Peter Coffee

Sometimes, fate hands me the perfect pair of news hooks from which to hang a metaphor. So it is with this weeks combination of the Eclipse Foundations move to join the Java Community Process, the Object Management Group and the Open Services Gateway initiative Alliance—in the same week that Hondas Asimo robot demonstrated in Las […]

The runaway success of Nintendos motion-sensitive Wii game controller, with December sales of nearly 1 million units, turned out to be merely a prequel to Januarys debut of Apples iPhone, a device that redefines expectations, if not quite yet realities, for handheld device interaction and connectivity. Developers are on notice: The next generation of personal, […]

Boy, it’s got to feel bad when you destroy a perfectly good working spacecraft with a dumb bug in a software upgrade. Hippocratic sentiments like “First, do no harm” certainly do come to mind. The prospect of sitting at a machine for ‘way too much time, installing expensive software only to wind up with something […]

A location is not a mere number or label. On a large scale, location information challenges application developers to work with the mathematics of movement around the not-quite-spherical surface of the Earth; on a small scale, it requires complex calculations of optimal routes based on frequent updates of rapidly changing conditions. But the investment of […]

Many trifling changes are hyped as “the end of an era,” but sometimes the phrase is well-chosen. The final removal of Morse code proficiency requirements for all classes of amateur (“ham”) radio licenses in a year-end action by the Federal Communications Commission is one of those signal events—pun intended. Even if youve never seen a […]

If you ask most people to free-associate from the trigger term “September 2001,” likely responses might be “World Trade Center” or “terrorists.” Only people at the epicenter of an enterprise IT operation are likely to recall, without being reminded, that the week after 9/11 was marked by the worldwide attack of the Nimda worm—which many […]

When I heard about the Ford/Microsoft announcement at this weeks Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, my first thought was the radically different time frames of the consumer auto and the consumer electronics markets. Ive never kept a new car for less than six years, and my typical tenure for a car that I buy […]

Reading through the updates on the latest PDF-related security flaw, I found one key observation about the pathway to exploits with full access to local file systems. Quoting CTO Jeremiah Grossman at White Hat Security, a CNET story noted that “For an attack to work, a malicious link has to point to an existing PDF […]

With admirable timing that buried the news in the heart of the pre-Christmas rush, not to mention burying it further in paragraph 5 of a presidential signing statement, the White House on Dec. 20 declared that “The executive branch shall construe…the [Postal Accountability and Enhancement] Act, which provides for opening of an item of a […]

When I saw a Reuters article about David Platt’s new book, Why Software Sucks, I thought it sounded familiar. Then I realized that I’d gotten a reviewer copy of that book a few weeks ago, but had put it aside because it didn’t have an animal on the cover. That article brought me up short […]

So far as I can tell, just about nobody recognized the joker in the deck when I put dBase Mac on my list of 25 killer applications of all time — even though I took pains to say, “in the homicidal sense.” Many Web sites merely posted the list of products’ names without my explanations […]

My engineering education was significantly shaped by my MIT faculty advisor, John Biggs, who thought it would be a good use of my time to take core courses in other departments whenever my degree program left some room for “free electives.” Instead of taking a class in Cinema of Classical Science Fiction, hypothetically, he thought […]