Author Archive

Reinforcing Knowledge while Learning

October 3rd, 2007

I just finished rereading Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. As a little experiment, I will explore how far I can get with the book’s fundamental design patterns with Python, an object-oriented scripting language that I am trying to pick up. One of the first design patterns I came across even before reading DP […]

Goal-based Learning

September 18th, 2007

“You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fucking education you could’ve got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.” –Will, Good Will Hunting My experience in college can be summed up as an ongoing lesson on learning. College was an opportunity to learn how to learn. I am employing […]

Shall, Should, and May

September 16th, 2007

The text of RFC2119, which describes the use of these phrases in system documentation, is presented here: Network Working Group Request for Comments: 2119 BCP: 14 Category: Best Current Practice S. Bradner Harvard University March 1997 — Status of this Memo — This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and […]

Secure Coding: Principles & Practices

August 28th, 2007

I read Graff and van Wyk’s Secure Coding: Principles & Practices to completion, but not because each page was more enlightening than the previous. I realized that the same themes and adages were being repeated constantly after having read half the book. Because it was pretty easy to get midway through the book, I decided […]

On the Lack of Exceptions

August 9th, 2007

Lately, I’ve been helping develop a reasonably sized application, which detects errors at every operation. Checking the return value of every function call seems awkward when compared to code that is written in rather informal working environments. Writing code that checks each return value is frustrating when a feature that exists in another language is […]