The most expensive programming mistake ever?

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote an excellent piece claiming that the choice of NULL terminated strings for the C language may be the most expensive mistake in the history of programming, and it was only a one-byte mistake at that. I write the TechRepublic Patch Tuesday column every month, and I can tell you that the kinds of issues that NULL terminated strings cause are the biggest cause of security issues for Windows, and therefore cost billions of dollars every year in security violations and lost time patching systems.

Does “social” fit into your mobile apps?

Appcelerator released its latest quarterly mobile developer survey, which has a big focus on “social” and how it fits into mobile apps. I think that mobile apps + social is a great blend. While I’m not that big on social stuff for enterprise scenarios (do you really want your server Tweeting that it’s had a failure?), I think it’s a good match with mobile devices, which tend to have a lot of consumer features.
Windows Phone 7 has a lot of social capabilities, and it is a great experience. For example, when my daughter was born a couple of months ago, I was able to get details and photos out to my friends and family within minutes of the birth, allowing those who could not be there to still participate.
I’m not sold on Google+ for a number of reasons, and Google’s history with its APIs makes me reluctant to recommend integrating apps with them, but an integration with Facebook and Twitter (where appropriate) makes perfect sense for many mobile apps.