Humans have a hard time understanding the concept of ‘random’. A great example of this that I love to use is to get someone to quickly pick the first ‘random’ number they think of between 1 and 100 (you can do this right now). If the number was truly random, a pick of 2 or [...]
Browsing Posts tagged Software Development
The Zune Bug A few weeks ago I heard of this issue where the Microsoft Zune crashes and won’t startup on December 31, 2008. The reason for this? A bug in the software that handled leap years. There are lots of articles on the original issue. When I heard of this issue, I originally thought [...]
This past week was the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 for short). Most of the major video game console vendors, publishers and developers get together and show the press some of the new stuff happening this year. This year Microsoft unveils their new and improved Dashboard. The dashboard is the main Xbox interface that is used [...]
A few weeks ago my Honda Civic was experiencing an intermittent clunking noise. I am by no means an expert in automobiles but I am fairly certain this noise was not “normal”. I proceeded to let the dealer know about this problem when I had it in for maintenance. I explained how it seems to [...]
Recently I have been working a lot with some people I would call “Old School Developers”. They were brought up in the “glory days” of the pre-internet era of development. I have been tasked with teaching an old dog new tricks. In this case, I am teaching Web Services development using Apache CXF and the [...]
There are many different types of open source software licenses. These range from the Apache License which is very commercial friendly to the GPL License which is not. In a nutshell, the reason the GPL is not friendly towards commercial software is because of the requirement that anything using the GPL code must in tern [...]
In Software Licensing (Part 1), I wrote about the issue concerning PC game piracy. This is not only an issue for the gaming market, but also for commercial software. Consider, Microsoft Windows. They took a lot of flack over their Windows Genuine Advantage system when they first rolled it out. The system took a “guilty [...]
Testing is a hard problem because there is no way to guarantee that a certain product or piece of code is 100% bug free. Many organizations have testing or “quality assurance” departments who are responsible for doing the majority of product testing before software goes to the customer. Even with a dedicated testing department, developers [...]
I had a Mathematics teacher in High School who used to get very excited over factoring problems where you could simplify expressions by canceling out terms. He used to say it was just like “taking out the garbage”. Taking out the garbage was not usually a fun task but it is surprisingly satisfying to get [...]
I read a great article today on the future of software development. It gives a great summary of what is wrong with the waterfall method of development and how agile methodologies try solve this problem. The problem was that the Waterfall Model was arrogant. The arrogance came from the fact that we believed that we [...]
