My bank has one of those idiotic rules forcing us to change our password for online banking every 90 days. It is my opinion that their rule increases vulnerability rather than resistance to attack, but it is a situation about which I can do nothing, and I otherwise like the bank.

I spend some of my time reading liner notes of the music CDs that I buy. Like the Rosetta Stone, they are often written in three languages, although the languages are usually English, French, and German, rather than hieroglyphs, demotic script, and Ancient Greek. Once in a while, I open to the wrong language, and [...]

Breathes there a web designer with wallet so fed who never to himself hath said, “Cutting and pasting this Lorem Ipsum stuff is utter tedium. It doesn’t look like English, and the first word isn’t even Latin.” Technologies have come a long way since cut and paste, and the time has come to use technologies [...]

From the time of publication of the essay “No Silver Bullet” in 1986, we have been looking for the silver bullet ever more diligently.  Even the essay’s author, Dr. Fred Brooks, Jr., wrote a sequel called “‘No Silver Bullet’ Refired” that appeared in 1995. On a less grand scale, five years later, I gave a [...]

Cryptography fascinates the inner thief in almost everyone, from children who have tried to steal a cookie while their mothers were not looking, to professionals attempting to steal secrets. This interview question is a good one to discuss for a 45 minute hour to determine if a candidate understands the basic principles of cryptography as [...]

In this morning’s mail I received a link to a good post about passwords and entropy and the like (http://blog NULL.agilebits NULL.com/2011/08/better-master-passwords-the-geek-edition/). There is so much cruft about passwords that it is difficult to reliably suss the good and the bad, but the above posting is both correct and reasonable. Sometimes I need a password, [...]

Whether or not you intend to be an SQL programmer (ever, or for the rest of your life), you will spend a large amount of your time in IT modeling data. For now, throw the MVC meaning of model out the window, or if you happen to be on the 17th floor, just put it [...]

English is the most orthographically difficult language written with the Roman alphabet, meaning, there are not always clues to a word’s pronunciation from its spelling, and the reverse. Only speakers of English can enjoy the perverse event of the grammar school Spelling Bee. I was so bad at spelling in school that I assumed it [...]

Bungled interviews go back a long way, and a mythological example comes to us from The Ring of the Niebelungen. Wotan, the God who had Valhalla built, and Mime, a dwarf, have a mutual interview that goes awry. At the start, they agree to bet their heads on their abilities to answer each other’s questions. Things do not [...]

There always seems to be an interviewer who is out to make his mark by asking the big-O question. Not that big-O question, but the one where a data structure is presented with little of the real world information that might accompany its use, and then the question is asked “What’s the big-O notation for [...]