Hania speaking: my paper "Continued Fractions and Digital Lines with Irrational Slopes" is accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery (DGCI 08), in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The conference will take place in Lyon, France 16-18 April 2008. I will also present a poster there. (No comments yet)

Hania speaking: I'm happy (really happy!) to announce that I got my article on "Digital Lines with Irrational Slopes" accepted for publication in Theoretical Computer Science. I could tell you all about it and what it means, but if you're mathematically inclined (it's more mathematics than computer science), you can read it for yourself. For more, check out my own page. (No comments yet)

So, I've got a blog now, too. See urSecta.com. In particular, I think I've found the solution to DRM. It's not very respectful of human dignity and human rights, but both these values are going out of fashion big time, anyway. But it ought to be efficient. (No comments yet)

Yesterday, I passed the exam for CSDP - Certified Software Development Professional. This is an IEEE certification based on 9000 hours (5 years, fulltime) proven experience in software engineering tasks and areas. This experience must cover at least six of the 11 knowledge areas. Additionally, you have to do an exam. Yesterday, I did and passed. (2 comments)

This is another presentation Hania gave at the university on january 24, 2005. This presentation contains an overview of the theorems that Hania is developing for the generation and recognition of digital lines (necessary resp. sufficient conditions for digital lines with irrational slope). You can view the presentation on-line or download a pdf of it. ...[Digital Geometry page] (No comments yet)

Having spent many years working in health care information technology, I felt a need for some kind of an official certificate. The problem is that it is very hard for people to rate the value of our advice, since much of what we tell people sounds like magic anyway. Being an MD seems to make things worse; a doctor is not expected to know that much about technology.

Anyway, from now on, I've got five more letters behind my name. I'm pretty sure being both an (experienced and licensed) MD and an (experienced and certified) information security professional will turn out to be very useful. The CISSP certification is maintained by (ISC)2, which has also achieved both ISO and ANSI accreditation for this credential. This is what Dr Roy Swift of ANSI had to say about the CISSP:

Quote:

"Employers in the public and private sectors can be confident that information security professionals holding the (ISC)2 CISSP credential possess the necessary skills and experience to effectively manage and deploy information security programs and policies anywhere in the world."

(No comments yet)

...one way or the other. There's a scene from a Pink Panther movie that keeps popping up in my internal projection room everytime I see futile security of a particular kind being excercised. In this scene, the detective (Peter Sellers) comes into a room and is suddenly confronted with a raging Kung Fu fighter that flies from one end of the room to the other, swirling arms and legs all around, accompanying it all with HO!...HAH! YI!... and similar loud and intimidating noises. After a fairly long and very scary show of skill and power, the guy faces Peter Sellers, ready to pounce and make chopped liver out of him. Peter Sellers calmly lifts a pistol and fires a bullet through his head, while looking slightly mystified. This guy had spent a lifetime of intensive martial arts training, sacrificed the lord knows what to get to the pinnacle of his art only to be defeated by a cheap pistol fired at point-blank range. There's a moral in this story, especially for security professionals. Sometimes it's described as: don't put umpteen expensive locks on the doors if you leave your Windows™ open...[full article] (1 comment)

Every developer has his or her own box of tools. Whenever you start a new job or a substantially new project somewhere, you gradually build up that same toolbox over time, while the management gratefully watches you construct their future infrastructure. Anyway, you'll probably need tools in all the below categories. [full article] (No comments yet)

Ever since MS won the browser wars, they've neglected the development of IE. It's woefully behind in the standards implementations, but now it's becoming clear just how much behind it is in the security department as well. The last couple of days, there's been a number of calls to simply dump IE in favor of almost anything else. The statistics don't lie, IE is our major security headache and MS is doing very little effectively to change that. More... (5 comments)

I've reworked the site considerably. Most of the hard tech stuff was done by Kim, while I was enjoying myself and being in the way a lot. What the site now allows is for you to comment on articles, be it about a general technical issue or a coding thing. You can also comment on book reviews. Note that to comment on anything, you first have to register. I'm not generally that anal retentive, but I've already been hit by "forum spam", which is a real PITA, so you'll have to go through this hassle if you have something to say. Sorry.
The comments on book reviews will be visible in the book review web page, the comments on articles only in the forum where you enter them. Also, the main headlines and the contents of the "Archives" panel to the left are extracted from the forum database. Actually, I think this whole setup is rather cool. Now we'll see how well it works in real life.
Update: the public forum (see "Forum" link above) is now also reworked in the same style as the site itself (thanks, Kim!). If you see good ol' subSilver only, go to your profile and change "Board Style" to "theWehlou". You find this setting in the section "Preferences". New users and guests should get this style by default.
While I was at it, I added a "Links" page and an "Alerts" page to the top menu. Check them out.
I have one thing to say about stylesheets and fontsizes: after much experimenting, I decided to have the fontsizes absolute. Having them relative made FireFox differ significantly from IE. Having them absolute means that IE can't resize the fonts. On the other hand, neither Mozilla, FireFox or MyIE2 have any problem resizing using ctrl-+ and ctrl--, so I think IE is defective here. (No comments yet)

This little utiltity makes it marginally simpler to edit the xml file you need to maintain your RSS feed. [full article] (11 comments)

This isn't one of my own articles, I just wish it was. Kim Nevelsteen wrote this piece about how to do completion ports in Delphi 6/7. It's a well-written expose with good code in there. Enjoy! The link below leads you off-site...[Kim's article] (No comments yet)

It teaches common sense to people without it. But how do you make people without common sense read it? That is one question that is not answered. It's an enjoyable book, but I fear it won't make much difference. It also, unintentionally, reflects badly on the state of the American society. ...[full review] (No comments yet)

If you have an application that collects events of some kind, you're likely to want to see a timebased graph of those events sooner or later. In my application, I'm receiving messages from clients over HTTP through several servers ("front-ends"). To see how well the front-ends handle the load, I want to be able to present a graph over how many messages are processed per front-end per time interval. ... [full article] (No comments yet)

The only thing Microsoft now expects the most simpleminded of our users to do is to add two fairly intricate registry entries, just in order so they won't have to learn how to use a two-field login dialog box. What did these guys smoke?...[full article] (No comments yet)

A presentation Hania gave internally at the university on december 15, 2003. It shows how you can abstract the digitization of a real line into a digital line in levels. A variation of the Euclidic algorithm helps in determining the composition of the levels...[full article] (No comments yet)

Email is a very useful medium, but should be used carefully in some circumstances. What I'm mentioning in this text is just the most rudimentary common sense. I'm not at all intending a full treatment of the subject...[full article] (4 comments)

I finally decided to join the human race and become a member of ACM and IEEE/CS about half a year ago. As a result, I'm also getting access to digital libraries and some print magazines that are way better than what I was used to until now. I've added a couple to my listing of magazines, but I'm going to get more in a while. At least I ordered and paid for more, which ought to give some result after a while...[full article] (No comments yet)

As you probably already noticed, I'm crazy about all the stuff you can do with RSS2. It's such a simple little thing, invented for publishing blogs or something to that effect. The acronym may even mean (opinions differ) "Really Simple Syndication, version 2", but it definitely lends itself to extensive misuse in a lot of entirely different ways...[full article] (No comments yet)

There are several ways of developing reliable server systems. The worst thing you can do is to decide for one model during development, then roll it out using another model. In particular, if you develop a loadbalancing server system and roll it out on a single lonely server, you're going to regret it...[full article] (No comments yet)

If you need to branch on a set of conditions, if..then..else trees quickly begin to look real ugly. A good example of this tragedy in action and a discussion of how to write it in a more bug resistant and readable way...[full article] (No comments yet)

Assuming you already have a way of finding out when a service of yours has hung or consumed too many resources, you still need a way to stop and restart it. Having the service exit itself often does not work, so you have to have another service that does it for you...[full article] (No comments yet)

Or, how I stopped being afraid of the long-distance debugging sessions. Or reduced my fear, at least. It's about an audiovisual aid to debugging threads. It's cute. Do it. There's even sample code here and it's real easy to do. It may win you less bugs, more friends, success with women, better breath and, just maybe, a job ... [full article] (No comments yet)

The radio and TV people practically pursued me (Hania) to get a glimpse of me and some of my wisdom. And they finally caught up with me, did their interview and plastered it all over their... website. Anyway, I think I'm famous in a way now, at least in some part(s) of Uppsala ... [full article] (1 comment)

Implementing performance monitors in your app is very helpful for profiling, debugging and general satisfaction of the more qualified endusers. It's also a non-trivial excercise, to put it mildly. Microsoft have done their part in making it obscure and hard to use, so naturally, we can't leave it alone, can we? This particular implementation only implements raw and delta counters, but that covers almost anything you'll ever need. The basis is there for other types of counters, though, such as instance based counters and high-precision. Both precompiled and full project source is available ... [full article] (5 comments)