The Upside of the Recession on the Dilbert blog.

I read and sometimes (rarely) post in the business of software forum on the Joel on Software site – and every once in a while someone asks if something he is about to do is ethical (usually it involves taking business away from a previous employer), this is my answer to all those questions. Follow your conscience and do what you think is right, you will have to live with your actions and the consequences of those actions for a very long time (hopefully). If you are asking you probably think what you are about to do is iffy at best –...

Let me ask you a question, I regularly use two on-line financial services – with very two different authentication systems: The first service uses a simple user name/password authentication, my login name is my e-mail address and the password never has to be changed. The second service uses a more complex authentication scheme, my user name is a random collection of letters and numbers, I have to change my password every month and I have a third identification code have to type to login. Which of those two services is more secure? I believe most people...

Security is a tradeoff, there is always a choice between security and usability, a good example for this is spam filtering, almost everyone gets an overwhelming amounts of e-mail spam – fortunately there are a wide range of anti-spam solutions to help you deal with this situation. For your personal e-mail you probably don’t care too much about an occasional lost e-mail and deleting spam manually is just too annoying – so you’ll probably prefer an aggressive filtering system, at least as long as it doesn’t block any of your friends. From a business perspective a lost e-mail message can cost you...

I turned trackbacks off on this blog today. I love the concept of trackbacks, every time someone reference a blog post the software automatically creates a link back in the post’s comments. It makes it easier to follow conversations and it’s a nice way to find more blogs on topic that interest you – it’s really a wonderful idea. So what’s the problem then? The system is based on trust, the blogging software will blindly add a trackback comment to whoever requests one – even if it’s a spammer. The moment spammers figured it out it was all over, lately the amount of trackback...

All software above some complexity threshold has bugs and that threshold is fairly low – Just about any software that does anything remotely interesting has bugs. Microsoft’s software, especially Windows and Office are insanely complex – they got so complex because they are so capable and I wouldn’t want to replace them with a simple alternative (you can read what I think about simple software here). If you write software eventually you will run into a Microsoft bug (if you’re software doesn’t run under windows than it’s a bug in the Linux kernel or Rails or a Google service you use), once...