Author Archive

The Necessity of Securing Backups

April 26th, 2008
Posted in Security | No Comments

Another case of lost backups has recently been featured on the pages of Slashdot. Let’s just hope that the “proprietary compression and encoding tools” place the strength of their cipher on a key, rather than a proprietor’s secret cipher algorithm. The article seems to suggest that third-party security consultants were unable to decipher the data […]

Gym? I Hardly Know Him

April 10th, 2008

If the definition of “computer specialist” can be stretched to include software engineers, then software engineering qualifies for Heather Boerner’s list of America’s Surprisingly Unhealthy Jobs. Though Boerner states that computer specialist jobs are associated with issues of ergonomics and her article appears to equate unhealthiness merely with injury, it is worth considering a sedentary […]

Trade Secret Protection

March 14th, 2008
Posted in Legal | 1 Comment

According to Classen’s A Practical Guide to Software Licensing for Licensees and Licensors, the following phrase may be helpful in marking an item as subject to contractual proprietary information clauses and agreements: Proprietary and Confidential, © Copyright [Company Name] all rights reserved. (Classen 141)

Data Hiding in C

March 2nd, 2008

Object-oriented programming languages are described as supporting encapsulation, polymorphism, and data hiding. They provide powerful features that allow software components to be designed and implemented for change. Observing the mechanisms in an object-oriented programming language can potentially lead to a parallel implementation in a procedural language. This allows some object-oriented design knowledge that has been […]

Weekend Tech Supporter

February 12th, 2008

I spent the weekend by hunting down the reason a computer was running sluggishly. I noticed that the system would wait at the Microsoft Windows XP splash screen for a couple of minutes while starting up. I activated the task manager just as the desktop was being displayed. According to the information that it provided, […]