It is a Platform or a Religion?

Blog posts like this annoy me. "Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation..."

I’m annoyed enough to keep that link in my ‘ToBlog’ notebook for over a year. That’s annoyed, ‘eh?

Apparently the system failed and the blogger decided that all failed systems that happen to be running on Windows fail because they run on windows.

ToBlog Dump – Time to Clean House

Geeze – Even after periodic culling, I still have twenty+ notes in Google Notebook, fifty-odd notes in Ubernote, and a whole bunch of Google Reader starred items, all waiting to be turned into blog posts.

Ain’t gonna happen. Time to clean house. I’ll dump the most interesting ones into a few posts & cull the rest.

Thomas Limoncelli: Ten Software Vendor Do’s and Don’ts

From a panel discussion at a recent CHIMIT (Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology), summarized and published at the Association for Computing Machinery. A good read, right through the comments.

Thomas covers non-GUI, scripted and unattended installation, administrative interfaces, API’s, config files, monitoring, data restoration, logging, vulnerability notification, disk management, and documentation. The comments cover more.

When the weather map looks like this….

Odds are the traffic map will look something like this:



I’m sure there is a parallel between the DOS attacks that mother nature periodically foists us and internet security. I’ll take a stab at describing the parallels.

There is nothing the governments can do to put the genie back into the bottle

From Paul Homer’s The Effects of Computers:

The “rich and powerful” are rich and powerful precisely because they have access to information that the rest of us don’t have.

And – once you give people the power to access the information:

There is nothing the governments can do to put the genie back into the bottle

Wikileaks related. A good read.

Log Reliability & Automotive Data Recorders

When are logs reliable?

Toyota's official answer seems to be either "It depends" or "The data retrieved from the EDR is far from reliable", unless the data exonerates them, in which case "the EDR information obtained in those specific incidents is accurate".

There’s got to be a blog post somewhere in that.