Dragons in the Algorithm

Another posting on how to understand Profile errors.

When you open any PowerPoint presentation made by my company's default presentation format, you get a warning that it contains macros and asking whether the macros should be disabled.

Suppose that your bank offers currency conversion as a service: give them a deposit or make a withdrawal in euros and they'll adjust your balance in dollars.

A brief hint: if you see an error message like this: InputStream does not represent a valid SOAP 1.1 Message check the namespace of the SOAP envelope SOAP 1.1: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/ SOAP 1.2: http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope/

I saw this interesting article about a weakness in the Scala language.

My election guide for November 8, 2011.

If you have complete and accurate requirements for your project which won't change, and your development team is spot-on in estimating and highly consistent in their development pace. and there are no surprises, then you can produce highly accurate project

Lots of science writers are getting very excited about the news that an experiment measured neutrinos going faster than light.

Armen Rigo has a blog posting (worthy of an article of its own) proposing using STM (Software Transactional Memory) in PyPy.

I find that this comes up fairly frequently.

I am in no way an expert on the tricky art of pricing, but I do have an interesting thought about the pricing of very cheap things.

Here is my election guide for the primary elections in May of 2011.

A few notes on a bug I had so next time I won't make the same mistake.

On reddit, I recently answered a question which I thought was rather interesting.

So, I got a new PC at work, and I moved to Outlook 2010.

Today I would like to celebrate a victory.

Here is a description of all items that will be on my local ballot for this upcoming election, along with my own thoughts on the candidates.But it's late in the evening on the day before the election so I'll be brief.

In his blog, Eric Lippert issued an interesting programming challenge.

Just a brief entry so the NEXT time this happens I can search and find the solution.Once before I had this problem, but I couldn't remember the solution so this time I am writing it down.

To find out what dependencies you are getting and from where, execute "mvn dependency:tree".

This coming Tuesday, we have primary elections.

I sent the following message to the FCC, which is currently accepting public input prior to promulgating new rules on "Net Neutrality".

In my previous post, I defined a number of different features that logging libraries could have.

Logging is not the world's most interesting computing problem, but it is important, and it's been on my mind lately because people have been pointing out that my company's use of logging is currently a bit of a mess and ought to be cleaned up.

I came across the following question on reddit: My bank on the online banking login instead of having a password field it presents you with 3 password fields 1 character each where it asks you for 3 characters from your password, chosen randomly.

It is a fairly simple screen for entering "mass alerts".

I had a project using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and App Engine.

When you estimate tasks, should the estimates be done in hours, or in days?

I like automated code scanners, really I do.

Once upon a time, all good software used some sort of a command language.

Suppose you are setting up your database table, and you want to create a column to store an email address.

As Willie Sutton didn't say, "I rob banks because that's where the money is."

Here is a description of all items that will be on my local ballot for this upcoming election, along with my own personal recommendations on how I expect to vote, and why.

Once upon a time (in the dark ages of web application development) we built our applications as a single monolithic Perl CGI script, or perhaps a large JSP file containing the entire application.

Developers of web applications have quite a few different kinds of "attacks" to worry about.

In a previous post I wrote about how nearly all web applications built on Java servlets suffer from potential threading issues.

Web servers are inherently threaded applications: their primary purpose is to serve up a website or web application to a large number of users.

This post is mostly for my own use; it updates a previous posting with the details of exactly how I am sending out the email version of these blog postings.

Google has released a new browser, "Google Chrome".

You are really lazy.

Unlike computers, humans tend to think in metaphors.

"Maintenance Programmer": This common, and underappreciated species of programmer is often heard muttering and cursing under their breath.

Suppose you want to select k things randomly from a list of n items, with no duplicates.

In a previous article I talked about using salt with a secure hash, but all of the examples assumed that the secure hash would be used to validate passwords.

Any software project needs a Business Requirements Document (BRD)—a document which describes what the deliverable is supposed to do once it's been built.

I'm not a very good cook.

Edward Lorenz died this past Thursday at age 90.

Suppose (just for the sake of discussion) you wanted to share some blog postings with a group of people at work - and the company email system uses Outlook 2003.

When I was a physics student one of the things that I learned to do was "unit analysis".

Firefox Plugins Here are the plugins I commonly use for Firefox: Google Browser Sync - share a common browser environment across multiple computers.