[Since this is probably of interest to readers in the region of Aachen only, the rest of this posting is in German.]

Bruce Schneier posted a link to a nice powerpoint presentation full of (sometimes snarky) maxims about the security industry.  I think a lot of them are pretty universal to software development in general.  You can replace security with computational math in many of the Maxims.  Good examples:

Infinity Maxim:  There are an unlimited number of  [bugs and errors] for a given [computational math] device, system, or program, most of which will never be discovered.

Ignorance is Bliss Maxim:  The confidence that people have in
[a piece of software] is inversely proportional to how much they know about it.

Rohrbach’s Maxim:  No [computational math] device, system, or program
will ever be used properly (the way it was designed) all the time.

Rohrbach Was An Optimist Maxim:  Few  [computational math] devices,
systems, or programs will ever be used properly.

A random sample of length n drawn from Bernoulli distribution with probability of success prob, that has a correlation c with itself shifted back lag steps, can be generated using following procedure,

SampleWithCorr:=proc(prob::And(numeric,satisfies(c->c>=0 and c<=1)),
lag::posint,c::And(numeric,satisfies(c->c<=1 and c>=-1)),n::posint)
local X,B,S,C,s,i;
uses Statistics;
X:=RandomVariable(Bernoulli(prob));
S:=Sample(X,n);
if n<=lag or s=0 then S else
s:=signum(c);
B:=RandomVariable(Bernoulli(abs(c)));
C:=Sample(B,n-lag);
if s=1 then 
for i from lag+1 to n do
if C[i-lag]=1 then S[i]:=S[i-lag] fi od;
else for i from lag+1 to n do
if C[i-lag]=1 then S[i]:=1-S[i-lag] fi od
fi fi; S end:

The following is extracted from Jakob Nielsen's weekly newsletter on usability.

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While in London for last week's conference, I stopped by the British Museum. Among other exhibits, I saw King George III's collection of antique coins. Because this was part of an exhibition about the growth of knowledge during the Enlightenment period, the collection was shown in the way the King had organized it.

His Roman coins were sorted chronologically, which is the same system the Museum uses to this day. But the Greek coins were sorted alphabetically according to the name of the ruler depicted on the coin. This meant that coins issued at the same time would be in widely varying parts of the collection. It also meant that coins minted in the same city state would be dispersed across the collection. Not surprisingly, the British Museum no longer uses George III's system for its collection (except for this special exhibit).

Information architecture lessons:

1. Alphabetical order is usually a bad way to structure items.
2. For a better structure, you need to understand the underlying dimensions of interest (the King didn't know enough about ancient Greece to correctly place the coins in time and space).
3. New info may cause you to restructure things for better access.
4. Two or more structuring principles may be better than a single one.

In a previous comment, J. Tarr asks "what is Maple primarily intended to do?", and suggests that I might have something to say on the topic.

The New York Times has a really interesting article ``They criticized Vista.  And they should know.'' (you might need to register to see the article, I am not sure).  It shows why Vista isn't really an upgrade to XP, mostly through emails between senior Microsoft executives.  Basically, they knew it was a dud, and instead of going with the more honest approach they were at first planning, went with really misleading advertizing that made things much worse.

There has been quite a number of complaints about new version of Maple being somehow inferior to previous versions in various ways. Lest people think that this is special to Maplesoft, PC World is running a story titled Before they Spoiled the Software, on various multimedia software that used to be better before it got seriously bloated. They also draw the reader's attention to sites like oldversion.com which specialize in archiving older versions of ``free'' software.

It had been quite a while since I had read Joel Spolsky's great blog on software, so I headed on over and read his rather thoughtful post on customer service. I learned something from reading it, so I thought I would share it with others.

I've wanted a Maple IDE for a long time. Still do. And apparently, I am not the only one who thinks that such a product could really sell.

While I was over on Wolfram Research's web site (to provide a link for another post), I saw an interesting link to a Technology Guide.

First, let me warn the techies: it is absolutely shameless marketing on their part. Second, again for the techies: take a look at it and drool! It is astonishing. They take basic technology, very little of which is Mathematica-specific, and turn it into a very sexy marketing story. In fact, some of the technology highlighted is ancient history in Maple, yet they managed to make it sound fresh, new, and Mathematica-only. I have to say 'wow'.