Was recently talking to a friend pursuing a physics Ph.D. about bad scientific code quality and the possible reasons behind it. We came to the conclusion that it's most likely equal parts culture, motivation, and experience. What follows is that chat distilled.

If you're old enough to have played with Windows back in the 95/98 era then you might have messed around with .com files. I once stumbled upon a quick way to restart the PC by using a basic .com file, but why did that work, and more importantly, why doesn't it work on more recent versions of the OS?

Symantec has been caught yet again failing to make its due diligence when issuing certificates: this time it looks like they have failed to properly validate at least 30.000 certificates.

With the increase in the number of people using only laptops for their computing needs came new technologies used to provide both power and battery life. Switchable graphics - moving from an integrated GPU to a dedicated one, is one such technologies. But how do they work?

Version control systems are really important tools in the day to day life of a software developer. What happens though when you have to move both code and people off of one system to another? Let's just say that you'll need time, patience and the desire to write your own tools...