<$BlogItemTitle$> Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
Security conference offers weird, woeful predictions - Computerworld.  The expectation of major IT "disasters" as well as problems with WIFI Internet technology and corporate privacy/security are strong messages.
posted by Dennis at Tuesday, May 27, 2003

 

Computer Technology

Training and Education

I noticed a fair amoung of material on how-to information, so I made these clippings for future reference.  I also found some material on inspections and validation of web sites and other software.  I wouldn't have noticed so carefully if I hadn't just completed a Software Engineering course.  I notice it impacts how I organize my web site and also how I appraise software tools that I install.

Help for developers

I know there is more out there, especially at CNET.com sites.  Here is a beginning.

ASP-Help.com - Active Server Pages Developers Help.  A different kind of help. Has benchmark data on ASP.NET performance. Funny, my licenses say I can't do that. I suppose it helps that the later (post-beta) version shows such outstanding web-side performance that they almost couldn't believe it.  Very interesting.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003

 
HTML Help by The Web Design Group.  This site supports the creation of web pages that are accessible to all, via any browser. There are also analysis tools and references on key HTML authoring standards and also an archive of FAQ.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003

 
Help - CNET.com.  I received some marketing trash from ZD-net offering Help.com Learning CDs. I am interested in what they have, but the e-mailed offer was too focused. I know I've seen Help.com, so I thought I'g do looking. Here's the home page.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003

 

Trust and Trustworthy Computing

The human factor

It seems very clear that the way employees support secure operation of a business, and how IT behaves, has a great deal to do with IT security and the trustworthiness of operations.  These clippings address the human factor in a variety of ways.

TechRepublic: Consultant tightened security two ways after "Needlepoint" virus attack.  (You may have to register to access this article.)  An interesting and somehow more personable approach to the overall issue of security problems on an intranet.  The risk management topics, the technical solutions, and the training and vigilance of staff are all addressed.  This does not deal with actions by IT staff that may lead to vulnerabilities, but they would seem to establish an important context.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003

 
Should you monitor your employees' Web use?.  An interesting discussion around establishment of trustworthiness.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003

 
Why you need a company policy on Internet use.  Another, related article on establishiing a policy and making it stick. Some of this feels pretty awkward. It would be valuable to find a benign way to discourage inappropriate use without discouraging the staff. What is an encouraging approach?
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003

 
Lessons learned from bad tech hires.  Important lessons also for the auditability and approach to inspection of system operations that should be part of any system design and implementation.  These examples all revolve around misconduct and socially-unaware behavior by people with internal access to systems.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003

 

Software Engineering and Development

Tool Integration

Web development

Here's an interesting project for tool add-ins to Visual Studio .NET 2003.  The nice part about it is that the tool used for the demonstration is HTML Tidy.

Walkthrough: Approaches to Building a Visual Studio .NET 2003 Add-in Project that Enables HTML Tidy.  This is about incorporating HTML Tidy into VS .Net 2003 as an Add-in. That's fine. They key thing is that HTML Tidy be used to vet web pages as part of projects under VS .NET. It makes me wonder what is happening to my old buddy FrontPage, though.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003

 

Integration and Interoperability

Web services

I have been saying that interworking of Microsoft .NET web services and Java web services can happen and the question is, who will do it.  There are related questions about bridging the respective toolcraft communities. I'm doing my part by finally studying Java, and I may actually become certified because it should be easy enough to do.  I'm not doing this because it lights me up, although I expect to get thoroughly into it.  I think that component frameworks are the answer and that they also provide the interoperability bridge required for preservation of design and for transcending the platform.  That, combined with the fact that Java is now the language of choice for instruction of programming techniques and training of developers, means I have to master it in a practical way.  But my eye is on interoperability and transcending the toolcraft lock-in, from either side of the current barriers.  I am starting with Java now, with C# and .NET next.

Web Services Enhancements 1.0 and Java Interoperability, Part 2.  An interesting demonstration of early work to bridge between a .NET web service and a Java one. In case I didn't blog it already.

Matjaz B. Juric Home Page.  A nice set of research topics in distributed computing, distributed object technology, and general enterprise platform considerations.

CASE

JRefactory Software.  A SourceForge resource on Java tools for CASE work.

Software Measurement Services.  A European consultancy dedicated to measurement-driven performance improvement in software.  Useful links and resources.
posted by Dennis at Sunday, May 25, 2003