January 31st, 2007
What would you say if your manager suddenly confronted you and said, “Quick! Tell me the three most important things that our software industry needs to do in order to bring about a substantial improvement in software quality! Just three things!“? Of course, if you don’t work in the software field, you wouldn’t know what [...]
January 29th, 2007
First impressions, from conversations with a few software engineers and managers, and a day-long visit to one large high-tech company: Japanese software developers probably work longer and harder than their American counterparts, but they are still frequently regarded as “second-class citizens” by their hardware-oriented peers and managers. Because they work so long and so hard, [...]
January 25th, 2007
Things have changed since my first visit to Japan nearly 20 years ago, in November, 1989 — though I’m just beginning to see the differences, as my flight zooms above Hudson Bay in northern Ontario, taking the Arctic Circle route to the other side of the world. Thus far, the changes and differences are relatively [...]
January 21st, 2007
Throughout the 1990s, pundits would pop up every year or two and proclaim that the venerable COBOL and FORTRAN languages were “dead,” and that programmers listing those languages on their resumes would soon find themselves on the unemployment lines (consider, for example, Edsger Dijkstra’s pithy remark, “COBOL is for morons.”) I’ve been guilty of making [...]
January 18th, 2007
I didn’t think I’d have a chance to get started reading and reviewing Dreaming in Code until next week, when I embark upon a 14-hour flight to Tokyo (click here to see an amazing HDR, or “high dynamic range,” photo of Tokyo, and be sure to click on the full-size image; thanks, BoingBoing!) But the [...]
January 15th, 2007
I can’t remember where I first saw the reference to Dreaming in Code: two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software by Salon.com’s Scott Rosenberg, but I ordered it from Amazon right away. How could you not order a book with a title like that? How come you didn’t open [...]
January 13th, 2007
It’s been four or five days since Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone at MacWorld, and I think most of the Internet buzz has died down by now. It would be impossible to provide you with links to all of the articles, commentaries, and reviews of this new razzle-dazzle cell phone, and a lot of [...]
January 12th, 2007
Feeling noble, I shlepped downstairs this afternoon to the fitness center in our apartment building, determined to burn off a few hundred calories on the treadmill. I got myself organized, and just before turning on the machine, I turned on one other indispensable machine: my iPod.
But instead of the usual display of playlists, albums, and [...]
January 11th, 2007
We’ve had a “corporate account” with ATT for our business phone line for several months, during which time we’ve received several bills and paid them promptly. Don’t ask me why we switched to ATT in the first place; it’s a long story, but I think we previously had Verizon as a long-distance carrier. I don’t [...]
January 6th, 2007
Computerworld is a traditional IT trade journal that has been around throughout most of my career in the computer field; as far as I can recall, it began churning out weekly issues somewhere around 1970. On January 1st, Computerworld published its survey of the “hot skills” that CIO’s and IT executives will be looking [...]
