With the ever-growing abundance of viruses, malware and other threats to our networks, laptops, mobile and other devices, I was interested to read Peter Saddington’s blog post for @agilescout that brings a software development angle to Todd Dewett’s post, “Soccer Has Ruined America.” Although just a casual fan of the game the rest of the world calls “football” (football to me is still the game played by Tom Brady and my beloved New England Patriots), I can’t say I completely agree with the headline of the post; nevertheless, at the urging of a colleague who is a soccer mom and blogger, I decided to dive in. Dewett’s premise revolves around … Read More
Tag Archives: Software
Microsoft Ducks Duqu
November’s most popular day in the United States is arguably the fourth Thursday of the month – Thanksgiving Day. In the Tech industry, however, it is the second Tuesday of the month – yesterday to be exact – that garners heightened interest. The reason for the additional interest is that the second Tuesday of the month means Microsoft Patch Tuesday. And this month in particular there was a bit more interest in Patch Tuesday than is ordinary, only the added interest was not due to the patches released by Microsoft; in fact, those were quite light. It was a kernel patch NOT released that drew the greatest attention. As Microsoft … Read More
Is There a Technical Debt Tipping Point?
This year, 2011, seems to have been the year of discussing, debating and, hopefully, dealing with debt crises. The U.S. Congress’ Super Committee has its deficit reduction recommendations due in three weeks. Meanwhile the Greek government is reconsidering the debt restructuring deal it signed just just last week. It’s pretty clear that in those situations, debt crises have reached a tipping point, but it’s far from clear whether those responsible will “man up” and address them. It’s with these current events in mind that I read Ilya Bagrak’s post Tuesday calling technical debt “a rabbit hole that goes deep, really deep…” This, combined with seeing Malcolm Gladwell quoted somewhere, made … Read More
Garbage In, Garbage Out
I learned recently of the passing of my first boss in the tech industry, Clint Battersby, a couple months back. Clint was a driven, highly motivated technologist. He was a creative individual with a number of patents to his name and with several tech startups founded by him. It was in 1994 when Clint hired me to write marketing materials for his latest venture at Measurement Techniques. To that point, the company had produced some of the world’s most precise measuring devices; so precise that one model was used by several automakers to calibrate the timing of air bags to the millionth of a second. This new venture, however, was … Read More
CAST Certified to Help Air Force Aim High on Structural Quality
Organizations can ill afford to have structural quality issues bring down their software applications and interrupt the conduct of business. The implications of poor software quality are amplified if that organization is part of the government– and accentuated even further if that organization is one charged with defending our country. The U.S. Air Force, for one, has taken a step toward addressing issues that could impact the sanctity of its desktop systems and has certified the CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) for use on standard desktop systems connected to its Global Information Grid (GIG) per today’s announcement by CAST. The U.S. Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB), formerly known as the Federal … Read More
You Are What You Eat: Secrets to Healthy IT
For those of us who remember the 90′s, two lessons stand out that would be wise to heed in today’s highly interconnected technology kitchen: Lesson #1 With performance pressure ratcheted sky high, and second place no longer an option, the quality of choices a company makes determine economic survival. Take for example Apple’s early operating systems that were built for Motorola processors; they were essentially iterative. Like a chocolate layer cake – OS 9 was created atop OS 8. OS 8 atop OS 7 and so forth. Successive layers of code defined every new feature and almost a generation of APIs and software support grew from the slim and trim … Read More
Sibling Rivalry: Code Quality & Open Source
Why does “Free” always seem to have a catch to it? We know there’s “no such thing as a free lunch,” that “freedom isn’t free” and that if you get something for free, you probably got what you paid for. Even in the tech industry, when we talk about open source software, we immediately think “free”, yet instantly jump to the old caveat of “think free speech, not free beer,” the idea there being that open source is the layer-by-layer developed product of well-intentioned developers seeking to produce high quality software that competes with established applications. Lately, though, there are some in the industry who are questioning whether or not … Read More