Everybody knows that SPAM caused the IT industry to respond with content filtering techniques and SPAM blocking techniques to help control this useless waste of bandwidth and irritation factor.

Same with large files. Bored employees are sending lots of 1MB+ mails containing the latest movie or powerpoint presentation of some joke. This obviously does not help the IT budget. So they either block certain content such as MPEG files or park them for late delivery.

What about employees visiting non-work related web sites? Surfing non-business related web sites wastes available bandwidth for important business related work. So IT departments block access to sites not deemed work related. And here I started discovering the first encounter what I now call "IT paranoia". At a large company I sometimes consult for, which houses easily a hundered developers - many of which write code in Java, I once tried to browse for information on one of the well known java sites. Their proxy server denied me access because it was non-business related. This impeded quite a bit on my productivity.

I was quite impressed to receive the publisher's response to my list of errors in the text of the book "Professional Techniques for Digital Wedding Photographers, 2nd edition". I'll paste it below...

From: Photobook@aol.com
Date: 4 January 2005 18:31:48 GMT+02:00
To: wn@photudio.co.za
Subject: From Amherst Media
Dear Waldo,

Thanks for your careful review of the Hurter book and for taking the time to bring the errors to our attention. We will bring your comments to the author's attention when the book is reprinted.

Best Wishes,

--
Barbara A. Lynch-Johnt
Assistant Editor
Amherst Media, Inc.

I have just now received an SMS from Chas Everitt - the estate agency. But first some background. I recently (2 months ago) sold my old home and bought a new one. The old one I sold through Chass Everitt, the new one I bought directly from Urban Constructions - the developers.

Anyways, the SMS promoted a new townhouse for sale - as if I am interested!!!!! I mean - I just spend the most money I have ever spent on a new house - barely 2 months old, and now they want to sell another house to me? This is down right stupid, blind and irritating.

Sounds like a paradox? Nope - I don't think so. What does it really matter if you are brilliant at your work in the IT industry, specifically?

You would expect to receive more clients by the day, always being overbooked and people would fall over their feet to get you to do their projects. Especially if you are way under priced.

However, real life has taught me that politics, relationships, smoke and mirrors and FUD for change significantly skews this idyllic opinion.

When should you perform input validation, and how thorough should you be? This is a question many developers are struggling with.

This ties back to one of my earlier comments on defensive programming techniques. However, here I will present a more detailed example. Most competent developers will perform the basic input validation to ensure correct input, such as ensuring a date has the correct format, an age is positive etc. However, should you explicitly add a check in your code for null values? Java will generate a NullPointerException in most cases when performing an operation such as method invocation on a null object.

There are two reasons why I prefer to explicitly check the input when data is passed to a method from an external party. Firstly, I do not trust the third party, be that another developer making use of my API, or myself using a class from another package. Secondly, if a null value slips through, I need to show to the world that I have considered such a scenario, and that I have actively coded to handle it. If I depend on NullPointerExceptions to be thrown, I might just one day discover that the API I am using has a side effect that it does not properly handle null values, and thus return nonsense.