Matthew’s Weblog

An interesting article from EWeek (Putting Applications to the Test) that discusses the potential liability issues in software and how to mitigate them with testing (QA and otherwise). We need to, as programmers, think about this early in the process…

The ring of a cell phone in a theater, or in a meeting, or an email arrives and pops up a message while you are writing. Common occurrences, all which some people are attempting to address. Still, I’m not sure that the efforts described are sufficient, since to be truly effective you would need an environmental broadcast that the tech would be aware of… like the theater sending out a signal ‘in a theater, in a theater’ constantly and then having the device have some rules that manage each and every situation. That’s a lot for an average user to keep up with. I mean, for some people the proper response is ‘take a message’, and for others it would be ‘use vibrate instead’… but how to handle tracking all those options? Egad…

The possibilities of this software to enable easy email encryption make me want to investigate further… now I just need a few friends to try it with. They got a great writeup from MIT. Hmmm… maybe I’ll start recruiting.

… with jealousy. I read the Chronicle story about the new tech gadgets being introduced overseas and found myself really wanting some for myself. Guess I’ll have to head over to Dynamism and order some myself… someday.