Design for user experience

If a million users each waste a minute a day dealing with complexity that an engineer could have eliminated in a week by making the software a little more complex, you are penalizing the user to make the engineer’s job easier.

Larry Tesler

Security humor – protection and voting machines

I know…if all I do is link to Schneier’s links, then you should probably just read his blog instead.

That notwithstanding, this xkcd comic is really funny and really wrong.

[via, you guessed it, Schneier]

Source code management

I’ve been trying to introduce some source code wrangling practices which I think will help us update existing systems while we also do ongoing maintenance/bug fixing. “Branching” is one of the ideas which I think will help keep us out of trouble.

Eric Sink, one of the founders of Source Gear, has a nice tool-agnostic series of articles about Source Control. Here’s the page on branching – my opinions are largely based on his so most of what he writes here matches my world view.

Please read this – I would welcome other ideas, opinions and experiences on the topic.

Dilbert Security

I’m not saying security rules we encounter are like this. I’m just sayin’…