Bugs vs. Flaws
jm October 13th, 2008
We didn’t realize that we were terrible bloggers until it was far too late to do anything about it.
Effective blogging probably has many components, but I believe one of the key tactics is to state a controversial opinion that will necessarily highlight a point of conflict between two reasonably sized groups of people. (I believe you get bonus points if one of the groups of people is actually completely fictional. You get even more bonus points if the point of “conflict” is actually a subtle trick of language that causes a group of people that agree to argue with themselves.) If done artfully, this generally results in much Internet chaos, which I think we can all agree is a lot of fun for everyone.
So, besides being terribly lazy at times, we’re just not the most opinionated guys in the world. Personally, I think having only one opinion is just intellectually lazy, and that you should try to have at least three or four for any given issue. Mark’s opinions tend to center around vegemite, currency hedging strategies, and the extent to which using Hex-Rays makes you “suck at Internet.” Justin’s opinions are classified and have to go through pre-pub review. So far, all we’ve gotten out of him is that he likes Batman. (I suspect this is because he actually *is* Batman, but that’s a topic for our next scheduled post in Q3 2009.)
Anyway, the point of this rambling pre-amble is three-fold:
1. Justin is probably Batman.
2. A page long preamble that doesn’t mention the point of the article is almost certainly not a technique of effective blogging.
3. I do have several strong opinions about software security and thought I’d give proper blogging a shot.
So, here goes. One of the things that offends my delicate sensitivities is this idea:
