CategorySoftware

Olympic Destroyer

Fascinating extract from Sandworm on Wired, covering the cyberattack on the 2018 Olympics Opening Ceremony in South Korea. The attack highlights the incredible sophistication in place, and has ramifications for all major events, the upcoming US election of course being top of mind for many: As the 2020 election approaches, Olympic Destroyer shows that Russia has only advanced its deception...

Software development planning

Interesting attack on JIRA (and any ticket based project planning approach for that matter) from Jon Evans writing at TechCrunch. He’s all for managing bugs and support tickets with JIRA, but against the idea of breaking projects into a series of tickets: …But an increasing number seem to be using it to define requirements; just deconstruct the project into a flock of JIRA tickets...

LINK: Do and Don’ts of development

Mads Kristensen has a nice checklist of Do This items for high quality websites.
Jeff Atwood has a list of Don’t Do This items for general development (based on the Common Weakness Enumeration list)
Technorati Tags: Jeff Atwood,Mads Kristensen,Advice

Software Craftsmanship

My good friend and colleague at Elcom, Angus McDonald (aka Falkayn), and I have been chatting about ways to improve the software processes at work. He’s taking over many of the responsibilities I’ve held – now that I’m moving on – and is a considered thinker. Angus is much more Agile focussed than me, and recently lead a very useful retrospective for us at Elcom. In a recent...

Parallel Computing

Boring history prologue I started playing with ‘computers’ back in the days when they came with 3K of memory (Vic 20 anyone?). And thank goodness I was too young to have experienced the punch card era… They quickly scaled up so that by the time I was at uni, 16MB of RAM was becoming standard. Fast forward to today and we can buy consumer notebooks with 16GB of RAM. Never in our wildest uni...

.NET OpenID project chugs away

There’s a lot of noise about OpenID (it’s great, we can’t live without it, it’s safer, it’s the future, etc, etc) but very little actually happening (in terms of real adoption). TechCrunch has had a few thought provoking posts on the matter – decide for yourself whether OpenID has become little more than a marketing tool. But if you’re interested in...

Angus McDonald discusses Watir

Angus gives an excellent overview of how to get up and running with Watir, a open source testing utility. Watir is basically about automating web browsers in order to help test web sites. This is something we’ve been struggling with at Elcom. Like most web companies we end up having to do a lot of manual testing of sites, because it is so difficult to automate. There’s a few offerings...

What do I spend my time on?

It’s always interesting to see what you spend time on the most… but tracking it can be hard. There’s various programs available of course, but you never really know how accurate they are. Does it count the idle time you spend reading an email on screen, and how does it tell that you weren’t actually on the phone at said time, etc, etc. Anyway, regardless of all the...

Get ClearContext for free

I’ve been using ClearContext for the last two months and I love it. But it costs over $100 (Australian). That’s a lot to pay. But I paid it and haven’t regretted it. However, what if you could get a license for free? Well you can. Check out the ClearContext blog for details – you just have to write a review of the product and let them know. For those not familiar with...

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