Recent Posts:

Will specialized devices become the last bastion of software patents? - Posted to Open Device, Insert Code by Brad Dixon on July 24th, 2008

[back from a fun vacation and a quick trip to Ottawa... hello to our new readers from LinuxDevices] Jonathan Corbet at LWN.net called my attention to a recent article in  the Patent Law blog which discusses a recent patent appeal outcome. The takeaway is that the appeal provided a rubric for evaluating the validity of patenting a software application that may mean that software algorithms that run only on general purpose computers are not patentable. Whoa. That should cause some heartburn. If the analysis from the Patent Law blog is reliable then there could be a number of software domains which just aren't candidates for protection using patents. Since IANAL I'll refrain from adding my own analysis. Let's see if I can tempt Matt "I blog 98 times a day" Asay into saying something about this. Brad .. (Read More)

Someone Needs an Antacid - Posted to Off the Shelf by Jim Ready on June 19th, 2008

Bruce Webster has an interesting blog post about "Project FUBAR," an IT project gone bad, really bad. Although Bruce describes what appears to be the IT software project from hell, it is a real world example of some of the things that I described in my last blog post. I recommend that you read Bruce's entire post, but I wanted to highlight a couple of thing that stood out. Take this part of his memo, for instance: The code base is very fragile. A lot of it is bad old code that BigFirm didn't have time to rewrite two years ago, but now is five times its original size and even worse. One consultant said he took a code listing, picked pages at random, and found problems on every page he selected. There is pervasive hard coding of what should be adjustable parameters or at least meaningfully named constants (e.g., # of [key items] hard-coded throughout with the literal value '3', a constant named 'ninety_eight'). Builds take all night. App releases don't run acceptably, if at all, in a production environment. Developers check in files that won't even compile. Granted, this is an IT project and not an embedded project,.. (Read More)