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"Last modified: Monday, April 30, 2007 0:53 am
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"Last modified: Saturday, April 21, 2007 7:06 pm
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"Last modified: Monday, April 16, 2007 10:14 pm
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"Last modified: Monday, April 9, 2007 9:54 pm
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"Last modified: Wednesday, April 4, 2007 1:48 pm