software entropy

I generally use Maven; I’ve used Ivy; I’ve used SBT.  I’ve even (long, long ago) checked my dependencies into SCM.  And every single one of them occasionally requires ‘rm -rf somecachedirectory’ to make them work.

The only thing worse than searching for an answer to a technical problem on the internet and finding only forum posts without answers is searching for an answer to a technical problem on the internet and finding only forum posts you originated, still without answers.

So I’ve also been following Glen Mazza’s X.509 tutorial for JAX-WS, found here.  It has some of the same problems as the other ones.  But this post is about something different. Glen’s tutorial, and every other tutorial I’ve seen for JAX-WS/Metro and WS-Security, includes configurations in the WSDL for the [...]

I’ve been recently trying to set up WS-Security on a web-service implementation I’m working on.  To that end, I’ve been trying to find out how to actually implement it.  I won’t say that the standard has failed me (yet), or that the internet has failed me.  I’ve actually found much [...]

The title of this blog comes from the fact that I believe software code strictly follows the second law of thermodynamics.   Here are a couple of the English-language formulations of that law (from the Wikipedia article): – In a system, a process that occurs will tend to increase the total [...]

I’ve been designing and writing software for various IT departments since 1997, and I’ve spent a lot of that time wondering why the IT industry does what it does, and why the process of designing, writing, and using software seems to be so problematic. I intend for this blog to [...]