Having read just another pamphlet about a successful software project with special emphasis on testing, testing, testing.

If they had chosen the right algorithms and made assumptions about their performance (Big Oh and stuff), that testing, testing, testing could have been reduced significantly.

Old school, I know. They don't trust their own software anymore.

Anti-virus products whitelisting fedware that tries to get all the little secrets you store on your computer: is this a real threat? A recent surevy by CNET News.com of antispyware vendors coudn't find any company cooperating unofficially with US government agencies. But some agreed in not to alert customers if gouvernmental spyware would have been found if they were ordered by a court to remain quiet.
This interesting survey shows that it might be rewarding to try one's hand on open source anti-spyware. At least it's unlikely that software created by a greater community will be compelled to betray the user. Perhaps the easiest antidote against the Bundestrojaner, too.
(Source)

...the problems of widespread saturation in communications flow may arise within the next half century

The information overload has become a dictum, if not a cliché, and some people are going to call this phenomenon information pollution. According to one's temper, people react in different ways: some are trying to reduce this pollution, which is a more active coping strategy, but most people just get tired and suffer from the information fatigue syndrome (IFS). This may come in many forms, from e-mail fatigue, password fatigue, feature fatigue, and much more. Quite new is the social network fatigue, caused by a burnout from self-imposed commitment to get to know as much people as possible via the usual community web sites.
Others are craving for data and become informavores, looking for more and more information. Again, this syndrome comes in many forms, including sort of digital acquisitiveness.
Paul McFedries digs deeper into the various phenomena of fatigues and addictions. Being online since 1994, I recall various phases when I started as curious lurker, becoming an infohoarder and now being busy with filtering information as efficient as possible. Often I remember the days when advertizing in the Internet was rare (if present, at all) and there was no Spam. Being confronted with info crap all the day, fatigue isn't far away for many people. Unfortunately, strategies of advertizers change all along and keep you busy in avoiding this. Switching off TV and computer is not a solution. I'd recommend learning how to cope with this and how to protect from too much news, too much spam, and too much unnecessary knowledge.

To keep up to date with actual nerdism have a look at McFedries' wonderful Word Spy web site.

Q: Why are fewer and fewer people, especially women, going into CS? A: Part of the issue is jobs not paying enough. There is also the thing I spoke about earlier, of CS not being expansive enough — this notion that the computer scientist will be sitting in a box writing Java code or something. That’s just not where the interesting stuff is.

Hollywood again. UCF professor Costas J. Efthimiou and former UCF physics chair R. A. Llewellyn argue in their paper "Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun But Limited Science Literacy" that contemporary movies don't respect scientific knowledge, thus stupefying the audience. Original reproach! But, dear colleagues: a movie theater is not a lecture hall, despite the similarity. I think most people know that action scenes in a movie are perfectly choreographed sequences that nobody should try at home. Who doesn't know this, well, won't understand the film either. So science doesn't lose anything / anybody. (Source)

"9% more degrees in natural sciences", including a raise of 13% in CS titles the Federal Statistical Office of Germany these days. Kids of New Economy (remember?) are leaving the universities. The situation for them must be similar to the mid-90s, when I finished my studies and found myself in the post-reunification recession, when jobs were rare and I was told to be exotic (Original words of an exhibitor at a job fair: No, we're developing in India, this comes way cheaper. We don't need computer scientists at this moment). I suffered for three years in small economy jobs until the Internet saved me. Kids of today are grown up with the Internet and I wonder if there will be another job miracle for them. I can't see any.

In the meantime, German public is faked with phantasy numbers by the German economics ministry, claiming that the somewhat felt shortage of skilled workers would cost the nation more than 20 billion euros ($26.8 billion). But before starting just another job market pig cycle, consider that our political top executives are calling for immigrants filling this job gap thus lowering incomes of skilled workers. Any skilled foreign national who will work for less money is welcomed by our industry. So these 9% people from above are somewhat left out in the rain and other countries realize once more a brain drain of skilled people. For further developments in this topic, see the american H1-B discussion.

Solutions, anyone?

Hope they don't brag of their technology too much: ACM's current SIGGRAPH shows holographic, tactile, and virtual wizardry for the displays of tomorrow.

Nothing spectacular: just a fly resting on our musa dwarf cavendish (a banana plant) and our sprouting Wollemia nobilis. That's all what happened on a sunny day at home.

I just felt so certain about this church and its 'britishness' I just had to revisit it. Several years ago, we discovered it in southern Cologne and it kept a memory in me of a neo-Gothic masterpiece of british appearance. When we rediscovered St. Paul, I figured out that I was wrong. It's a nice little church but that british accent I was memorizing just came from the missing spire. We couldn't get in and left the situation somewhat disappointed.

It's not easy being green. Kermit the Frog's insight is also true for plants and every gardener wants to know the effects of his treatment on the plants. The EUREKA E! 2544 E-PLANTS project has now simulated plant growth behaviour using a mathematical model that computes influence on various effects on plant growth. Being sort of black magic, effects of fertilizing and nursing are only badly predictable. Hope they'll provide a version for personal use.

Upgrading to Movable Type V4. Took less than an hour, some little problems based on my server configuration. Older entries may look a bit garbled, but I plan to adapt the blog to the website's design anyway. Nice job, six apart!
Note: switch off mod_security before installing, get password for DB user close at hand, copy whole mt-static directory into target directory, refresh templates and republish entries.

If marketing and SEOs get aware of this study of Pennsylvania State University, they'll be beside themselves with joy. Though the study says that testers click on sponsored links in the results list of a search engine less than two times out of every ten searches (a rate of 16%), it notes that "there is plenty of upside growth potential." Fortunately, click rate of sponsored links didn't increase when these links weren't separated from regular "organic" links any more. Penn State assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology and lead author Jim Jansen grants users more wide-awakenness, but considering the "growth potential" of sponsored links further development in this area is to be feared. (Source)

Students - children of sorrow these days. An original approach for explaining the decrease in the number of engineering and IT students is given by Quocirca analyst Rob Bamforth who says that today's people aren't too tech savvy at all because technical products are now so easy to use that there's a major lack of knowledge and curiosity about technology as a whole. Also, the lack of positive role models is bemoaned, but nothing beats Hal Abelson's argument. (Source)