CMMI horror stories

Juan Palacio in Navegapolis posts a link to CMMI Horror Stories: When Good Projects Go Bad, a power point presentation Northrop Grumman, one of CMMI's authors, that was presented at SEPG. The principal problem is when companies achieve certification for marketing purposes and don't actually use the techniques on all of their projects.

Ecology and truth

Enrique Baltanás in Al margen de los días writes about ecology:

Our well respected ecologists never cease to claim that the disappearance of species is due to the harmful activities of mankind...

But we have been waging war on cockroaches, mosquitoes, rats, moths, etc. and they still have not disappeared... the buggers.

There must be something about ecology that isn´t true.

Good resource for the Software Engineer in you

JorgeBec in Ingenieria de Software posts a link to the article, Good resource for the Software Engineer in you, which in turn posts a link to the Library and Information page of The Westfall Team. The site has a lot of resources on the various subjects of software engineering.

The rise and fall of CORBA ( and what we can learn)

mig21 in Yet Another Programming Weblog posts a link to the article,The Rise and Fall of CORBA by Michi Henning. He extracts the following conclusions:

• Standards bodies must make solid rules to standardise best practices.

• No standard should be approved without a reference implementation.

• No standard should be approved before being used in some implementations of reasonable complexity.

• Free and open source software follows Darwinian selection so more readily satisfies the above rules.

• To create quality software, the ability to say, “No,” is more important than the ability to say, “Yes.”

Jorge Luis Borges

TrickyDicky in Zenit Translations posts an article, Jose Luis Borges, a translation of an interview with Borges by Noel Clark, journalist and translator, in Spanish for the BBC Latin American service.

One of those migrations

Cesar Tardaguila in design-nation.blog/es posts a link to Enterprise Conversion Quirks a story in the Daily WTF of a migration of an application from Java server pages to ASP.NET.

Presentations of "Blogs and The Law"

Juan Palacio in Navegapolis posts a link to the output of the IberoAmerican Congress on Blogs and The Law that was held in Zaragoza from 4-6 June. The main output was the Declaration of Zaragoza which individuals may sign showing their agreement with its principles.

Kevin Mitnick

TrickyDicky in Zenit Translations posts an article, Interview with Kevin Mitnick, a translation of “La gente no está entrenada contra el engaño a través de la tecnología” by Mercè Molist published in El País on 15-Jun-2006. Kevin Mitnick is the most famous hacker in the world and was imprisoned in the US for his activities. He has since been released and now works advising those who once feared him. He was in Barcelona recently where this interview took place. He makes some interesting comments about the US justice system and the current state of computer security and in particular on the field of social engineering: getting information from people.

Translations

TrickyDicky in Zenit Translations has published the following articles:

• Technology, Made in Spain, a translation of Tecnología 'made in Spain' by Tomas Delclos and Laia Reventos published in El País Semanal on 11-Jun-2006. The Spanish love new technology, but they don't make much themselves. However, there are a few examples of world leading companies that can serve as role models.

• Cardona, the last Catalan explorer, a translation of “Cardona, el último explorador catalán” (source can only be accessed by subscription) by Eugeni Casanova, published in La Vanguardia (Revista) on 11-Jun-2006. The Cardona father and son discovered the source of the Orinoco in Venezuela and explored the area around Angel falls. This article was written in memory of the son who has recently died.

SPHPBlog updated to version 0.4.8

Javier Gutiérrez Chamorro (Guti) in Bitácora de Guti posts a link to the news of the update of Simple PHP Blog to version 0.4.8. The only description of the features of this blogging software is in the About section, “I started this project because I wanted a dead-simple blog. Something that didn't require a database, used flat text files, and looked nice.”

Interdisciplinarity

TrickyDicky in Zenit Translations publishes an article, Interdisciplinarity, a translation of Una palabra difícil by Enrique Baltanás published in Al margen de los días on 2-June-2006.

Wiki of the Iberoamerican congress of Blogs and Author's Rights

Juan Palacio in Navegapolis posts a link to the Iberoamerical congress of Blogs and Author's Rights to be held in Zaragoza from 5-6 June. The congress has set up a Wiki for registered users.