How do I support redundancy on my OpenID login website? For instance, I have users that demand 100% uptime (yeah, right, but let's get as close as we can). Some of them use less available providers (ie, myphpid on their own website, or an ID on a startup which has frequent downtime). Now I can shuttle them to a more reliable provider...
I've heard that the automotive industry has something called MISRA C. What are the relevant standards for other high reliability/availability/security industries, such as Space Aircraft Banking/financial Automotive Medical Defense/Military ??? ...
How do you organize DB layer, business logic and cross-platform API of your information management system, if uploading and processing 500000 data records in one session is a normal operation (C# .NET 3.5 + MS SQL 2005)? I’m specifically interested in production-proven paging patterns that behave well with the concurrency, scalability a...
We are currently setting up the evaluation criteria for a trade study we will be conducting. One of the criterion we selected is reliability (and/or robustness - are these the same?). How do you assess that software is reliable without being able to afford much time evaluating it? Edit: Along the lines of the response given by KenG, t...
Embedded Linux based devices often require a mechanism to update applications and system files. For example, a (non-networked) lab instrument with a USB port can get software updates from a USB stick. It would be a simple matter to run a script to copy files into place on the device's internal flash memory. However, there is the danger...
I have a Java SOAP data service which sits on top of a Sybase database which, for reasons out of my control, has unreliable performance. The database is part of a vendor package which has been modified by an internal team and most of the issues are caused by slow response times at certain times of the day. The SOAP service provides dat...
I want to learn how to create truly robust applications in .net - ones that are fault tolerant and are capable of withstanding unexpected situations. Where can I find literature/guidance on this subject? So far, I am not having much luck. ...
I would like to use Markov models for some architecture simulations, but don't have a budget to buy anything like, eg, SHARPE. Does anyone know of a freeware tool, either platform-independent or available for Mac OS/X ...
We have a mobile Application in a very unsteady WLan Environment. Sending Data to a webserver could result in a timeout or in a lost WLan connection. How do we ensure, that our data is delivered correctly? Is there a possibility of having Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM) on the device? MSMQ is no option at the moment. ...
Almost every application out there performs i/o operations, either with disk or over network. As my applications work fine under the development-time environment, I want to be sure they will still do when the Internet connection is slow or unstable, or when the user attempts to read data from badly-written CD. What tools would you reco...
after changing the max file size, session times, and post max size is it wise to use php to upload files larger than 200mb? reliable? (and this is ignoring whether a client connection is maintained) edit: done through http not ftp ...
I have been looking into using facebook connect for a new web site I am building, however the facebook api seems to be a little flaky. Th code I have been using is basic, however the example application 'therunaround' suffers from similar issues. E.g. friends list does not always load, logged in fb user not always detected. Are these ...
How much trust can I put in a standard computer running windows? To what certainty can I be sure it will run my code the way I wrote it? How can I be sure that if I declare something like "int j = 5;", j will alway be 5? Is there a way to measure trust in a standard x86 computer system? What kind of protections are there to make sure...
Upgrading software for embedded devices often has the possibility of "bricking" the device, e.g. if power should happen to fail while in the midst of writing software to FLASH. Two questions: What are some best practices for implementing the upgrade mechanism so as to minimize the probability that the device will be "bricked"? What are...
I'm trying to figure out a simple way to handle reliability for UDP messages. I figured I would just send each one with a sequencing ID and by comparing the ID to the one previously received, a loss can be detected. I would normally just use integers however the idea that it would just keep incrementing indefinitely did not sit right wit...
I'm writing an application with a GUI frontend (GTK) and an SQLite backend. When something is changed via the GUI, I want the change to show up in the GUI if and only if it completed successfully in the DB. Is watching the return code from sqlite3_step for SQLITE_ERROR sufficient to ensure that I don't give false feedback to the use...
Looking at the general trend of comments in my question about Building an Aircraft using Agile, the biggest problem other than cost appears to be safety. Do people feel that it is not possible to build a safe system (or prove it is safe) using agile? Doesn’t all the iterative testing mitigate this? Is it likely that a piece of software...
I'm not talking about the stuff that health junkies eat, but the open-source search/indexing software based on Xapian. My company are currently employing someone to implement it, and they want me to use it's functionality on a project I am working on, however I have heard little about it and am so a little wary of setting up a link to m...
Is it a good idea to use sockets to send data between two servers, or should I use something like MQ for moving data. My questions: are sockets reliable, if I need once only/assured delivery of the data? Are there any other solutions? Thanks. ...
Say I have a multithreaded application made up of two separate threads and a Queue. Thread 1 finishes it's computation and puts the result in the Queue. Meanwhile thread 2 is constantly looping and checking if there is any data in the Queue for it to process. How can I save the values in the queue to disk temporarily in case the for so...