In this case I am finishing up one project and working on another. Being at different stages in development/implementation is also making it interesting because there is a different mindset. In the first case I am always waiting on the user to do some testing, find some bugs and then call me in to resolve them. In the other case I am working primarily without any road blocks to get a first draft of a new system out. The find and fix programming process is a lot different from the ‘create and test’ one. If this is a daily process then efficiency is degraded. In my case it is a once a week for a few hours on the fixing part but as the work gets more critical I am finding that it is important to find the right time to do the debugging work. For this to work flexible schedules are necessary and an understanding manager user set on both sides of the process.
Language is a dynamic process. In a recent letter to the editor I noted a rather pedantic individual complaining that the singular form of agenda is agendum. Yes, sometime in the past agenda was the plural of agendum, meaning a thing to be done. In modern times this has been changed to mean a list of things to be done. Language is dynamic and in all the meetings I have attended it was always the agenda never the agendum so being pedantic does not change modern usage.
That being covered some of the new words added to the dictionary this year include woot, retweet, cyberbullying, denialist, gastric band, mankini, jeggings, sexting, slow food, upcycle and
domestic goddess. There are others but this is a representative set of what we are using out there over the past few years though can’t we do with a word like mankini? Of course my spell checker is not accepting most of the above.
Industry News
What a surprise as Android takes off Apple is getting more aggressive in attacking companies like Samsung. Europe represented by the EU, being somewhat Apple loving, has bent over backwards to accommodate Apple. Since there are some serious doubts as to the validity of Apple’s claims I don’t expect Samsung to rush to meet the recall notices. The latest Apple attack is on both tablets and phones.
UK readers are moving across to eBook formats at a record rate no accounting for half of all European sales in that area. To put this into perspective the UK accounts for about 15 per cent of book sales in Europe. Overall eBook sales grew more than 400 per cent in 2010 with over 10 million books sold. This is expected to hit around 32 Million in 2011 not counting the free books from sources like Project Gutenberg, nor of course the Torrent-sourced books. The introduction of a UK version of the Kindle a year ago has helped sales there as I expect the similar introduction of an Australian one recently will boost eBooks sales there.
Just to make you feel that much safer about online security cryptographers have discovered a way to break the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) used to protect everything from top-secret government documents to online banking transactions. The technical paper can be found here http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/cryptanalysis/aesbc.pdf. The technique was revealed at the recent Crypto 2011 cryptology conference in Santa Barbara, California and it allows users to ‘recover’ AES secret keys up to five times faster than previously possible using a technique known as biclique cryptanalysis to remove about two bits from 128-, 192-, and 256-bit keys. The process is faster than a brute force attack for single key AES implementations.
The good news is that the technique does not really compromise AES because stronger AES keys are still quite secure as the technique still takes a very long time to process this kind of encryption. Since we are talking millions of years AES looks secure for now. What it does mean is that weaker AES encryptions are vulnerable.
As a side note you will read that AS has been ‘broken’ using this technique. The term “broken” simply means faster than it would take with a standard brute force attack, 5 times faster in this case. AES is not broken in the sense of being useable or reliable. Give that these kind of technologies get better with time then expect to see the number five here grow in size as time passes and techniques are refined or improved.
The rumour is that HP is going to divest its PC business and spend $10b to buy Autonomy a s/w company they have ben partners with since 2007. In the last financial quarter they made only $533m from their Personal Systems Group on revenues of $9.4bn driving the sell rumours.
Remember quite a while back I wrote in a Bangkok Post article about how performing a Microsoft update resulted in the most prolific viral infection of a series of Web Browsing tests. You will not be surprised then that Microsoft has deleted code on its MSN website that secretly logged visitors' browsing histories across multiple web properties, even when the users deleted browser cookies to elude tracking. In other news Microsoft has been secretly logged visitors' browsing histories across multiple web properties.
This was not a magnanimous gesture by Microsoft but rather one forced upon them when that a researcher in Stanford University's computer science department found that MSN and three other Microsoft websites hosted JavaScript that uniquely identified users in the event they deleted tracking cookies from their hard drives and that the code had a date-time stamp of 2007 which implied that they had been doing it for 4 years or so.
MS secreted some JavaScript in the browser's cache folder that held two separate ways to uniquely identify visitors. One held the MUID, or machine unique identifier, with code to recreate them if it was no longer held in the browser's cookie folder. The script also included the MUID in as an ETag that was also stored in the cache. The researcher could not find a single legitimate reason why Microsoft might have been doing this. Microsoft's outside PR firm declined to answer any questions about the practice and no one inside Redmond is talking either.
Other sites like Hulu.com, Spotify, and GigaOm have also been found to be using respawning techniques called supercookies and zombiecookies. Many are facing lawsuits for doing so. Microsoft was using the technique to sync browsing histories across at least six of their sites.
About a month ago there were some very excited signals from the Large Hadron Collider about a possible series of detection of the elusive Higgs Boson sometimes called the God Particle. There is still a 95% confidence level the readings will be verified but for scientists, unlike those in the AGW world, 100% certainty is required for confirmation. It is expected that the Higgs will be confirmed by the end of 2012.
I read an interesting article on what programmers might put on their tombstones. The text would of course be in a programming language of some kind. I particularly liked one example that I have modified slightly. While { Not Crocodile; } Or put another way, Not in a while crocodile :)
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