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  HeartBleed: Should C be blamed for the HeartBleed bug?

There is a discussion about the security of applications written in C on Hacker News recently after the report of HeartBleed bug in OpenSSL. In this discussion, some people are saying that the applications written in C are unsafe. It seems all or most of the faults should be laid on C. I think this is biased. The language itself should not be blamed.Safety is a relative term for programming languages. No language is absolutely safe. We claim some languages like Java and C# are safer than C/C++ b...

   C,HeartBleed,Analysis,Code review     2014-04-14 03:52:55

  Kicking ass together: How to improve coding skills as a group

Over the last year and a half, I have worked with a small group of students and staff to create an excellent online learning community at Mendicant University. Unfortunately, because Mendicant is something that we’re intentionally scaling at a very slow pace, we won’t directly reach as many people as we’d like to any time soon. In this post, I’ve collected some of the things that I think contribute to making Mendicant University a great place to learn. I’d love...

   Code skill,Group,Improvement,Efficiency     2012-01-31 23:59:33

  The price of information

SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998,...

   Information,Price,Value,Facebook,Social network     2012-02-07 06:24:53

  The Death of .NET and the Power of Perception

One of my long-standing issues with Microsoft is its inability to control the perceptions surrounding its own products. One of the biggest examples was during the Windows Vista years when, even after the product had been fully patched and worked fine, Apple continued to do a better job to define the image of Windows (compilation of ads here) than Microsoft did, costing Microsoft billions in lost revenue for the millions it saved on a strong advertising campaign. The firm has a history of being p...

   .NET,future,death,bottleneck,development     2011-08-10 03:13:40

  Google engineer: What I learned in the war

Veteran's Day is an ideal time to hear from one of those rare folks who combine corporate and military careers. Dan Cross, a software engineer at Google (GOOG) and a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, took a leave to serve active duty in Afghanistan, came home a year ago, and brought back lessons that he couldn't have learned in business. While he had never seen himself as the military type until a personal tragedy made him reroute his career, he's a better man for it. Cross, 34, is now an...

   Military,Marine,Google,Engineer,Lessons,Teamwork     2011-11-12 10:36:03

  Not better, but different

The most important feature of Apple products is usability--Simple, aesthetic, easy to use.Their products may not necessarily the most powerful, but they usually are the easiest to use. Following picture show a Mac (left) and a PC(right), which one looks better?Many products are trying to mimic these features, but one problem comes out:It's hard to keep a product simple while providing so many new features.If you continuously add new features to your product,  your product will become more c...

   Market positioning,Product manager     2012-05-19 13:29:20

  TL;DR: Beyond Mobile

In his Beyond Mobile presentation at TL;DR Conference in San Francisco CA, Scott Jenson made the case for moving beyond mobile applications and illustrated what a future without apps could be. Here’s my notes from his talk: The history of mobile phones has been copying the desktop and then realizing it just doesn’t work right.Apps are a holdover from the desktop.There are a number of trends that highlight how we can move beyond apps on mobile.App Glut: are we going to have an a...

   Mobile,Beyond mobile     2012-04-01 04:20:30

  Different types of keystore in Java -- PKCS12

PKCS12 is an active file format for storing cryptography objects as a single file. It can be used to store secret key, private key and certificate.It is a standardized format published by RSA Laboratories which means it can be used not only in Java but also in other libraries in C, C++ or C# etc. This file format is frequently used to import and export entries from or to other keystore types. Next we will explain the operations which can be performed on PKCS12 keystore. Create PKCS12 keystore Be...

   Java, PKCS12, keystore, tutorial     2015-01-04 21:08:49

  IDC lists top 6 myths, realities about open source

Summary: What are the top 6 myths? That open source software will enter every market, is inherently innovative, it improves faster than commercial software, that it has less lock-in, that it’s free and that it has little benefit if one is not involved in the community. IDC calls these ideas “myths” but acknowledges there’s more than a grain of truth to all of them At its Directions 2012 conference in Boston today, IDC rev...

   IDC,Open source,Reality,Free,Contribution     2012-03-16 08:47:53

  My love… for Expressive Programming Languages

I started out my journey with programming as a teenager learning GW-BASIC. Soon I learnt C language followed by C++.  I was impressed with the OO syntactic constructs C++ had on offer but I felt a little uneasy with a few constructs such as the scope resolution. I started studying Java. It immediately caught my attention with the syntactic improvements and simplifications it brought over C++. I was still in academics, so learning(precisely trying) programming languages on su...

   descriptive,programming,language,prefere     2011-08-17 07:31:09

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