I have mixed feelings about 'test driven development' (and I can'tclaim I've done much of it, especially not with rigor), but one subtleadvantage of it has come through clearly even in my limited use of it:you actually start using your code's interface before you freeze it.This is important because actually using things remains by far the bestway to refine their design in computer science.

Usually I started out with a general idea of what function calls andmethods and so

One of the nice things about researching things like the history of dump is that it teaches me things about Unix's historythat I didn't know. For example, until I decided to write up dump 'shistory, I had no idea that it had actually originated as far back asV6; for some reason I had it in my mind as a UCB invention.

(Perhaps because the idea of dump always struck me as the kind ofbaroque thing that UCB would come up with, instead of

This is one of those things that I shouldn't have to write butapparently I do: anything that is called 'email marketing' is prettymuch always spam, and everyone involved in it either knows this or isactively hiding their head in the sand. Theoretical good intentions inthis do not matter, because there are simply too many pressures pushingthe other way. There are too many reasons for salespeople to lie aboutwhether their leads have consented to email, too many reasons for themarketing department to be optimistic

Although this is rather behind the times, I don't think I've seen thepractical consequences of the Debian OpenSSL vulnerability written downclearly and in one place. So here is my list, concentrating on SSH andSSL certificates:

• SSH host keys and personal SSH keys generated on a vulnerablesystem are entirely compromised.
• OpenSSL generated SSL certificates are compromised. This especiallyincludes signed certificates used on public websites ; if this applies to you, get ready to explorethe marvelous world of certificate compromises .
• any SSH DSA key