First, look at "Protecting your MySQL database from SQL injection attacks with GreenSQL ". Okay, a longish article on the ins and outs of installing something that blah blah blah

Wait -- what? GreenSQL is a proxy for MySQL that checks the SQL for certain kinds of injection attacks!?!?!

Now read Twisted …

Here's a great quote from a reader regarding Big Plan for Change : "[the advice] doesn't account for project tracking requirements of the organization. Budgeting. Metrics. Hiring. Documenting. Transitioning to new staff."

Good point. Let's look at these in a little bit of depth. We'll cover the three management practices first …

See Fast, but Slowly . ComputerWorld, Frankly Speaking, August 25, 2008, by Frank Hayes.

This is a very cool restatement of some essential Agile principles.

Sure, we can train and plan -- and we should. But there are too many unknowns to train and plan for everything. A slow ramp-up lets us …

Here's a recipe for transforming a pile of similarly-formatted source spreadsheets into a suite of unittest test cases.

The customer sent a screen grab from an accounting desktop application with a couple of rows highlighted. They claim that the application I reverse engineered from C and rewrote in Java didn't work for this one case.

Step 1. Get clarification on the screen grab information. The data labels don't …

First, read Bach's Heuristic Risk-Based Testing . Clear and simple.

Then, read Amland and Garborgsv Risk-Based Testing and Metrics . Not so clear -- probability gets folded in, confusing the issue. Also check out Schaefer's Risk-Based Testing . Probabilities are waved around like they're important. They aren't.

Risk management shouldn’t be confused with …

An old professor of mine writes "There are lots of pathological propensities at work ..., "Gee, we've got a way to use the computer to ..." In short, automation for the sake of automation."

See jbox.dk Quotations on Simplicity . The fundamental principle is that simplicity is really important. But how do …

In the Small Not-for-Profit Web Presence posting, I identified a software portfolio for a small NFP. Basically, it was a list of cheap (or free) web resources that would provide a solid web presence with relatively low cost. More importantly, it would move them off a legacy web presence that …

Here's a great summary of Agile techniques. It's in ComputerWorld's Development section, in an article by Heather Havenstein: "Five Web 2.0 app dev lessons for enterprise IT ". I think the article is mis-titled, since it's basically "Agile for Big IT."

Some of the five techniques are motherhood and apple-pie …

Let's talk about a Small Not For Profit that has a number of web assets, but a web presence that isn't working well.

First, they have a Domain Name (pretend it's www.smallnfp.org). They have an associated organization which is hosting their web site. Let's call them the Associated …