Great word: “bibliophibians”. Swap the genders of the two people in the Wondermark strip below, and you’ll capture the essence of many conversations that Sandra and I have had over the years (click on the strip to go to the full-sized original): The difference being, of course, that Sandra and I started out together with […]
I’ve been hired by Ziff Davis Enterprises to write a weekly column on IT Management for the online version of Baseline. The column itself will be based on materials I’m writing for my (forthcoming) book, Surviving Complexity. My first column is up: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Metrics (Part I)”; here’s the opening paragraph: When Capers […]
One of the books I’m currently writing is Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering, a greatly expanded and updated version of a book I published back in the 1990s. I’ve been posted new and revised pitfalls over at my Bruce F. Webster & Associates (bfwa.com) website. To make the pitfalls a bit easier to browse, I’ve […]
I’m a fan of Howard Phillip Lovecraft, not because I think he was a great writer (his prose is a bit purple by today’s standards), but because he really was the father of 20th Century post-Gothic horror. Sadly, all the film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work to date have been mediocre at best and usually wretched, […]
I’ve gotten some feedback on my memorial for Arthur C. Clarke, both direct and indirect, that the “Big Three” should include Ray Bradbury, either by expanding it to the “Big Four” or by dropping one of the “Big Three” (usually Heinlein). My response is that Bradbury doesn’t belong in that group for two critical reasons. […]
I just finished reading House to House: An Epic Memoir of War by SSG David Bellavia (with John R. Bruning). Bellavia took part in the US battle for Fallujah (Iraq) in November 2004; his squad was one of the first to enter the city, in which insurgents had spent months entrenching themselves and booby-trapping much […]
It is common in “serious” reviews of J. K. Rowling’s works to start with disclaimers regarding her writing — awkward, overly long, inconsistent, filled with excessive and irrelevant details about this ‘magic’ world, and so on. Give me a break. Rowling has managed to create one of the greatest phenomenons in the history of literature, […]
I’ve begun the process of updating and generalizing the original pitfalls (in Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Development) for Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering (or PMSE). Just scroll past the introductory text, and you’ll see an outline of the actual live content. As with The Art of ‘Ware, feedback and contributions are encouraged. ..bruce..
I’m finishing up an expert report for a patent case that I’m working on, so I haven’t been able to push forward with PMSE. However, I am posting a PDF of Chapter 2 from the original Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Development (M&T Books, 1995). This should be useful for those of you interested in contributing to […]
Thursday throes
We aim to please (most mostly we aim to hit) . . . MID-MORNING UPDATE: The FBI raids the office of the DC Chief Technology Officer, who is (or was) Vivek Kundra, who is now the new CTO for the Obama Administration. However, it appears that the focus is not on Kundra, but on two […]
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