Blub at large

There are actually blub programmers who are not too shy to boast their status. Not only that, they point to the very people explaining their misconception and don't get it. They also manage to create a website that tells you that you need to login only after you click the comment link, and provide no visible of means to create a login in the first place, which is the reason for me posting this here.

(Seems the site has been dead for a while.)

Trust and Guarantees

Bertrand Meyer had me laughing for a change. Obviously trust doesn't mean the same in computer science as it does in normal life; he wants to build 'trusted components -- reusable software elements whose quality can be guaranteed'.

The department of defense actually uses the same misconception: They are initiating a program for verifying the functions of chips manufactured abroad, and call this program TRUST.

Now trust implies that we don't know that a system has a specific property; we assume it has, on more or less sound reasons. Guarantees come via control, at a price. It's the same as in project management; either you have people you can trust to deliver results, or you need processes to control the output (and hopefully only of those you can't trust).

Blogger oops

Blogger does not give me the delete button, and it should also not have posted this twice.

Learning at the barber's

I accompagnied my wife to the barber's recently. The cutting looks so easy, everybody should be able to that! (Just like software.) I kept looking and learned. Even though it looks like he is just cutting away, he doesn't. There are different movements for the different stages, and there are tricks to check if the (long) hair has the same length on both sides.

Learned: To make it look easy you need to know what you are doing and what you can do. The last part, your options, are the hard part. You can't just bash away (at the scissors or at the keyboard), you need the confidence that you can handle upcoming difficulties.