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 1.41 2009/03/24 07:23:11 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/20100828 flowchart, n.: The innumerate misleading the illiterate. — Stan Kelly-Bootle, “The Devil’s DP Dictionary” A mechanical engineer who sees the symbol ⊥ in a diagram will immediately realize that a feature is specified to be perpendicular to another. In contrast, a software engineer looking at a diagram’s line ending with the symbol ◊ will, at best, wonder whether it denotes aggregation (as in UML), or a “zero or one” cardinality (as in IDEF1X), or something else invented by a creative academic. Worse, many developers will simply scratch their head in bewilderment. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100828 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text UML, Everywhere http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100828 2010-08-28T08:48:30-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100824 Being able to use plain alphabeitc keys as editing commands is for many of us a great strength of the vi editor. It allows us to edit without hunting for the placement of the various movement keys on each particular keyboard, and, most of the time, without having to juggle in order to combine particular keys with ctrl or alt . However, this advantage can turn into a curse when editing files using a non-ASCII keyboard layout. When the keyboard input method is switched to another script (Greek in my case, or, say, Cyrillic for others) vi will stop responding to its normal commands, because it will encounter unknown characters. Here is how I've dealt with this problem. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100824 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Sane vim Editing of Unicode Files http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100824 2010-08-23T22:24:04-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100804 Four years ago I wrote about a method that could be used to have the Unix Bourne shell interpret Windows batch files. I'm using this trick a lot, because programming using the Windows/DOS batch files facilities is decidedly painful, whereas the Bourne shell remains a classy programming environment. There are still many cases where the style of Unix shell programming outshines and outperforms even modern scripting languages. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100804 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Batch Files as Shell Scripts Revisited http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100804 2010-08-04T20:21:50-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100711 Technical prose is almost immortal. — Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. Although programming is a form of literary expression, the relationship between code and its documentation is uneasy at best. As Figure 1 shows, among the thousands of projects that FreeBSD maintainers have considered important enough to port to the platform, the number of comments per 100 lines varies substantially. Clearly, as developers our views on how we should document our code are anything but consistent. Yet, there are universal principles, nifty tools, and useful practices that can benefit us all. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100711 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Code Documentation http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100711 2010-07-11T10:32:58-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100619 The ISI Web of Knowledge recently published the 2009 Journal Citation Reports . Following similar studies I performed in 2007 , 2008 , and 2009 , here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the impact factor in computer science journals. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100619 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2009 http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100619 2010-06-19T21:13:02-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100520 During the past six months I've been drowning in email. I spend a large part of my day responding to email messages and filing incoming messages I consider important. Yet I'm falling behind and this affects the quality of my work: I sometimes delay responding to important messages. Followng Peter Drucker's dictum "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it", I decided to write a tool to analyze my incoming and outgoing email messages. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100520 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Email Analytics http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100520 2010-05-20T09:40:06-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100407 Earlier today I had the privilege to attend a lecture on crisis management by the Harvard Senior Lecturer Ron Heifetz . Here is a list of points that struck me (in the form of slightly edited tweets), and my view of their relevance to software development. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100407 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Ron Heifetz on Crisis Leadership http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100407 2010-04-07T20:31:32-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100312 I drown in email and my aspirations for handling it are becoming increasingly lame. In the 1980s my goal used to be an empty mailbox at the end of each session. During the 1990s the goal became to empty the mailbox by the end of the day. But tasks I couldn’t complete within the day accumulated, so in the 2000s I just tried to have only so many messages as could fit in a window without a scrollbar, so that I could immediately scan what I had to do. Nowadays my modest goal is to keep the size of my mailbox below 100 messages, and I succeed in that only half of the time. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100312 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Email's Ten by Ten Law http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100312 2010-03-12T09:52:54-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100304 A generous car reviewer might praise a vehicle’s handling by writing that it turns as if it’s running on railroad tracks. Indeed, tracks offer guidance and support. When you run on tracks you can carry more weight, you can run faster, and you can’t get lost. That’s why engineers, from early childhood to old age, get hooked on trains. Can we get our software to run on tracks? http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100304 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Software Tracks http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100304 2010-03-04T11:48:18-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100112 Four years ago I blogged about an incantation that would allow the Windows command interpreter (cmd) to execute Unix shell scripts written inside plain batch files. Time for an update. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100112 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text Useful Polyglot Code http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20100112 2010-01-12T17:52:24-00:00 en http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20091227 Students who do well in my courses often come to me asking for a recommendation letter for graduate or postgraduate study. I only write letters for students I know well and I can honestly recommend, so some end up with a glowing recommendation while others leave empty handed. While I was drafting a few letters today, it occurred to me that obtaining a good recommendation letter is a lot easier if you've planned for it well in advance. http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20091227 Diomidis D. Spinellis Text How to Get a Glowing Recommendation Letter http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20091227 2009-12-27T16:53:10-00:00 en