Peter Coffee

Last week, a public relations agency asked me if I were still interested in a topic that Ive been covering for more than 10 years—”or are you now all security, all the time?” I assured them that development tools, emerging technologies and many other topics are still on my radar—but yes, I have been writing […]

Were really good at building IT systems that remember what we told them: “If A today, then A tomorrow.” Were fairly good at building systems that can combine facts according to rules: “If A and B,” then C.” But were terrible at building systems that will tell us, “I dont believe you when you tell […]

In a universe where entropy always wins, disk defragmentation used to yield small but satisfying victories. When Im about to begin a video project or develop a hefty database, my ritual includes running Symantecs Norton SpeedDisk and enjoying the sight of a single, contiguous empty space on the disk—ready to capture my work. Im peeved, […]

Last week, I promised you the story of how I learned the hard way about the difference between mere IEEE 1394 compliance and genuine, FireWire-class plug-and-play convenience. Theres also a moral to the story, one that may change your perception of evolution versus revolution in personal computing platforms. Pull up a chair. More than three […]

People ask me why we accept complexities and defects in software that we would never tolerate in any other product or tool. From time to time, Ive shared in these columns a number of possible explanations: Read on for two old and one new. “The illusion of control” was named by researchers observing spreadsheet users. […]

Enterprise data storage may create more tension than any other element of IT architecture—facing the pressure of constant growth and presenting a spectrum of options that range from costly obsolescence to unacceptable bleeding-edge risk. At Washington Group International Inc., IT Enterprise Operations Manager Gary Bronson met the storage challenge with a SAN deployment, now in […]

As high-speed hardware cognoscenti converge for 1394 DevCon, taking place this week at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., its ironic that the 1394 Trade Association has just adopted Apples “FireWire” name for its future marketing and compliance labeling. Thats one more arrow in the quiver for those who say that Apple innovates, while Microsoft […]

Developers tool choices used to be made with a stopwatch, back when compile times were measured in minutes and desktop PC speed was the clients limiting resource. Todays performance bottlenecks often reside at a distance, whether in network bandwidth limits, in opaque run-time environments or in server-side code. Should developers still use tools that let […]

Do you protect yourself against hackers by crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? Thats the strategy of choice, it appears, for more than a third of the thousands of eWeek online readers whove replied to our poll on this subject. Even if our poll respondents (see results at www.eweek.com ) were being flippant […]

Continuing a year of hot pursuit of developers attention, Borland Software Corp.s JBuilder 7 arrived this month in the wake of Oracle Corp.s Oracle9i JDeveloper and Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio .Net. (See eWeek Labs Jan. 14 review of JDeveloper and Feb. 11 review of Visual Studio .Net at www.eweek.com/links.) JBuilder 7 adds Mac OS X […]

If Microsofts Xbox is going to be the digital homes gateway to the net, it might be a good idea if that gate could be locked—with a different key for every home. Ignoring a fundamental precept of security, Microsoft has been shipping the Xbox with a security key, identical in every unit, embedded in its […]

Of all the topics that I try to cover in these developer-oriented letters, nothing generates even half as much mail as the issue of software quality. In our June 3 eWEEK story on software patching, many of the most vigorous comments concerning the inevitability of software updates in the field came to me as readers […]