Author Archive

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 […]

Transitions

July 14th, 2007

Transitions are always difficult.

While in Deutschland

June 18th, 2007

I have been at Germany for two weeks out of the last month. I took on a task that I thought was theoretically possible, but one where completion under given time and resource allocation constraints was uncertain. The situation called for code developed in a proprietary environment for many months by many people to be […]

Configuring the Mouse Scroll Wheel

May 10th, 2007

Having packed my stuff just in case the Griffith Park Fire of ’07 drew closer to home, an opportunitity was created to rearrange my workspace. Rearranging my computers has allowed me to connect a keyboard and mouse directly to one of my principle development machines. I have been interfacing with the machine through VNC up […]