The most striking (yet still unsurprising) things to me: 99% of passwords contained NO non-alphanumeric characters and 92% of passwords are re-used on multiple sites.
Oh, and passwords like dallascowboys and 1qazZAQ! that people think are strong are still in the password dictionaries.
Ask ANY developer or project manager if they practice agile development.
90% will say yes.
Now ask if they use scrum, velocity tracking, XP, TDD, FDD, or pair programming. The number will now be closer to 10% (followed quickly by “but we’re still agile”).
The problem is that the opposite of the term “agile” is slow, stodgy, and not able to move quickly. Who wants to be that? No one. It’s a loaded question to begin with.
So when someone says “we do agile development”, it’s important to make the distinction: are you saying your team moves quickly and respond well to changes? If so, that’s great. Good for you. Or are you actually describing your methodology?
I don’t actually hate agile development. I just hate the name.
“It’s Agile with a capital A, baby!”
Related: As funny as the term Extreme Programming is, it completely avoids this problem. If you ask someone if they practice XP, you will get almost no false positives.
Similar: asking someone if they have a zero-tolerance policy for bugs (AKA Joel Test #5: Do you fix bugs before writing new code?) is a similar question. Answering “no” implies that you accept and tolerate bugs, which no one wants to admit, even though they definitely do.
A federal judge in the case has agreed to allow the U.S. Copyright Group to subpoena internet service providers to find out the identity of everybody who had illegally downloaded [The Expendables via bit torrent].
The best part about using an SSD with OS X is that, for the first time, Spotlight is actually usable. And it’s great!
This means I can finally get rid of Quicksilver, which I’ve used and loved for 10 years but is by far the buggiest piece of software I’ve ever relied on.*
* Not totally true. The Treo 750’s text messaging application on Verizon was much buggier and I relied on that for a long time, but only out of necessity.
Exceptional tracks errors in Ruby apps. It’s wildly popular. It now processes a few hundred million errors per month for over 10,000 apps—including some very big and popular ones.
So if my math is correct, ~300 million exceptions per month for 10,000 apps works out to about 30,000 exceptions per month, or one thousand exceptions per day per application!
That’s a little terrifying, no?
Sony has a platform for e-books. Amazon has a platform for e-books. Barnes & Noble has a platform for e-books. Apple has a platform for e-books. But Apple is the only one which allows its competitors to have apps on its devices. And Apple is the anti-competitive one?
For the old fogies (read: over 30) this is a surprisingly interesting video. Lots of reminiscing, and 20+ years of compatibility is just mind boggling.
Hi, my name is Ben and I'm the co-founder and CTO of Mobile Commons in New York City. 
