Bill Sommerfeld's Weblog

Sunday August 15, 2004

The Little Things. In a post the other day on the Columbia disaster, Glenn Reynolds wrote "Sometimes it's the little things that get you."

I beg to differ. In engineering, it's usually the little things at the root of failures. A large part of successful engineering involves getting enough of the details right. Most commonly, a bunch of little things, any one or two of which could be shrugged off, all go wrong at once or in sequence.

A large part of successful engineering involves getting enough of the details right that the inevitable minor failures don't build on each other and cascade into a larger failure. This is doubly so when security is a consideration... (and, as an aside, one of the reasons why I need to dive back into the IETF PKI4IPSEC discussion real soon now...)