Archive for November, 2005
Friday, November 11th, 2005
Why are so many computers so insecure? As Whitten and Tygar pointed out in their 1999 USENIX paper, "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt", the biggest reason may be that most security software is hard to use. Requiring people to know how DNS works in order to turn on a firewall ...
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 11th, 2005
I always feel badly about giving a book a poor review. Whatever else it may be, it's somebody's baby. Someone put hundreds or thousands of hours into saying something they thought was important (or at least, something they thought other people would spend money to know). Sometimes ...
Posted in Books | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 10th, 2005
In 2002, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that on average, 12% of the effort in a large project went into maintaining the build environment, and that on some projects, the figure was in the 20-30% range. If you include the time needed to cull stale entries from ...
Posted in Books | No Comments »
Thursday, November 10th, 2005
We've all cursed slow software and unresponsive web sites, and most of us have probably built a few, but making them zippy is often as big a challenge as building them in the first place. One reason is that modern computer systems are among the complex artifacts ever created; ...
Posted in Books | No Comments »
Sunday, November 6th, 2005
This post, from Kathy Sierra, is a lighthearted look at how well-designed software should behave. Those of you building your first real web application, take heed...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, November 4th, 2005
Paul Gries, Arnold Rosenbloom, and I spoke to the Toronto Java Users' Group meeting this past Tuesday about Java as a teaching language. It was fun, and the questions and comments from the audience gave me lots to think about --- as did the fact that of the 45 ...
Posted in Equity | No Comments »
Friday, November 4th, 2005
If the smart paintbrush posted earlier wasn't enough to drop your jaw, try this (thanks to Miles Thibault).
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, November 4th, 2005
As I've mentioned before, I'm running a workshop on "Essential Software Skills for Research Scientists" at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday, February 17, in St Louis. I'm hoping to use the workshop to convince scientists, administrators, and policy makers that ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | No Comments »