I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.

Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

Lack of documentation is becoming a problem for acceptance.

As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.

One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion.