Staffan Malmgrens blogg

Den här gången pratar jag om riskanalys. Idén föddes ur en frustration över att det är så mycket lättare att identifiera risker i ett förslag (och därmed kasta en skugga av rädsla, osäkerhet och tvivel över förslaget, vilket gör att ingen vågar ta beslut åt ena eller andra hållet) än att faktiskt kvantifiera risken (vilket ersätter osäkerheten med en prislapp så att det blir trivialt att säga go eller no go).

Uppdatering: Bruce Schneier säger samma sak (typ), fast kortare och koncisare. Nyckelcitat: “You can’t avoid risk management; it’s fundamental to business just as to life. The question is whether you’re going to try to use data or whether you’re going to just react based on emotions, hunches and anecdotes.”

This time, it’s about the recently discovered flaws in WinZip 9.0’s AES support and the importance of knowing exactly what it is that a security solution protects against.

Read it here (as always, in Swedish) Update: Better yet, read it here, with nicer formatting and the possibility to comment.

Alan Kay recently won the Turing award for his work on Smalltalk and subsequent projects. I spent some time with the free smalltalk implementation Squeak this weekend, and was particularly impressed with the very dynamic nature of things — being able to modify the actual root Object is not something that’s common in more mainstream environments. Felt very much like a Lisp environment like Emacs, but object oriented. Anyway, it all led to me writing a column on Smalltalk and it’s impact for IDG.se. As usual, in Swedish.

Update: Oh, look, it made the frontpage

This time, I give props to PHP.

I got the opportunity to write another column for IDG.se this week. The topic is Spam, it’s ten year anniversary, and why Microsoft’s “Penny Black” system, where the sender buys a virtual stamp by performing ten CPU-seconds worth of calculation, is a good idea but not the end-all, be-all of spam prevention. I also give a modest proposal on how to stop spam for good. It’s up here, in swedish as usual, and will hopefully be up on the main page tomorrow, where people can comment on it. You can comment on it here instead, for the time being. All two of you.

It’s been a while since I wrote in this blog. I’ve been working a lot with Unicode and Arabic character encodings lately, and will probably post a little story about that soon enough, but for now I’ll just plug my latest column up on idg.se, about what the fortcoming XP Reloaded will mean for .Net deployment. The column is in Swedish, but the short executive version is “XP Reloaded is a Good Thing for people wishing to write consumer software using the .Net framework”. No big surprises, really…

I’ve just finished this weeks column for IDG.se. This week, the news of Intels new line of P4’s tied nicely into a rant about how we really do need ever faster computers, even though not all of us may have a use for the cycles right away. It should be sent out in tomorrows newsletter. Why not subscribe? The one I write for is called “IDG.se Teknik & Tester”, and is in Swedish.

The column should also be up on the web some time later this week. Update: Here it is