http://www.spinellis.gr/blog The Internet soapbox of Diomidis Spinellis dds Text Diomidis D. Spinellis Web Log http://www.spinellis.gr/blog 2004-08-20T18:00:00-03:00 en weekly 2 2003-01-01T12:00+00:00 $Id: blog.pl 1.43 2011/05/31 16:05:06 dds Exp $ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://www.spinellis.gr/dds.gif http://www.spinellis.gr/blog http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120322 We hear a lot about the adoption of open source software, but when I was asked to provide hard evidence there was little I could find. In an article I recently published in the Journal of Systems and Software together with my colleague Vaggelis Giannikas we tried to fill this gap by examining the type of software the US Fortune 1000 companies use in their web-facing operations. The results were not what I was expecting. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120322 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text How do Big US Firms Use Open Source Software? http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120322 2012-03-22T17:47:48-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120308 DLL hell was a condition that often afflicted unfortunate users of old Microsoft Windows versions. Under it, the installation of one program would render others unusable due to incompatibilities between dynamically linked libraries. Suffering users would have to carefully juggle their conflicting DLLs to find a stable configuration. Similar problems distress any administrator manually installing software that depends on incompatible versions of other helper modules. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120308 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Package Management Systems http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120308 2012-03-08T12:00:02-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120207 Secrets for Android is a nifty Android application that allows you to securely store passwords and other sensitive data on your Android phone. Your data are encoded with your supplied password using strong cryptography and are therefore protected if your phone gets stolen. Although the application offers a backup and an export facility, I found both wanting in terms of the availability and confidentiality associated with their use. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120207 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text How to Decrypt "Secrets for Android" Files http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120207 2012-02-08T22:19:04-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120111 The refactorings that a good integrated development environment can perform are impressive. Yet, there are many reasons to master some cheap-and-cheerful alternative approaches. First, there will always be refactorings that your IDE won’t support. Also, although your IDE might offer excellent refactoring support for some programming languages, it could fall short on others. Modern projects increasingly mix and match implementation languages, and switching to a specialized IDE for each language is burdensome and inefficient. Finally, IDE-provided refactorings resemble an intellectual straightjacket. If you only know how to use the ready-made refactorings, you’ll miss out on opportunities for other code improvements. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120111 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Refactoring on the Cheap http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120111 2012-01-11T15:23:57-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120108 In a recent NPR interview the journalist described how I used a mind map to organize my work while I served as Secretary General for Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance. A number of people asked me for more details; if you're interested read on. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120108 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Mind Mapping http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20120108 2012-01-08T16:42:47-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111228 Choosing between people you want to invite to a function and people you have to invite is sometimes difficult. Say Alice wants to invite Tom, Dick, and Harry to a party, but she'd actually prefer if Dick didn't show up. Here's how Alice can send invitations by email from an email-capable Unix system to achieve the desired result, while covering her scheming with plausible deniability. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111228 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Pretend Invitations http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111228 2011-12-28T10:29:56-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111217 Members of the Hellenic Association of Mobile Application Companies and the Hellenic Semiconductor Industry Association , assorted biotechnology companies, and representatives from Greek and US-based venture capital funds gathered on Friday December 17, 2011 in a meeting to exchange advice, tips, and war stories on venturing abroad. It was one of the most inspiring meetings I've attended for some time. These are my notes from the meeting. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111217 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Advice from Successful Greek IT Startups http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111217 2011-12-17T11:31:55-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111214 Some facilities provided by mature multi-user operating systems appear arcane today. Administrators of computers running Mac OS X or Linux can see users logged-in from remote terminals, they can specify limits on the disk space one can use, and they can run accounting statistics to see how much CPU time or disk I/O a user has consumed over a month. These operating systems also offer facilities to group users together, to specify various protection levels for each user's files, and to prescribe which commands a user can run. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111214 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Apps are the New Users http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111214 2011-12-14T15:24:31-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111127 Neither Hewlett Packard nor Microsoft Windows 7 offer native support for my HP 4470c scanner. Throwing a working scanner away to buy a new one only because some software was missing seemed like a waste, so I looked for an alternative solution. This is how I made it work using SANE , an open source framework for scanners. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111127 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Using the HP 4470c Scanner Under Windows 7 http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111127 2011-11-27T16:54:31-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111030 By Diomidis Spinellis and Henry Spencer We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming. — Wernher von Braun Twilight saw the landing of Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center on 21 July 2011, marking the end of the 30-year Space Shuttle program and leaving the Soyuz series of spacecraft as the only remaining major option for sending humans into space. With a history of 1,700 flights over an almost half-century lifetime, the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft are arguably a tremendously successful spaceflight design. Given the parallels between the complexity of human spaceflight and large software systems, what can we developers learn from the Soyuz program? http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111030 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Lessons from Space http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20111030 2011-10-30T12:05:22-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20110911 This column is about a tool we no longer have: the continuous rise of the CPU clock frequency. We were enjoying this trend for decades, but in the past few years, progress stalled. CPUs are no longer getting faster because their makers can’t handle the heat of faster-switching transistors. Furthermore, increasing the CPU’s sophistication to execute our instructions more cleverly has hit the law of diminishing returns. Consequently, CPU manufacturers now package the constantly increasing number of transistors they can fit onto a chip into multiple cores—processing elements—and then ask us developers to put the cores to good use. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20110911 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Faking it http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20110911 2011-09-18T14:43:23-00:00 en