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{ Category Archives } General Software Development

Book Review: Rework

Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, cannot accurately be described as the "sequel" to the first book to come out of 37 Signals, Getting Real. As a significant percentage of the book seems to be word for word identical to text in Getting Real, I think it’s more of a "remix." Getting Real [...]

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A Math Primer for Gentry’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote What Is Homomorphic Encryption, and Why Should I Care? In that post, I promised to share my C# implementation of the algorithm from Craig Gentry’s CACM article. Before I can do that, though, I need to explain some of the math involved.
Perhaps surprisingly, it’s actually very simple. (I [...]

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What is Homomorphic Encryption, and Why Should I Care?

The March 2010 issue of the Communications of the ACM includes a technical paper with an introduction entitled "A First Glance of Cryptography’s Holy Grail" (ACM subscription required). That’s enough to catch my attention. The paper itself, Computing Arbitrary Functions of Encrypted Data, describes a relatively new algorithm for homomorphic encryption.
Although these words may be [...]

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Crossword No. 2

DotNetSlackers just published a crossword puzzle I created; you’ll see the grid below. The puzzle is focused on .NET and programming themes, including a Delphi reference here and there. The site editors wanted an article to go with the puzzle, so I wrote an article explaining how I created the puzzle. The article is full [...]

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Comparing C#, C++, and Delphi (Win32) Generics

C#, C++, and Delphi all have a generic type and method language feature. Although all three languages are statically typed, they implement generics in very different ways. I’m going to give a brief overview of the differences, both in terms of language features and implementation. I presume that Delphi Prism generics work essentially the same [...]

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The Leadership Mistake I Keep Making

I need to teach myself to say "No" in a much more constructive way.

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On That Delphi 7 Virus and Ken Thompson’s Turing Award Speech

In 1984, Ken Thompson, the operating system and programming language pioneer, received the ACM’s Turing Award. In his short, highly-readable Turing Award speech, he describes "the cutest program I ever wrote." He notes that because the C compiler is written in C, it is possible to alter the source code maliciously to produce a malicious [...]

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2D Goggles - Babbage and Lovelace

Warning: The following comic has been demonstrated to severely lower developer productivity upon first introduction.
Sydney Padua has done the impossible: Created a programming comic which I like as much as XKCD. You can start at the beginning or read the latest, thrilling episode. She also did a special for the BBC. Navigation is a bit [...]

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Columbus Give Camp

This past weekend I, along with around 50 other local geeks, volunteered three days of my time to build web applications for eight different Columbus-area nonprofits. Columbus Give Camp is based on a similar series of events in Michigan. The Columbus Give Camp was hosted by Quick Solutions, who, conveniently, are located five floors above [...]

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A Crash Course In Failure

My new article, A Crash Course In Failure, has just been published on the architecture site NPlus1. In it, I examine the surprisingly persuasive argument that unplugging entire racks of live, production servers is not only a good idea, but that shutting them down any other way is a mistake, and what this means for [...]

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