blog dds

2007.04.30

Silver Bullets and Other Mysteries

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

—Ken Thomson, on naming the Unix system call to create a file "creat"

When conference participants interrupt a speaker with applause, you know the speaker has struck a chord. This happened when Alan Davis, past editor in chief of IEEE Software, gave a talk on improving the requirements engineering process at the NASSCOM (Indian National Association of Software and Services Companies) Quality Summit in Bangalore in September 2006. He was explaining why a marketing team will often agree with developers on additional features and a compressed delivery schedule that both sides know to be unrealistic. The truth is that this places the two parties in a Machiavellian win-win situation. When the product's delivery is inevitably delayed, the developers will claim that they said from the beginning that they couldn't meet the schedule but that marketing insisted on it. The marketing people also end up with a convenient scapegoat. If the product launch is a flop, they can say they missed a critical marketing time window owing to the product's delay. Where else are we playing such games?

Continue reading "Silver Bullets and Other Mysteries"

2007.04.21

Modularity and Troubleshooting

A residual current device trips leaving the house in the dark. How do I fix the problem?

Continue reading "Modularity and Troubleshooting"

2007.04.16

Breaking into a Virtual Machine

Say you're running your business on a rented virtual private server. How secure is your setup? I wouldn't expect it to be more secure than the system your server runs on, and a simple experiment confirmed it.

Continue reading "Breaking into a Virtual Machine"

2007.04.09

I Spy

Knowledge is power.

—Sir Francis Bacon

The ultimate source of truth regarding a program is its execution. When a program runs everything comes to light: correctness, CPU and memory utilization, even interactions with buggy libraries, operating systems, and hardware. Yet, this source of truth is also fleeting, rushing into oblivion at the tune of billions of instructions per second. Worse, capturing that truth can be a tricky, tortuous, or downright treacherous affair.

Continue reading "I Spy"

2007.04.04

A Humbling Upgrade

Yesterday I upgraded one of the servers I maintain from FreeBSD 4.11, which had reached its end of life, into the latest production release 6.2. It was a humbling experience.

Continue reading "A Humbling Upgrade"


Creative Commons License Last update: Thursday, September 22, 2016 9:56 am
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material on this page created by Diomidis Spinellis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Greece License.