Government-Sponsored Static Analysis for Open Source

According to an article in InfoWorld, Coverity has been contracted over the last three years by the Homeland Security Agency to provide static code analysis for open source code tools. Way cool!

Worth noting:

• Government agencies are using enough open source code to make the contract worthwhile. This is additional confirmation of Thomas Friedman's observation (in The World Is Flat) of the commerce-changing impact of open source.

• The Coverity press release cites an estimate by Gartner that 80% of commercial tools will incorporate open source code by 2012.

• Open source coders are voluntarily submitting their code for analysis. Not surprising. I would want my code to be as robust as possible too, and would take advantage of such an opportunity.

• The submitted code gets a "grade" by being assigned to a rung. You could obviously use this in deciding whether or not to use the tool.

• The measured defect densities are decreasing. The effect illustrates the principle that people will put more effort in improving what they can measure. Other errors could be getting less attention as a result. However, I expect that the code genuinely is getting more robust overall.

For more detail, you'll want to look at this week's press release from Coverity.

Local prep school library goes all digital media

According to the Boston Globe, Cushing Academy, a prep school in Ashburnham, MA, is getting rid of all the books from its library and going fully to digital media. The library itself will be converted to a media center, complete with laptop-friendly carrels.

Cushing’s headmaster, James Tracy, calls the tangible books “an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.” According to a school news release, “Our internal research has shown that students rarely rely on printed books for their academic work, and instead search for information online, either in our library space or on their laptops.”

The announcement comes as a bit of a shock to a longtime book-lover such as myself. (I even arrange my personal books in Library of Congress catalog order.) On the other hand, I realize I’m trending the same way -- one of my current reads is T. A. Brown’s Genomes 2, available online gratis from the NIH. The price is hard to beat! And I love the availability of old out-of-print volumes on Google Books.

Ever wonder how scholars in the first few centuries of the present era felt about the disappearance of their beloved scrolls in favor of the more compact codices?

According to a Wikipedia article, most scrolls that were not converted to the newer form were lost to posterity. Unfortunately, printed books may prove more durable than their digital replacements.

Yes, I Am a Nerd

Today, on my way to an appointment, I was so absorbed in reading an article on the P=NP software problem that I sailed right by my stop without noticing. The stop? Kendall/MIT, of course.

I guess I really am a nerd.