A week or so ago Microsoft dug into a customer's Hotmail account in order to track down some information about code that had been stolen from Microsoft. Their terms and conditions specifically allowed them to do this, but despite that they received a fair amount of criticism.
With this announcement …
I have had people tell me things like "You should never throw an exception to return a value in an unusual case, exceptions are only supposed to be used for error conditions." And I HATE it when people say things like this.
There are a couple of audiences at play …
Posted Fri 24 January 2014 by mcherm in Programming
I don't often write book reviews here, but in this case I have a connection to the book. My friend Terry Jones was one of the authors of a new O'Reillyprogramming book (you know, the ones with the animal pictures on the covers) which is titled:
Posted Tue 31 December 2013 by mcherm in Programming, Reviews, Technology
CAPCHAs are those odd little boxes that show some badly malformed letters and numbers and ask you to type them in. The idea is to check whether you are a human.
The problem is that CAPCHAs are pretty difficult for humans. And they're fairly easy for computers. There are the …
Posted Mon 28 October 2013 by mcherm in Security, Technology
I wanted to pass on an excellent idea that I read from Martin Fowler's Blog. He calls it Immutable Servers, but I claim, if you think about it properly, it is merely the application of version control to systems administration.
Everyone understands just how much version control has transformed …
Posted Fri 28 June 2013 by mcherm in Software Development, Technology