It's a bit of a random link, but I've recently been trying to remember a talk I saw at the Computer Lab about the horrendous state of software reliability. I've finally tracked the author down, and Professor Les Hatton has a fascinating view on this stuff that just makes you want to give up and do something completely different. He's a bit of a polymath, so it looks like there's some other cool stuff there, but I haven't really had an in-depth dig. The paper on optimising your phone tariff versus the phone companies' obfuscated talk plans, for example, is quite fun.
Posted 2006-07-21.