Peter Coffee

Where do we get our ideas of whats smart and whats stupid to do? That question largely inspired this months Youth Summit for Online Safety, conducted at the University of California, San Diego, with sponsorship from Microsoft and nonprofits i-Safe America (www.isafe.org) and TakingITGlobal (www.takingitglobal.org). I was asked the question above during a call with […]

It was simpler and smoother-running, and it had more potential for future development. On the downside, it ran hotter, it wasnt mass-produced, and it lacked ubiquitous support resources and maintenance skills. Downside concerns trumped upside potentials; the mainstream technology won. That may sound like a narrative of Apples decision, announced this month, that it will […]

Like a bunch of, pardon the expression, desperate housewives, developers are getting dumped left and right by partners to whom theyve given the best years of their lives. Last week began with Apple Computer Inc. telling developers that theyd better be using Xcode for their Macintosh software development — because other tool sets wouldnt offer […]

Its hard to be a modern electronics hacker when the performance of your test and measurement gear has to advance at 10 times the pace of the hardware mainstream. Thinking about this problem made me realize, though, that the same issue arises in business process measurement and control. Its easy to explain why electronic measurement […]

Automatic source code review—comparing a programmers work against a growing library of coding standards—is the new frontier of development tool sets. Integrating both general and task-specific rules of readability, reliability and security into the coding process is becoming a top priority of those responsible for equipping development teams. Convenient means of customizing and extending those […]

Early in the story of Neal Stephensons 1995 novel The Diamond Age, a wealthy client is mildly peeved to learn that an interactive educational project that he has commissioned must be delivered partly in the form of a service, rather than a completely self-contained device. Regretfully, the project leader explains the problem: “After all of […]

Software standards used to be developed by programmers, for programmers, as tools for ensuring interoperability and achieving greater leverage for developers skills. Increasingly, though, development teams find their efforts affected by standards that respond to external forces, such as corporate governance regulators, consumer protection activists, civil rights advocates, and other stakeholders and scrutineers. Development teams […]

Apple Computer Inc.s Mac OS X 10.4 offers developers the first broadly used client platform on which to explore application interactions with data—especially with metadata—across world-spanning networks that merely begin with local storage. The 10.4 “Tiger” release represents the flip side of the Macs debut in 1984, which challenged developers to take a new view […]

Lots of folks get all misty-eyed these days about the power of computers to help us express ourselves. The engineer in me recoils, though, from the use of so much power to wait for a user to think of something to say—as the 1GHz CPU of my laptop is waiting for me, right now, to […]

The need for accurate measurement and process control was a pervasive theme at this months Nanotech conference and trade show in Anaheim, Calif. I spoke there with Matthew Laudon, executive director of conference organizer Nano Science and Technology Institute, about the nanotech communitys convergence on this concern. In early years, Laudon said, there was much […]

Science fiction sometimes offers oddly flawed images of the future. Robert Heinleins 1953 novel “Starman Jones,” for example, depicted faster-than-light starship travel—with flight deck officers toggling binary numbers directly into their computers, using values they looked up in books. Heinleins scenario wasnt just an amusing failure of foresight. It says a lot about peoples expectations […]

With application developers bearing a growing share of the enterprise IT security burden, its necessary for development-tool budgets to provide for the scrutiny of code and support of rigorous process, as well as boosting traditional measures of developer productivity. Software quality assurance tools such as Parasofts Jtest 6.0 are adding security rules to their portfolios […]