Reading Matters

Chet asked, in a comment on my post, for the security blogs I read.

I was planning a 'reading matter' blog anyway, and there's a bit of crossover so here we go:

Security

I get the OraNA Security feed as my main source. Sometimes I'll add a new feed I come across, but they seem to get added to OraNA very quickly, and then I just remove the specific feed. The remaining ones aren't specific to Oracle (or even necessarily databases).

Imperva blog - Mostly database or data related

Securosis -Mostly computer related

Schneier on Security - A bit more high level

Risks Digest - Mostly reports on things that have gone wrong

A Day in the Life of an Information Security Investigator
This one is entertaining, but it has got quiet over recent months. He's either working hard, or its because he has cut down on his coffee intake.

I'm glad Chet asked since I found a couple of broken feeds while checking and had to re-point them to the new feed locations.

Software
I follow the blogs of Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.

I've just finished "More Joel on Software" which I found very enjoyable. While it is 'just' a collection of his blog articles, it has been brought together in a very cohesive way, so works well as a book. I have been reading the 'Joel on Software' blog for a couple of years and had previously bought "User Interface Design for Programmers".

I suspect I got to Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror blog from Joel's blog, but it may have been the other way. Either way they got together to produce stackoverflow.

If you haven't already been, go take a look round stackoverflow.com. I used to hang around a couple of forums but this one just works better. OpenId authentication so I don't have to worry about ANOTHER password to remember. A whole bunch of 'badges' to earn and reputation to be garnered. Users with a high enough reputation get editing privileges on the question or answers (though there's a wiki style history to see who did what). As well as originators being able to mark answers as correct, others can vote answers up and down, and vote the question up and down. You can comment on the question and on answers and vote the comments up and down. Its not only free to use, but you can even download the whole Q&A database. If Oracle ever feel like ditching Jive, they can get this off the shelf [http://stackexchange.com/]. That said, I'm sure the thing could be spoiled by the wrong user base.

'Paper' reading

I've started on Oracle PL/SQL Programming, 5th Edition. I won this after Steven's visit to Sydney. I'd previously owned a much earlier edition (okay, it was my wife's but it sat on *our* bookshelf), but eventually got rid of it as it was too dated to be fully trusted. I need to catch up with best practices for the later versions of PL/SQL, and the latest edition goes all the way up to 11gR2. It's a big book, so it will take me a while.

On my non-work stuff, I've been re-reading my set of Jasper Fforde books. Very English and refreshingly different. I'd sort of class them as satire, but they are very tricky to categorise.