The Washington Post ran an interesting article this week about how aides to the Obama Administration ran into a lumbering bureaucracy of the government as they began to move in after Tuesday's inauguration ceremonies.

The article reported:

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

For the most part, the article reads like a bunch of Mac users coping with a moving into a Windows shop. Even more interesting, however, is how readers comments actually advanced the story, while taking issue with how it was reported. Comments by IT managers and tech-savvy readers helped provide some context, such as pointing out that six-year-old software running laptops these days is fairly common, given that Windows XP is still widely used on many corporate PCs, including, it would appear, many in the U.S. Government.

One reader warned in a comment:

As soon as some major slip up occurs and a Gmail account is hacked, they'll learn ... the hard way.

This article is abusive to both the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration. It shows a lack of critical thinking and awareness by the author, the copy editor, and the WP staff.

The other major point many of the comments made is this: before you get the government to buy all new Macs for the Mac-centric Obama-ites, consider Linux!

Open source has been finding more than a few converts in the U.S. Government. Could the White House be the next spot it lands? If the buzz around Windows 7 builds into solid upgrades when it ships this year, Linux may have to wait.

"There's a plane on the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up people. Crazy."

And so went one of the Tweets from the ever-expanding Twitter-ers who, for many people, broke the news about the jaw-dropping emergency plane landing by a US Airways pilot yesterday after the plane's engines failed.

(By the way, Janis Krums, the Florida man who posted the picture of the plane floating on the Hudson river while all the passengers were getting out, has been on Good Morning America so far this morning, and on MSNBC. "The last few hours have been intense. Thanks for all the support.")

How did you find out about the plane that landed on New York's Hudson River yesterday afternoon? I got an email-, then a text, then phone calls and then was able to watch the live story unfold on CNN.

But talk about a crowd-sourcing story. The site Social Media Today has another round up of how they got the news. Via texts to their mobile device, for the most part via Twitter feeds.

Not being close to a TV at the time, I clicked on CNN.com to see what they had. Pictures but not video yet.

Then over to the NYTimes.com Web site, which had posted an alert headline atop its home page. Later a blog post started to relay what the reporter had seen on CNN, and eyewitness accounts -- by then flying in via text and other mobile devices.

The NYT Web site may have been slow to cover the story compared to other news organizations, but it would later publish a fascinating package of coverage -- its own reporting, eyewitness accounts from passengers, from witnesses who sent in accounts, videos and pictures of what they say unfold on the Hudson yesterday.

Amazing. One of my favorite headlines on the Times' coverage: E-Mail Note: 'I Landed in the Hudson'

So here we are that still-early, not-so-new part of the year, when the resolutions that wash over us in the giddy, early days of a year year start to wane. It's make or break time for resolutions.

Plenty of them won't make it through the year. But sometimes the year that just closed out was so pivotal on its own that resolutions just happen. And stick. I think this is going to be one of those years, on a personal level and for the technology industry's IT sector.

So, if a steely resolve came over you this year, may you enjoy the change you're bringing to your life, and the industry.

If you're a programmer, developer or technology professional, I also hope your resolutions for your profession touch these three areas:

1. Elevate software engineering's best practices;

2. Treat Network security as National Security (and do so by thinking globally, and acting locally);

3. Spend more face time with your software's end users;

As for #1, 30 of the most respected security organizations just released U.S. and international cyber security organizations just released a list of the most common programming errors that constitute the bulk of security problems with software today. It's a real eye-opener.

In one helpful passage that does more than just put the issue in context -- call it high relief -- the SAN announcement asked several of the participants why they think this effort is that important.

This one by Tony Sager of the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate, caught my eye:

There needs to be a move away from reacting to thousands of individual vulnerabilities, and to focus instead on a relatively small number of software flaws that allow vulnerabilities to occur, each with a general root cause. Such a list allows the targeting of improvements in software development practices, tools, and requirements to manage these problems earlier in the life cycle, where they can be solved on a large scale and cost-effectively.

The SAN report went on:

"Shockingly, most of these errors are not well understood by programmers; their avoidance is not widely taught by computer science programs; and their presence is frequently not tested by organizations developing software for sale.

The impact of these errors is far reaching. Just two of them led to more than 1.5 million web site security breaches during 2008 - and those breaches cascaded onto the computers of people who visited those web sites, turning their computers into zombies." Other errors include CWE-89, failure to preserve SQL query structure, which gives rise to SQL injection attacks, one of the favorite attacks of hackers.

As our Richard Adhikari reported, the list comes amid heightened concerns about Internet security. Experts have expressed fears that cybercriminals will have a bonanza year in 2009 because governments are preoccupied with the global recession.

This is why security, and improving how programmers design software, are resolutions that I'll be following in 2009, and hoping to see improved in a dramatic way this year.

Change, I’ve found, happens in little increments, which then grow into dramatic differences. But they start in little steps.