ISSA 2006

Well, I suppose I should be happy that I got a paper accepted at this year's conference; but to be honest, the standard of reviewing leaves a lot to be desired. I suppose part of it is bad gripes for not having a paper accepted as a full paper (it was accepted as a poster, and we subsequently withdrew it) - but I still think I got a raw deal out of it.

ISSA has only two reviewers, and the second reviewer for my paper started off praising the paper with comments like "a good paper clearly describes a significant problem, provides interesting solution" and "clearly presents advances beyond the related prior work". The reviewer then criticises my ordering of chapters and suggests a more traditional security paper layout where the security analysis is done before the design. I had it the other way round, since my new design was the subject of the paper, and I felt that a security analysis before the design was pointless ... but anyway. And then, the reviewer comments: "Do not accept the paper in the present format. To present as a paper authors should improve the manuscript", and rejects the paper! So it seems, that the entire paper was rejected because the reviewer did not like my layout :/

But overall, the review process was rather short and abrupt - only two reviewers, contributing about a page of review in total. This is clearly not to the standard that is seen at more prestigious conferences - I have had over 6 pages of review in most of the papers I have submitted to ACM or IFIP-Sec. And the reviewers' knowledge of the subject under review is also a bit suspect at times. And this seems to be the problem with most SA conferences - the review process is too shallow and I think that, ultimately, quality really suffers.

Bike Ride

So after a long time, I finally got back on my bike this weekend. With the good weather, and a long 1Km downhill after a relatively hard slow uphill, it was very enjoyable. The fact remains though, at this stage I am quite slow - managing only an average of 16Km/h over 24 kms on Sunday (though it was better than 15.3 Km/h over same distance on Saturday). If I remotely want to consider doing the Argus next year, I need to do atleast 20Km/h - and that will take some doing.

But regardless - the aim is to get fitter, and ejoy the downhill. Doing 47Km/h at the bottom of the hill by Wynberg Park was fun! And sunrise from Kirstenbosch was spectacular.