Wandering Thoughts archives

Link: When the "best tool for the job"... isn't.

When the "best tool for the job" isn't argues that what we might think is the best tool for the job isn't. (I'm not going to mangle its ideas by trying to summarize it more than that.)

This is an issue that I sometimes feel moderately acutely, since I use X Windows in preference to something like OS X, while the general view is that Apples are the machines for people who want both Unix and a decent user experience (and there's a certain population that questions the sanity and wisdom of Unix people who aren't interested in that migration).

(From the Voidspace Techie Blog, via Planet Python.)

Link: Ten Risks of PKI

Ten Risks of PKI: What You're Not Being Told About Public Key Infrastructure is a paper by Carl Ellison and Bruce Schneier. These aren't technical risks, at least not directly, and it makes for interesting reading. (And after you're done reading your printed copy of the PDF you can leave it out in a strategic spot for other people to run across.)

(From this comp.lang.python article by Edward Elliot, which I ran across through the Daily Python URL.)

Link: Linguistic blindness illustrated

If you can answer this, you are not paying attention is a nice illustration and discussion of the importance of thinking about what you're writing in prompts and questions in software. Also interesting is a followup entry on why everyone is so against using 'yes' and 'no' for answers in dialog boxes.

(From Daring Fireball.)

Link: non-errors in English

Non-Errors is a nice catalog of things that aren't English usage errors, even though a lot of people tend to think that they are. Since I do any number of them I find this reassuring, and it's amusing to see just how old some of these perfectly proper usages turn out to be.

(From Daring Fireball.)

Link: 'Document Centric'

Document Centric is about the disconnect between relational databases and regular users, and why people keep stuffing data into spreadsheets and the like instead of 'real' databases.

(They do. Joel Spolsky has written about the Excel team's surprise at finding this out about how real users used Excel.)

(From Carlos de la Guardia.)