2010.03.12
Email's Ten by Ten Law
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.
Continue reading "Email's Ten by Ten Law"Last modified: Friday, March 12, 2010 11:52 am
2010.03.04
Software Tracks
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?
Continue reading "Software Tracks"Last modified: Thursday, March 4, 2010 1:48 pm
2010.01.12
Useful Polyglot Code
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.
Continue reading "Useful Polyglot Code"Last modified: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 7:52 pm
2009.12.27
How to Get a Glowing Recommendation Letter
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.
Continue reading "How to Get a Glowing Recommendation Letter"Last modified: Sunday, December 27, 2009 6:53 pm
2009.11.25
The Risk of Air Gaps
As some readers of this blog know,
from this month onward I'm on a leave of absence from my
academic post
to head the
Greek Ministry of Finance
General Secretariat of Information Systems.
The job's extreme demands explain the paucity of blog postings here.
I'll describe the many organizational and management
challenges of my new position in a future blog post.
For now let me concentrate on a small but interesting technical aspect:
the air gap we use to isolate the systems involved in processing
tax and customs data from the systems used for development and production
work.
Continue reading "The Risk of Air Gaps"Last modified: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 6:30 pm
2009.10.21
Basic Etiquette of Technical Communication
Parents spend years trying to teach their children to be polite, and some of us had to learn at school how to properly address an archbishop. Yet, it seems that advice on courteousness and politeness in technical communication is in short supply; most of us learn these skills through what is euphemistically called “on the job training.” With enough bruises on my back to demonstrate the amount and variety of my experience in this area (though not my skill), here are some of the things I’ve learned.
Continue reading "Basic Etiquette of Technical Communication"Last modified: Sunday, December 27, 2009 6:43 pm
2009.10.15
Tags for Bibliography References
I love writing my papers in LaTeX.
Its declarative style allows me to concentrate on the content,
rather than the form.
I even format the text according to the content,
keeping each phrase or logical unit on a separate line.
Many publishers supply style files that format the article according
to the journal's specifications.
Even better, over the years I've created
an extensive collection
of bibliographies.
I can therefore use BibTeX to cite works with a simple command,
without having to re-enter their details.
This also allows me to use style files
to format references according to the publisher's specification.
Yet, there is still the problem of navigating from a citation to
the work's details.
Here is how I solve it.
Continue reading "Tags for Bibliography References"Last modified: Thursday, October 15, 2009 9:25 am
2009.09.16
Applied Code Reading: Debugging FreeBSD Regex
When the code we're trying to
read is inscrutable,
inserting print statements and running various test cases can be
two invaluable tools.
Earlier today I fixed
a tricky problem in the FreeBSD regular expression library.
The code,
originally written by Henry Spencer in the early 1990s,
is by far the most complex I've ever encountered.
It implements sophisticated algorithms with minimal commenting.
Also, to avoid code repetition and increase efficiency,
the 1200 line long main part of the regular expression execution engine is
included in the compiled C code
three times after modifying various macros to adjust the code's behavior:
the first time the code targets small expressions and operates
with bit masks on long integers,
the second time the code handles larger expressions
by storing its data in arrays,
and the third time the code is also adjusted to handle multibyte characters.
Here is how I used test data and print statements to locate and fix the problem.
Continue reading "Applied Code Reading: Debugging FreeBSD Regex"Last modified: Wednesday, September 16, 2009 9:44 am
2009.09.02
Job Security
My colleague, who works for a major equipment vendor, was discussing how his employer was planning to lay off hundreds of developers over the coming months. “But I’m safe,” he said, “as I’m one of the two people in our group who really understand the code.” It seems that writing code that nobody else can comprehend can be a significant job security booster. Here’s some advice.
Continue reading "Job Security"Last modified: Wednesday, September 2, 2009 3:35 pm
2009.08.28
The Price of Cheap Labor
The strange entries I've found over the past two weeks I've been
researching a large database are innumerable.
Some addresses, like Wastington, DC are simply annoying,
while others, like Vancouver BC V6T 1Z4 United States, are
mildly amusing.
It's clear to me that the database has been populated by the massive
application of a cheap labor force.
This is happening all too often, and I think it is a mistake.
Continue reading "The Price of Cheap Labor"Last modified: Friday, August 28, 2009 6:32 pm
