Gnodal Journal

One more for the “it’s not just me department”. (A bit of setup: 1) Joel is no amateur, and no poseur, right? 2) our language is practically dead; the reaction I get to “I heard a nice song this afternoon” is much the same as what I’d get to “OMG I don’t know how I missed it but the 9th cut on Kwaku Kwaakye Obeng’s “awakening” can loop for hours without boring!!” … same-o … no connection, no contact! 3) I’m tiring of ranting about how things shouldn’t go Code4 everytime a lighbulb burns out.)

Joel on Software –   “A week of Murphy’s Law gone wild“

Gawd … how are we supposed to run a planet if we can not rely on our peripheral processes and ancillary devices?! “Mission critical” has become as much a buzzword as “new and improved”. A society that doesn’t relate to the actualities of economic activity can’t learn from history, and so won’t be able to distinguish between reasonable fear and mere paranoia. *slaps forehead*
You read this. I’m going to get a drink. Scotch. Old scotch. Neat. A double. At least one.

The M$ $erver $aga Continues: A nice little page of security-related links from showmyip.com
Yesterday I found a few good links (one is “Putting your web servers under lock and key” from business2.com) reading a couple of good overviews of the $QL $lammer on CNN Tech, (“Experts: Internet attack hunt difficult” and “As Net attack eases, blame game surges“). In the latter I came across this quote from Andrew Schulman, software litigation consultant and author:

“Part of the problem is that Microsoft has always been oriented toward growth rather than consolidation. Getting them to say ‘Let’s take what we do now and make better and more bug free’ is a big challenge.”
“It would be great for someone to tell them, ‘Go back and clean up the whole mess you made.’ That would be terrific. But it’s not going to happen.”

Now that rang my bell, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to post it … maybe too much like kicking someone down … maybe a limited capacity for appalling truthes. But it came to mind very strongly and I decided to blog it when I read Eric Meyer on a related thread:

“[T]he more I hear about the things that can happen to IE/Win users, the happier I am about being a Macintosh user who works for Netscape. The very idea that a Web browser can be taken over, and seriously mess up the operating system in the process, makes my eyes cross. I’m starting to wonder how any company with the slightest shred of concern over security could possibly justify running IE/Win.”

*sigh … so it’s not just me … *sigh*