Peter Coffee

Its been 10 years since IT gadfly Stan Kelly-Bootle called the PC spreadsheet “the Uzi of creative corporate accounting,” but too many decisions are still being made on the basis of point-value estimates at the hopeful end of the error range. Decisioneerings Crystal Ball 7.1, released earlier this spring, eliminates the excuses for getting along […]

If you look at the shape of a mountain range, its often difficult to tell whether the image spans just a few hundred feet or hundreds of miles. Any section of the shape has the same sorts of wiggles as the larger context from which it came. This is called “self-similarity,” and I felt as […]

Enterprise application developers are squarely in the cross hairs of the next generation of IT system attacks. As generic infrastructure security and user awareness issues are increasingly addressed, the most dangerous remaining and newly arising vulnerabilities are those in the applications that define any modern organizations procedures and controls. When perimeter security is lax, attackers […]

It was bad enough for retailer TigerDirect to find itself displaced in search engine rankings by Apples Mac OS X 10.4, with its own well-promoted Tiger nickname. (District Court to TigerDirect: “Get over it.”) Things are much worse this morning for anyone other than Microsoft and Sun with a pitch to make for federated identity […]

You couldnt choreograph a more ironic pas de deux than the debut of Apples OS X 10.4, with its Web-intensive Dashboard of data-tracking “widgets,” followed just nine days later by a multihour outage of several Google services. The first event illustrated, not just with a developer-conference demo but in an actual shipping product, the difference […]

Congratulations! Youve proved you could do it. Now you get to do it again and again and again … Thats the realization thats starting to sink in as enterprises come to terms with the success—which may not be the best word—of their initial completions of Sarbanes-Oxley Act audits. As the Greek King Pyrrhus said circa […]

Its easy to agree that the world needs more software testing, but its much more difficult to turn that desire into a disciplined and cost-effective process. The wrong kind of testing tool is like an automatic transmission in the hands of a driver with no good maps: It will merely make it easier to take […]

Programmers editors such as SlickEdits Visual SlickEdit 10 have become much more than manual tools for working with source code text. The March Version 10 update of Visual SlickEdit, a long-standing eWEEK Labs Analysts Choice, provides impressive real-time analysis and display of program structure. Improvements include expanded tools for code refactoring as well as edit-time […]

Its good that the Internet enables exchanges of any kind of content among consenting nodes. Embracing that principle, though, is not the same as liking the results. Some of the packaging choices Ive seen almost give me second thoughts about content-neutral networks. People routinely overpackage and underprotect content. Ive seen public documents, linked from government […]

Version 4 of the Globus Toolkit, released today with the sponsorship of the Globus Consortium, is a Web services-oriented platform that signals the readiness of grid computing for mainstream enterprise applications as well as research and supercomputing tasks. “GT4 implements the latest standards from WS, OASIS and W3C,” explained Globus Consortium board member Ian Foster, […]

My wife and I accompanied two of our sons this month on a Boy Scout backpacking trip to the Santa Monica Mountains, where Southern Californias near-record rainy season has produced an incredible landscape of green meadows and hillsides overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I figured wed better enjoy that scenery now because by August the only […]

Last weeks acquisition of New York-based Popkin Software and Systems Inc. by Swedens Telelogic AB combines two companies whose products Ive covered for years. I reviewed Version 10 of Popkins System Architect product this past September, having first made the products acquaintance with (as I recall) Version 3: Ever since, its been among my favorite […]