These days I was thinking (yes, sometimes I commit this sin because “тренер запрещает нам думать”, “noi muncim, nu gandim”) why the hell, with all the advances of management and methodologies in software development, the softdev is still have to cope with mess… and I mean mess, the real mess/garbage/left-overs in the source code…

Well, to answer this question, I drew a (somewhat) parallel line with other development industry - building development. In general terms, the parallel can be made even with work of a carpenter to a certain degree.

So, making abstraction of the fact that softdev is more a virtual environment (where programmers can optimize the lift so that it’s acceleration catapults thru the roof or can paint the paper roof to look like tile and so on) a parallel line can be made:

• both need a proper and sustainable approved architecture plan
• both need a nice and modular design
• both need qualitative tools and materials for a superior finished quality
• etc

One of the things however I notices is that:

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EUSecWest 2010 is near

I invite you to take a look at EUSecWest 2010 agenda and register. Perhaps we could meet there, who knows…

“Programmers should be able to program!” program

Well, sad and true in the same time… It is an entertaining reading and one full of insights…

Maybe it’s just one of those reasons why software is getting more crappy, unreliable, insecure, etc.

The non-programming programmers

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UPDATE 20101012

By a very nice coincidence I have bumped into this interesting paper (dating around 15 Jul 2008) - “BREAKING THE BANK - VULNERABILITIES IN NUMERIC PROCESSING WITHIN FINANCIAL APPLICATIONS” - ENJOY the reading!

Given I currently work in a telecom billing software company - I just cannot find enough words and meanings to confirm with sorrow that pretty-fucking-many of my fellow programmers do not give a shi…ny glass for avoiding this kind of problems. Worst, they don’t even realize it :-S…

PS: …and YES, Bank Of Cyprus (along with its new migrated Java/JSF-based banking application - a special post on this to follow) allows/uses:

• input like “1E+3″ which gets translated into “1000″
• “round-to-nearest, ties away from zero” for 3rd decimal, i.e. “0,004″ gets translated to “0,00″ and “0,007″ gets translated to “0,01″

Happy hacking…

Money

When it comes to speaking about money, a lot of people get interested. And nowadays most money discussion evolve around or near-by the EUR-USD exchange rates.

Some people (including me sometime ) are unhappy to depend and always lose their honestly earned savings because of some avid and greedy circles of interest are playing with exchange rates and make them uncontrollable…

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26C3 - “Look ma’ , I am on TV”

26C3 is over… It was a fun experience however !

Some key points:

Lightning talks

Together with Pavol Luptak (from Nethemba team in Slovakia), had a lightning talk about the MFCUK

Online video / Downloadable video (our talk starts around 00:09:50)

Slides 26C3 Lightning Talk Day2 MFCUK Mifare Classic Toolkit

Open digital radio

Also, I have attended a very nice and neat workshop put up by Mathias Coinchon from OpenDigitalRadio.org

The workshop link is here.

Mathias also have kindly provided the GNU Radio Companion files used in “26C3 Radio Broadcasting Workshop”.

DYI Book scanner

Ever wondered how the thousand pages books are scanned and put online? I was wondering that too.

A nice lecture and slides are here:

How to build your own Book Scanner [in 4 min]