Ed Bilodeau

<< Back to Home

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Royal Navy will run on Windows for Warships : Professional responsibility now took hold. Those of us who understood the implications of trying to use Windows as a foundation for a command system saw the risk. As loyal officers of the company, we were obliged to attempt to convince management about the risk. Acting as spokesman for a phalanx of concerned engineers, I compiled a dossier to document the problem. The dossier provided a management summary, reinforced by some fifty pages of detailed analysis and rigorous argument; The dossier explained why Microsoft Windows could not form a safe and secure foundation for anaval command system; [...] The company's action was swift, but disappointing.

This is a position that software engineers will continue to find themselves in: caught between the values of their profession and the values of their employers. In other types of engineering, there is a legal context that helps to align the two. In most if not all cases, software engineering doesn't enjoy that same benefit.