Currently at work I’m designing a large-scale system that will be susceptible to a certain kind of denial-of-service attack. By way of analogy, imagine that Gmail didn’t bother to prevent robots from creating accounts. By the time the first human went to create an account all the reasonable combinations of the top 10,000 human names would have had already been [...]
I complain a lot about FreeBSD here and on Twitter and, thankfully, I am now about to stop using that horror on my desktop. But why horror?
In the world of desktop computers, anything that is not Windows, is niche. In that niche, anything that is not Mac OS X is niche. In that niche, anything that is not Ubuntu Linux [...]
Yes, this is one of those irritating posts. Where a blog that you thought had quietly retired suddenly reappears with a post. A post that says basically nothing. A very self-indulgent post just promising that there will actually be real work worth reading reappearing soon.
Why couldn’t the blogger just leave us all in peace? Why this attempt to appear [...]
Recently I have realised that at a very early age my attitudes towards and interactions with computers were permanently damaged. Like all geeks, I first started programming in primary school. And like many geeks my age, the first computer I had to program was an Apple //e. My Dad had lots of books for the Apple //e, so I [...]
Clearly Steve Jobs and the JesusPhones is the ultimate name for a band.
We’ve had mobile phones in our lives for quite awhile now. First they were enormous, and only tradesmen had them. Then they started to get small, really small. So small you couldn’t use them. And then they got bigger again: now swelling with countless features. Torches, cameras, pedometers. [...]
I’m now in the process of switching my main desktop from Windows XP to FreeBSD. And man, all I can say is that if you’re still on Windows or a Mac, now’s the time to go Free baby!
My Windows desktop has two DVI LCD displays, and a Microsoft (hiss!) Natural Keyboard. I’ll still be using Windows reasonably often [...]
The Mythical Man-Month Fred Brooks
Everyone knows this book; everyone knows the core points and Brooks’ recommendations and laws, even if not everyone has read it. This is one of the few true classics of computing. I’m not going to waste anyone’s time repeating those assertions.
The Mythical Man-Month is now, unfortunately, hilariously anachronistic. And, the anachronisms are starting to damage the [...]
Dreaming in Code
Scott Rosenberg
Rosenberg is one of the co-founders of the online magazine Salon.com, a magazine I’ve been reading on and off since 2000. After having a bad experience with internal software development, he became interested in how, after more than 50 years experience, we still find, in the words of Donald Knuth, that ’software is hard.’
In the interests of [...]
It’s true, they do. Possibly something of a disadvantage in my chosen career, but I get by, carefully. Don’t believe me? Hear my tales of woe, come cry with poor, poor me.
April, 1997 – Still at University, just started my second year of a computer science degree. I save up the cash and buy the first computer of my [...]
It’s very fashionable in geek circles to attack Paul Graham at the moment, particularly after his essay You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss. I’ve been reading his essays for a few years now and I’ve wavered between agreement and an undefinable sense of unease. Now I believe I can finally pin this down.
The central point of Graham’s Boss [...]
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