From an angry post by Bruce Schneier:
Over the past several months, the state of California conducted the most comprehensive security review yet of electronic voting machines…Serious flaws were discovered in all machines, and as a result the machines were all decertified for use in California elections…Yet California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has conditionally recertified the machines for use, as long as the makers fix the discovered vulnerabilities and adhere to a length list of security requirements designed to limit future security breaches and failures…. [This] has security completely backward. It begins with a presumption of security: If there are no known vulnerabilities, the system must be secure. If there is a vulnerability, then once it’s fixed, the system is again secure. How anyone comes to this presumption is a mystery to me.
Worth reading in its entirety. When you’re done, go back and think about what you’re working on right now, and ask yourself how trustworthy you think it really is…
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Over on the Beautiful Code blog, Ian Darwin has a nice article about reflection in Java. It starts simple, but the end, he’s shown readers how to create dynamic proxies. The first person who sends me translations of his examples into Python, Ruby, or C# gets a guest posting on the blog…
Beautiful Code
Artima has another post about Adobe donating its Tamarin virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation, which references this post by John Resig. Long and short, it means that languages other than Javascript may be able to run within the browser (well, a browser), though the stack will be rather complex: IronPython/IronRuby rely on the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), which will ship with the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which will be mapped by IronMonkey to ActionScript Byte Code (ABC), which will run on Tamarin. What makes this really interesting is Resig’s follow-up article, which discusses “why Tamarin rather than Mono or the JVM”?
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Interesting post at Particletree comparing four web application companies: as David Crow says, it ain’t scientific, but it’s still a good read.
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I just posted my first entry at the Beautiful Code blog, which is mostly a plug for the journal Software: Practice & Experience (one of the few I regularly read).
Beautiful Code
Scott McMahan says nice things about Beautiful Code, while Jonathan Edwards explains why he declined to contribute. There’s also this review at graphic-design.com, but I couldn’t find its author’s name; meanwhile, Henry Carstens would like to know how the contributors got to be better programmers. If he can talk them into answering the question, I’d be happy to buy a copy of his book… 
Elsewhere, O’Reilly has posted an interview with me and Andy Oram about the book.
Beautiful Code
I wasn’t happy with the two courses I taught this past winter — too many distractions, too little preparation. The feedback on the Software Carpentry course was therefore a pleasant surprise: I’ve heard second-hand that several of the Computer Science grad students were disappointed by its slow pace, but overall I did better than I expected. On a 1-5 scale:
- Background required to successfully complete the course: 2.0
- How easy to obtain details/background to supplement lecture material: 2.0
- Did term work increase understanding: 3.7
- Material was presented too slow/fast: 2.0
- Material was too broad/specialized: 2.9
- Workload was too light/heavy: 2.9
- How well organized was the lecturer: 4.0 (no idea whose class they were in…)
- How satisfied: 4.5
- Overall rating: 4.2
The most common positive comments were that the course was practical and pragmatic, and that the collaborative projects were worthwhile. Negatives include the assignment being distributed and marked very late, not enough examples of what good programs actually look like, the course being slow for CS students, a lack of depth in some areas (particularly security), and my jokes being corny.
Software Carpentry
Via Jon Udell‘s interview of Lewis Shepherd, I discovered Intellipedia (yes, I’m late to the game). Through that, I discovered barnstars. No wonder I never get anything done…
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Carl Zimmer is looking for examples of science tattoos. I suppose computer science would count — any of our readers able to help?
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Some of the discussion around Beautiful Code has got me wondering: where do you go for in-depth technical discussion? I’m not talking about personal musings and reflections (though a lot of what Jon Udell, Diomidis Spinellis, and others post is tremendously valuable). I’m talking about in-depth magazine-style articles — the kind of thing that takes real time to read and absorb. Do you read DDJ online? Artima? Better Software? IBM developerWorks? Inquiring minds (well, mine, anyway) want to know…
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