Riiiight here.

Yet another website about programming is Software Engineering Tips, written by an anonymous (as near as I can tell) genius. It’s full of opinions, wisdom, and humor, and may make you laugh, squirm uncomfortably,  nod your head in vigorous agreement, or punch the screen. Or all four of those things in some combination.

If you’re looking for security wisdom, D. A. Norman has some.

The numerous incidents of defeating security measures prompts my cynical slogan: The more secure you make something, the less secure it becomes. Why? Because when security gets in the way, sensible, well-meaning, dedicated people develop hacks and workarounds that defeat the security. Hence the prevalence of doors propped open by bricks and wastebaskets, of passwords pasted on the fronts of monitors or hidden under the keyboard or in the drawer, of home keys hidden under the mat or above the doorframe or under fake rocks that can be purchased for this purpose.

He’s not particularly fond of complex password rules. Fortunately, he didn’t make fun of ours. Because he found Northwestern’s.

Paul Graham has posted a new essay titled “Maker’s Schedule, Managers Schedule“. First couple paragraphs:

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a
different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule
and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s
embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one
hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you
need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

Very insightful and well written.

Securing my reputation for never posting anything substantive here: Google implements an old gag.

• Bruce Schneier has a pointer to a provocatively-titled article: “Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything?” The authors contend: not that much.
• Quite possibly the worst security question ever.

I’ve been negligent about contributing, sorry. And I don’t currently have anything substantive to contribute, but let me recommend a collection of pithy programming quotes to the folks I didn’t already e-mail.

A lot of cheap shots at some of my favorite things, but that’s OK, they’re still funny. Here’s one of my favorites from Brian Kernighan:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Enjoy! You can probably get away with claiming it’s work-related!