Embedded in Cork

The Register reports on plans to test programmers ability to program securely as a help to software buyers. If like me you assume that embedded devices are hard to attack then this article on embedded security will give you pause for thought. Of course once you add one of those fancy IP addresses to your device you open up a whole world of security pains for your embedded device. Just look for embedded security on Google and examine how many of the top results relate to IP.

We write code for humans, not computers. That may seem a strange statement, but when you consider that machines don’t care about the number of source files you have, the use of nice variable names, comments, white space, new lines, functions etc. then it’s clear that the main audience for the code you write is the human reader. So if you’re going to bother to write code that can be read by a human then it better be easy to understand, preferably first time. Scott Belware uses the term Soluble Code for code that can be understood first time and his short summary on the topic is excellent.
(By the way one possible exception to soluble code may be when writing assembly, but even then clear comments, spacing, multiple files etc. should still be present).

Quickly, pick a number between 1 and 20? So how “Random” was your guess? Turns out humans aren’t great at doing random and 17 is the most random number we come up with between 1 and 20.