So – what is the connection between Certification-Competence-Correlation and the false positive incident?

From the original authors bio:

Mohamed Hassan, MSIA, CISSP, CISA is the founder of NetSec Consulting Corp, a firm that specializes in information security consulting services. He is a senior IT Security consultant and an adjunct professor of Information Systems in the School of Business at the University of Phoenix.

Yup, that are quite a few impressive sounding abbreviations behind the name. So that person is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional – and still made such a terrible oversight. What does that say about the quality of the certification?

For me it shows (again) that a certification is – on its own – nothing more than a proof of willingness to spend some time and money to increase ones chances on the job market.

Never judge or hire someone on certifications alone; and by the way, that holds true for an university degree or similar as well. Let them prove what they actually can do in programming exercices or proof of previous work (which is usually hard to get).

Disclaimer: Let me finish by making it clear that someone who has a certification is not incompetent by definition – I want to make it absolutely clear that I strongly believe that a certification is not a proof of competence, but there is no implicit inversion, i.e. competence does not mandate absence of a certification.

Even more important Disclaimer: This post is written in the context of software development and software development only. It is not valid in any other fields. I certainly want my physician to have a degree and certifications

If you’re wondering where you have heard it before – it’s Johann Sebastian Bach, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (and I highly recommend listening to another very distinct version: Jaques Loussier‘s rendition on The Bach Book.

(Found this on Scott Berkun’s blog)

Example: to revert all files in the current directory back to the state as they were on 25th of March 2011, do this:

hg revert --date 2011-03-25 .

Note that hg understands quite a few date / time formats (hg help dates has a list) but I recommend to stick to ISO 8601 format as used above.

hg st -m -a -r -d

for this until I read the complete hg status text.

Now I use

hg st -q

“Introducing C#”

Not much differences yet. Instead of main you use Main (but you can leave the String[] args param out and it still works in C#) and instead of String you use string and it is System.Console.WriteLine and not System.out.println.

It is nice though that composite formatting is right there in everything. In Java you would have to use MessageFormat.format or some other middle message stuff. But in C# you can write:

System.Console.WriteLine("There are {0} words in {1} lines. Remember: {0} words!", 10, 5);

Also there’s XML comments by using /** **/ and /// respectively. Nice generalisation of Javadoc comments.

There are some explainations around the CLI and how everything works, but that’s nothing new and not a 100% related to C# itself.

I still fondly remember Don Box (then not yet a MS employee) introducing C#. With Emacs and csc and ildasm and a lot of “You still with me?” and no Visual Studio.

I then learned C# and dot-NET fundamentals – never needing them in my work-life and time-constrained that I am, I forgot  most of it rather quickly.

To re-learn C# again I recently bough Essential C# 4.0 by Mark Michaelis. I will post important things and especially the differences to Java as separate blog posts. Please note that important means: things I find important Your milage may vary.

PS: This event also included a live presentation by Bill Gates himself. Boy, was I impressed….such an influential person and such a horrible public speaker

1. 4 Goals of Lean
2. 7 Key Principles in Lean
3. 7 Types of Waste

I was immediately inspired to create a mind-map visualizing those lists for printing and hanging on my wall…and so I did and here it is.

In past years I evaluated Model Driven Architecture  (and decided to forget about it for the next few years), Software Product Lines (I really like that), Agile (yet unsure) and other buzz-word-compliant ideas.

I’ve been to the conference a few times before, but never for more than 3 days. This year I booked the so-called VIP package – which means you simply buy all 5 days and the 3 “night school” sessions. And that’s a lot. Most of it very good, a few talks not that good…one talk really bad.

I laid my focus on architectural and programming talks.  Highlights included Kevlin Henney‘s “Know Your Units” talk and his session with Frank Buschmann on “Refactoring, Re-Engineering, Rewriting”, Linda Risings “Fearless Change” Tutorial and her keynote as well as the “Experience Agile Practice” Tutorial with Jens Coldewey and Henning Wolf.

I’ll write more about these and other talks in forthcoming entries.