Blog Day 2008

The 4^th Blog Day was held yesterday, but I was too busy to notice this, so my contribution was postponed to today.

More information about the yearly Blog Day.

I apologize to my fellow Hebrew language blog writers for not mentioning any Hebrew language blog this time. To my defense, I’ll point out the common denominator of the following blog recommendations. They all deal with various aspects of bullshit. Good and bad stories about disaster recovery (some of the bad cases are accompanied by bullshit), bullshit as “security theater” (which is a nefarious kind of bullshit), IT project failures (again, frequently due to bullshit), amusing software related bullshit stories, bullshit gadget designs, and bullshit in general.

• Amanda Ripley’s Blog
  Amanda Ripley wrote the book “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why” about behavior of people, who were caught in natural and human-made disasters. Her blog expands upon the theme of disaster recovery.
• Schneier on Security
  Bruce Schneier is the foremost computer security expert in the world, and is also the author of the book “Applied Cryptography”. His theme is that security is a system property. No technological means assures security if there is a security vulnerability in the rest of the system. He blogs, among other things, about stupid security policies.
  Not related to security, he blogs also about his hobby – squids.
• IT Project Failures
  Informs the readership about big IT project failures and their causes.
• Worse Than Failure
  Amusing stories about the foibles of less than top notch computer professionals and software developers.
• Commonsense Design
  This blog has the slogan: “Nathan Zeldes writes on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design”. I cannot improve upon this slogan.
• The War On Bullshit
  Opinions, which are sometimes politically incorrect, about various bullshit attitudes in sociology and politics.

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities. View all posts by Omer Zak