Tag: software

• Failing software – again

  The line above is from a real (and current at time-of-posting) job advertisement for a software developer. I’m not positing it because I think it is bad, shocking or dangerous, but mainly because it is illustrative of the real world: developers are expected to be “pragmatic” when it comes to testing the software they make…

  Adrian McMenamin

  May 27, 2017

  Uncategorized

  British Airways, Computability, Hilbert’s tenth problem, NP problems, software, software failure

• If you want bad advice, ask a London taxi driver

  Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association in London, quoted in the Guardian on the prospect of driverless buses in the capital: “We don’t have a a lot of confidence in anything that comes out of TfL [Transport for London], to be honest, and the fact that they’re suggesting it means it’s…

  Adrian McMenamin

  August 1, 2014

  Uncategorized

  driverless buses, London, software, Steve McNamara, voice recognition

• Time to write a signal handler?

  I am trying to execute some self-written pieces of software that require a lot of wall clock time – around three weeks. I run them on the University of York‘s compute server which is rebooted on the first Tuesday of every month, so the window for the software is limited. I have until about 7…

  Adrian McMenamin

  July 12, 2014

  Uncategorized

  Control-C, Kerberos, Operating system, software, University of York, Unix, Unix signal

• President Obama’s campaign and free software

  It seems a row has broken out between staff on President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign over the fate of the free software it produced (the article linked here refers to it all as “open source” but on this issue I tend to side with RMS and not ESR). Actually I do not blame the DNC…

  Adrian McMenamin

  January 23, 2013

  Uncategorized

  Barack Obama, Democratic National Committee, DNC, free software, OpenSource, Political campaign, software, White House

• Here we go again

  I used to have a blog. It was meant to be about “politics and free software” (not the politics of free software) but ended up being mainly about politics. I wrote the last entry on that in January 2008 and subsequently took it off line (the content is still on my server at home and…

  Adrian McMenamin

  December 5, 2010

  Uncategorized

  blogging, Labour, Linux, software