Author Archive: bfwebster
Webster is Principal and Founder at at Bruce F. Webster & Associates, as well as an Adjunct Professor for the BYU Computer Science Department. He works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects. He has also worked in several dozen legal cases as a consultant and as a testifying expert, both in the United States and Japan. He can be reached at 303.502.4141 or at bwebster@bfwa.com.
Really poor web programming at AA.com
I travel a fair amount on business, though it can really vary from year to year and even during a given year. As it happened, I traveled a lot last year, requalifying for Platinum status on American Airlines. My wife traveled with me a lot as well, and she actually ended up with Gold status, […]
A possible game-changer in industrial robots
Via Slashdot come a link to this MIT video (sorry, can’t find a way to embed it) about the work that Rodney Baxter (founder of iRobot) is doing to develop a new kind of industrial robot: cheap (~$22K), safe, and programmable by factory workers. What rings true in Brooks’ commentary is that people will find […]
“Ground-truth documents”
A great post by Eric S. Raymond[*] (yes, that esr) on what he terms ground-truth documents: Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its […]
New series of posts (at bfwa.com): Readings in Software Engineering
Over at bfwa.com, I’ve started a new series of posts that will present brief reviews of and excerpts from my library of software engineering and IT project management texts. Here’s the introduction to the series; and here’s the first post, covering Jerry Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming. ..bruce..
Rebuilding a WHS 2003 box, part I
A few years ago, I bought an off-the-shelf (well, delivered from Amazon) Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server. It came with a single 2TB hard drive, 2 GB of RAM, an Intel Atom CPU 230 (1.6 ghz), three empty hot-swap drive bays, and Windows Home Server 2003 pre-installed; I added three more 2TB drives to the […]