The storage of plaintext or encrypted passwords by any company that does business with the public is an act of stupidity. An act of stupidity so dangerous that it needs to be made illegal. Yes, we need federal law banning the storage of passwords on more or less all IT systems in the world. The recent break-in of the Gawker user database makes this point more clearly than anything I can say, but that won’t stop me from trying.

read more from this topic.....

Email-based reminder services are a handy tool for keeping track of pending activities. I recently gave a try to a service called FollowUpThen. It works by simply sending an email to a specific address in the followupthen.com domain, which then creates a reminder. Examples on their web page include: 3hours@followupthen.com tomorrow@followupthen.com 11am@followupthen.com

read more from this topic.....

Microsoft has added a new keyword to C# as part of the 4.0 release earlier this year. Objects that are typed as dynamic bypass normal static type checking, allowing C# to have the flexibility of other scripting languages. This is all well and good, but the headline writers of the blogosphere have taken a decided [...]

read more from this topic.....

The New York Times has an interesting article today examining the curious fact that certain types of terrorist organizations have an unusually high ratio of engineers among their members. An interesting point to study, no doubt, but what caught my eye was this little blunder: William A. Wulf, a former president of the National Academy [...]

read more from this topic.....

The Pigeonhole Principle, also referred to as the Counting Theorem, is a handy tool for mathematicians, and naturally, computer programmers. The loose version of this principle says “After placing n pigeons into m compartments, if n is greater than m, you will find that some compartment must contain more than one pigeon.” Seems obvious, and [...]

read more from this topic.....

This isn’t the first time I’ve complained about innumeracy, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Just to get off on the right foot, let me give the definition of the word from thesite innumeracy.com: A term meant to convey a person’s inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives. Innumeracy [...]

read more from this topic.....

If you’re going to use the web to perform a survey of your customer base, this report on a similar project from American Express should serve as a cautionary tale.

read more from this topic.....

With the tight security at our nation’s airports, it’s kind of surprising to see a security warning from Windows show up on the Anchorage airport’s flight status screens!

read more from this topic.....

The world is full of people making miraculous claims for video compression. For example, the hucksters at Euclid Discoveries have been leading their investors on with tales of incredible video compression for years now. No doubt that somebody, someday, might make a quantum leap in video compression, but for the past 25 years it’s been [...]

read more from this topic.....