Who Will Edit the Editors?

I am often asked to review papers that are written in a language only superficially resembling English. In a few cases the writing is so confused that I return the manuscript, asking for it to be edited by a native speaker of English. I realize that writing proper English is an additional hurdle for, possibly brilliant, scientists who are not native speakers of English, and I often wondered how authors could address this problem. Apparently, there are companies that will edit scientific papers for a modest fee.

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If STL Had Been Designed by a Committee

I've been reading on XML schema, and it's embarrassingly obvious that it has been designed by a committee.

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A Clash of Two Cultures

I dug the following gem from the Usenix HotOS X Conference Panel titled "Do we work within existing frameworks or start from scratch?", summarized by Prashanth Bungale.

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How to Sort Three Numbers

Quick: how do you sort three numbers in ascending order?

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Supporting Java's Foreach Construct

Java 1.5 supports a new foreach construct for iterating over collections. The construct can be used on arrays and on all classes in Java's Collection framework. I searched the internet for an example on how to make my own classes iterable with this construct, but could not find an example.

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US Military Removes Word Documents from the Web?

On August 25th 2004 the comp.risks forum run an article I submitted regarding the large number of Microsoft Word documents available on US milatary sites (sites in the .mil domain) through Google searches (23.50 "U.S. military sites offer a quarter million Microsoft Word documents"). The article documented how such documents could lead to the leakage of confidential data. A week later I setup a script to watch the number of Word documents available through Google searches to see if and when the military would recognise the threat those documents posed and remove them.

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Working with Unix Tools

A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author.

— Stephen C. Johnson

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Human Thought and the Design of Computers

Peter J. Denning wrote an excellent article titled "The Locality Principle" in the July 2005 issue of the Communications of the ACM. The article explained the story behind the locality of reference, a fundamental principle of computing with many applications. In a comment that appeared in the October issue of the same magazine I commented:

Peter J. Denning's "The Profession of IT" column ("The Locality Principle," July 2005) invoked an anthropomorphic explanation for the prevalence of the locality principle in computational systems, observing that humans gather the most useful objects close around them to minimize the time and work required for their use, and that we've transferred these behaviors into the computational systems we design.

A more intellectually satisfying explanation might be that we are dealing with two parallel and independent evolutionary design paths. Trading some expensive high-quality space (fast memory) in order to gain time performance is a sound engineering decision. It is therefore likely that evolution first adapted the human brain by endowing it with limited but versatile short-term memory and large long-term memory structure that exhibits behavior similar to caching.

Millennia later, we make similar design decisions when building computing systems.

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MIT's $100 Laptop

The MIT Media Lab is working on a research initiative to develop a $100 laptop. This will be distributed through governments to schools to help the education of the world's students. These are my notes from a talk Michail Bletsas, Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab gave on the subject, at an event organized by the Netmode Laboratory .

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Hard Disk Failure

I tell everybody that the question is not whether your hard drive will fail, but when it will fail. My laptop's drive started emmitting a loud grinding sound last Saturday.

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The Other Side of Digital Preservation

We often grumble that digital preservation is risky, and that modern storage technologies and file formats quickly become outdated destroying the record of our past. What we don't appear to appreciate is how much more data we are able to preserve, thanks to digital technologies.

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Slashdot Story: The Future of Windows Software Distribution

Earlier today I posted on Slashdot a story describing Microsoft's new third-party software distribution approach.

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Information Kiosk

The inclined panel is indeed a computer screen, and, of course, it is not working. Another, more reliable, technology has prevailed.

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Preparing for the Exams

The (retake) exam period has started. At the metro the passenger sitting opposite me is obviously a student frantically sorting the cards containing a 6%-reduced photocopy of her forensic psychology textbook.

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Version Control Talk Demystified

One indication of the importance an endeavor has in our lives is the vocabulary associated with it. If developers employ a tool or a method, inevitably they will come up with words to describe their corresponding work in an accurate and concise way. I recently heard a colleague describe version control systems (also formally known as configuration management tools) as boring. I hope that this dictionary will dispel this myth by documenting a rich technical and social vocabulary. If you don’t work with a VCS I believe this list will give you plenty of reasons to look at what these systems can do for you and your projects. On the other hand, if you already use a VCS I hope you will find ideas on how to use it more productively and how to improve your configuration management process. And, no matter to which group you belong to, I am sure you’ll find here some new words worth knowing.

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Version Control Systems

A source code control system [is] a giant UNDO key—a project wide time machine.

— A. Hunt and D. Thomas

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Everything Old is New Again

In 1984 the new kid on the block was Borland's Sidekick. A terminate and stay resident (TSR) program for MS-DOS, it would run in the background, and when it detected the two shift keys being pressed it would overlay the (then character) screen with a calculator, a notepad, a calendar, a dialer or an ASCII table.

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C++0X Enhancement: Rational Metaprogramming

In a recent article Bjarne Stroustrup presented the evolution of C++ toward the 0X standard, and asked the C++ community for ideas regarding C++ enhancements. This is a proposal to add to C++ support for rational metaprogramming.

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GCC Obfuscated Code

For years I've struggled to understand the GNU compiler collection internals, I am ashamed to say, without much success. I always thought that the subject was intrinsically too complicated for me, but after struggling to understand a two line gcc code snippet of a fairly simple operation for more than two minutes, I realized that the code style may have something to do with my problems.

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C++0X Enhancement: Packaged Libraries

In a recent article Bjarne Stroustrup presented the evolution of C++ toward the 0X standard, and asked the C++ community for ideas regarding C++ enhancements. This is a proposal to add to C++ support for using packaged libraries, and a standardizing a library distribution format.

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Tool Writing: A Forgotten Art?

Merely adding features does not make it easier for users to do things—it just makes the manual thicker. The right solution in the right place is always more effective than haphazard hacking.

— Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike

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XML Abstraction at the Wrong Level

Over the last month I've encountered two applications that use XML at the wrong level of abstraction. Instead of tailoring the schema to their needs, they use a very abstract schema, and encode their elements at a meta level within the XML data. This approach hinders the verification and manipulation of the corresponding XML files.

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An Open Letter to a Copy-Editor

Copy-editors perform a valuable service. They take prose that is often rough and unfinished, and massage it into a professional document. Unfortunately, sometimes copy editing can go to far and distort the meaning, especially in technical writing. Also, my feeling is that across the across-the-board copy editing performed by many publications results in writing whose language is uniformly polished, and, yes, bland. Think of what would happen if the writings of Hemmingway got copy edited. While I consider my writing at least five leagues below that level, I prefer to learn my own way toward perfection, than to battle with corrections that sometimes change the meaning of what I write in treacherous ways.

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Today's Dynamic is Tomorrow's Static

Today at the IEEE Software's editorial and advisory board meeting, the issue of service-oriented architectures came up. Robert Glass wondered whether this was the upcoming fad, following structured programming and object-oriented programming, to which Stan Rifkin replied that service-oriented architectures are a lot more dynamic. Interestingly, the previous approaches, which we today consider as static, were also thought-off as dynamic in their day.

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Cats and Cigarette Lighters

On April 14th, the US Transportation Security Administration started enforcing a new ban on cigarette lighters. A month later, I saw the corresponding announcement posted on a check-in desk at the Samos international airport. At the same airport I also saw a free-roaming cat getting its food delivered directly on the tarmac. I entered my flight feeling a lot safer.

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Warum einfach, wenns auch kompliziert geht?

(Why make it simple, when you can also make it complicated?) Consider the task of associating code with specific data values. Using a multi-way conditional can be error-prone, because the data values become separated by the code. It can also be inefficient in the cases where we have to use cascading else if statements, instead of a switch, which the compiler can optimize into a hash table. In C I would use an array containing values and function pointers. My understanding is that the Java approach involves using the Strategy pattern: a separate class for each case, and an interface "to rule them all".

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Ordnung muss sein

A free-form translation of the above German phrase (orderliness must exist) would be that orderliness is not negotiable. In the domain of information technology I find this motto particularly pertinent.

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Google's Web Accelerator as a P2P CDN

I admire Google's guts in deploying their Web Accelerator. Proposing to act as an intermediary for the whole planet's web traffic takes a lot of courage and a certain amount of audacity. Interestingly, the system's design can be quite scalable, through the use of peer-to-peer and personalization technology.

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Java Makes Scripting Languages Irrelevant?

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

— Alan J. Perlis

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Solving Singh's Substitution Cipher

Many of us enjoy playing with encryption algorithms. Simon Singh, before a book promotion trip to Greece, published a "substitution cipher with a twist". I would consider solving a substitution cipher aimed at the general public unfair, but the "twist" made me curious.

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A Pipe Namespace in the Portal Filesystem

The portal filesystem allows a daemon running as a userland program to pass descriptors to processes that open files belonging to its namespace. It has been part of the *BSD operating systems since 4.4 BSD. I recently added a pipe namespace to its FreeBSD implementation. This allows us to perform scatter gather operations without using temporary files, create non-linear pipelines, and implement file views using symbolic links.

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Vatican's Prescient Web Masters

The Vacancy of the Apostolic See web page appears to have been prepared one day BEFORE the Pope's death.

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UMLGraph Update

I have updated the UMLGraph program to run under Java 1.5.

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A Plea for Usability Design in Children's Electronic Toys

I am not particularly fond of children's electronic toys, but they constantly arrive at home as presents, and they also attract the children's attention. Unfortunately, the usability aspects of most electronic toys for toddlers and children appear to be ignoring important and well-established principles of user interface design.

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Self-Healing Systems Will Age

A number of researchers are advocating the adoption of self-healing approaches as a way to create more robust systems. They suggest to copy a page from the book of life, where organisms with a self-healing capability can survive numerous mishaps and accidents. However, biological systems have another property, which I believe is associated with their ability to heal themselves: ageing, and, eventually, death.

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Dear Editor

Machines should work. People should think.

— Richard Hamming

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XML Versus Text Files

The JDepend package dependency analyzer can output its results either as XML or as plain text. Instead of using the XML output, I found myself processing the text output using awk. Am I becoming tied to old-world thinking, or are text files easier to process?

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The Efficiency of Java and C++, Revisited

A number of people worked on replicating the results and optimizing the programs I listed in my earlier blog entry.

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An Open Source Java Metrics Toolset Is Hard to Find

I spent many hours looking for a stand-alone open source metrics toolset for Java programs. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a single tool that would fit my (relatively modest) requiremets.

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The Efficiency of Java and C++

I seem to have trouble convincing my neo-Turk students that Java's design makes it inherently less efficient than C++. The arguments often and up in an exchange of comments like:
— This (micro) benchmark executes with the same speed when written in Java and C.
— Yes, but a realistic application, like Eclipse takes ages to start up.
— You are only complaining about the cost of the runtime startup costs and JIT compilation, which are quickly amortized, and, anyway, Eclipse offers many more features than other IDEs.
and so on. I therefore wrote a small program to demonstrate the exact problems of Java's design decisions.

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Macro-based Substitutions in Source Code

A friends asks: "How can one easily replace a method call (which can contain arguments with brackets in its invocation code) with a simple field access?

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Maintainability of the FreeBSD System

Last November Ioannis Samoladas and his colleagues published an article in the Communications of the ACM [1] that compared the maintainability of open-source versus-closed source projects. I applied the maintainability index [2] they used on the FreeBSD source repository following the code's maintainability over time, and comparing the maintainability of different modules. Here are the results.

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Java: the New Straightjacket

I first learned to program on a home computer in Basic. At first it was fun, but after a point it became frustrating, when I realized that I was living inside a walled garden. Many interesting programs, such as those interfacing with the display controller, simply could not be written in standard Basic. Luckily, this limitation forced me to move to Pascal, assembly code, and C.

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The Tools at Hand

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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