Peter Coffee

With its September release of WAI-ARIA, the Web Accessibility Initiative road map for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, the World Wide Web Consortium sends developers an implicit mandate to restore equal Web content access for all. Developers should also appreciate that there are explicit mandates—as well as evolving case law—that combine to make Web accessibility for […]

The mainstream media are fighting back against the encroachment of the Web. I dont mean the Web as medium, but the Web as social network of sound and fury that signifies less than it seems. The mainstream medias most devastating weapon is ridicule, but their barbs wouldnt hit home if they werent making valid points. […]

When I saw the news of Ciscos forthcoming TelePresence virtual meeting system, my first thought was, “Now theres a really well-paved cow path.” For anyone building enterprise applications, Ciscos innovation is a cautionary example of the temptation to approximate the familiar, as closely as technology enables — instead of starting afresh with a business need, […]

Semi-surrounded by the curving movie screen that took up one whole end of the briefing room, I watched a three-dimensional animation of a human brain that was visibly losing mass. “The symptoms of chronic methamphetamine use are similar to those of Alzheimers disease,” explained a calm narrative voice. Without a trace of irony, it added, […]

When eWEEK Labs looked at Parasofts Jtest 8 Java test tool, we were reminded of the travails of the Apollo 13 mission. We didnt consider Jtest 8 to be a desperately jury-rigged approach to programming problems; rather, we found it to be a valuable leap beyond past tools for Java-code-error diagnosis and correction, but one […]

The dominant theme of data protection discussions is one of preserving secrets. Much less attention gets paid to the problem of ensuring datas availability—not to mention verifiability—rather than limiting it. I spoke this month with representatives of Surety about their technology for addressing all four elements of affirmative data access management: confidentiality, authentication, integrity and […]

Googles acquisition of YouTube gives me new respect for the notion of infinity. It proves that no matter how smart you are, you can still have more money than brains. If you were trying to find a way to collect the attention of the worlds least discriminating media consumers—people who demonstrate 100 million times a […]

CBS “Numbers”—or, strictly speaking, “Numb3rs”—is one of the few TV series my family makes an effort to watch or tape each week. Yes, we do know some of the technical advisers for the series; no, my wife and I almost never get through an episode without some shared eye-rolling, as necessary liberties with the mathematical […]

This weeks sold-out Eclipse Summit Europe, in Esslingen, Germany, will include a presentation on the Topcased project, an effort driven by the French National Center for Aeronautical and Space Technology Research to construct “an open-source CASE environment [to] perpetuate the methods and tools for critical embedded system development.” The goals of Topcased include “high-quality open-source […]

Like model years in Detroit, it seems as if the new year for book publishers starts in the fall. I just received a new book with a copyright date of 2007, “Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash,” by Mary and Tom Poppendieck (Addison-Wesley Professional). Wonderful, I thought. Ive only just finished teaching my […]