quality and it's all for the reef and ensuring its resilience for the future generations. It's not the only program where this is happening. It's happening across the state. I think it's up to everybody. It's not an easy fix. Improving water quality is hard but if we're all at the table I think we'll achieve what we're trying to do. We're trying to improve water quality and we're trying to make a difference and we're trying to look after the Great Barrier.