Diomidis Spinellis blog

Complete Contents

The perils of GenAI student submissions (2025-04-11)

Unix make vs Apache Airflow (2024-10-15)

How (and how not) to present related work (2024-08-05)

An exception handling revelation (2024-02-05)

Extending the life of TomTom wearables (2023-09-01)

How AGI can conquer the world and what to do about it (2023-04-13)

Twitter’s overrated dissemination capacity (2023-04-02)

The hypocritical call to pause giant AI (2023-03-30)

AI deforests the knowledge’s ecosystem (2023-03-16)

How I fixed git-grep macOS UTF-8 support (2022-10-12)

The sorry state of software quality (2022-03-10)

Rather than alchemy, methodical troubleshooting (2021-11-27)

The Evolution of the Unix System Architecture (2021-06-18)

Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator (2021-01-02)

Fast database UPDATE/DELETE operations (2020-12-10)

Raspberry Pi 400 vs ZX Spectrum (2020-11-02)

Error handling under Unix and Windows (2020-09-29)

Shell scripting for software developers (2020-08-27)

IBAN length and DESI score (2020-08-13)

Auto-correct text entered with the wrong keyboard layout (2020-07-21)

The titanic battle between big iron and microprocessors (2020-05-31)

Contact tracing with a Raspberry Pi Zero-W (2020-05-20)

A chat protocol for remote lectures (2020-04-06)

Shell scripting for personal productivity (2020-03-23)

What explains the counter-intuitive numbering of chip pins? (2020-03-20)

Installing PyTorch on a Raspberry Pi-3B+ redux (2020-03-17)

Seven reasons to add Unix command line expertise to your tool chest (2020-03-16)

What can software developers learn from the Soviet Moon Landing Program? (2020-03-06)

Was Knuth Really Framed by Jon Bentley? (2020-02-25)

Convert file I/O into pipe I/O with /dev/fd (2019-12-14)

Pia Betton on Service Design (2019-12-05)

How to monitor MySQL / MariaDB query progress (2019-11-03)

So, you’re chairing a conference session? (2019-05-29)

Java Stream Methods and Unix Pipeline Commands: A Dictionary (2018-11-27)

Debugging had to be discovered! (2018-11-16)

How I slashed a SQL query runtime from 380 hours to 12 with two Unix commands (2018-08-05)

How to Perform Set Operations on Terabyte Files (2018-04-03)

The Shoemaker’s Children Go Barefoot (2018-02-10)

Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer’s Manual (2017-11-19)

How I Recovered my Firefox Tab Groups (2017-11-17)

An Embarrassing Failure (2017-10-03)

Who are the Publishers of Computer Science Research? (2017-09-15)

The Origins of Malloc (2017-09-14)

Of BOOL and stdbool (2017-09-05)

Debugging in Practice: dgsh Issue 85 (2017-08-15)

Display Git’s and Current Directory on Terminal Bar (2017-08-10)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2016 (2017-06-16)

Modular SQL Queries with Unit Tests (2017-06-06)

Open Collaboration at Eclipse (2017-05-31)

Unix Architecture Evolution Diagrams (2017-05-10)

Research Priorities in Software Technologies (2017-04-04)

The 1980s Research Unix Editions Are Now Available for Study (2017-03-28)

The Psychology of the AWS Outage (2017-02-28)

The Road to Debugging Success (2017-02-16)

Measures of Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address (2017-01-20)

How to avoid redoing manual corrections (2017-01-16)

Debugging PCSecrets Synchronization (2017-01-03)

As it Happened: Leap Second 37 (2017-01-01)

Computer vs Human 0-1 (2016-12-02)

The State of Software Engineering Research (2016-11-17)

Netdata on a Raspberry Pi (2016-10-27)

Debugging a File Synchronization Problem (2016-10-13)

Revision Control Smells (2016-09-13)

The Computer Tube (2016-05-07)

Verifying the Substitution Cipher Folklore (2016-03-18)

Raspberry Pi vs USB vs Mac Audio (2015-12-13)

Raspberry Pi Zero vs Elliott 405 (2015-11-29)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2014 (2015-06-28)

Grady Booch on the Future in Software Engineering (2015-05-22)

ABS's 2015 Academic Journal Guide (2015-02-28)

What's the Best Time and Day to Tweet? (2015-01-13)

First, Do No Harm (2014-09-25)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2013 (2014-08-08)

Service Orchestration with Rundeck (2014-07-30)

Developing in the Cloud (2014-04-24)

Bespoke Infrastructures (2014-01-15)

The Birth of Standard Error (2013-12-11)

The Frictionless Development Environment Scorecard (2013-12-06)

A Better Air Gap (2013-10-21)

Differential Debugging (2013-09-10)

Portability: Goodies vs. the hair shirt (2013-07-25)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2012 (2013-07-03)

How to Create Your Own Git Server (2013-06-19)

How to make a MacBook Kensington Lock Adapter (2013-06-13)

Systems Software (2013-05-08)

How to Fix the Sony MDR-W08L Headphones (2013-03-30)

Software Tools Research: SPLASH Panel Discussion (2013-03-14)

Systems Code (2013-02-21)

The Importance of Being Declarative (2013-01-23)

APIs, Libraries, and Code (2012-12-19)

Changes in the Way we View Computing (2012-12-12)

Programming Languages vs. Fat Fingers (2012-12-05)

Chemical Element Trump Cards (2012-10-21)

Virtualize Me (2012-10-11)

How to Calculate an Operation's Memory Consumption (2012-09-22)

Research Proposal Becomes Reality (2012-09-18)

Don't Install Software by Hand (2012-09-04)

Importing an RCS Project into Git (2012-08-07)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2011 (2012-07-03)

Why are AWS Command-Line Tools so Slow? (2012-06-01)

Git (2012-05-17)

How do Big US Firms Use Open Source Software? (2012-03-22)

Package Management Systems (2012-03-08)

How to Decrypt "Secrets for Android" Files (2012-02-07)

Refactoring on the Cheap (2012-01-11)

Mind Mapping (2012-01-08)

Pretend Invitations (2011-12-28)

Advice from Successful Greek IT Startups (2011-12-17)

Apps are the New Users (2011-12-14)

Using the HP 4470c Scanner Under Windows 7 (2011-11-27)

Lessons from Space (2011-10-30)

Faking it (2011-09-11)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2010 (2011-07-31)

How I Dealt with Student Plagiarism (2011-07-23)

Agility Drivers (2011-07-03)

Ten Lessons I Learned from Fixing my Laptop's Motherboard (2011-05-29)

Code Verification Scripts (2011-05-21)

Choosing and Using Open Source Components (2011-05-01)

elytS edoC (2011-02-27)

Sophisticated Targeted Link Spam (2011-01-06)

Manifesto for Agile Government (2010-11-19)

Farewell to Disks (2010-10-30)

Synchronizing Thunderbird's Replied Flag (2010-10-14)

UML, Everywhere (2010-08-28)

Sane vim Editing of Unicode Files (2010-08-24)

Batch Files as Shell Scripts Revisited (2010-08-04)

Code Documentation (2010-07-11)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2009 (2010-06-19)

Email Analytics (2010-05-20)

Ron Heifetz on Crisis Leadership (2010-04-07)

Email's Ten by Ten Law (2010-03-12)

Software Tracks (2010-03-04)

Useful Polyglot Code (2010-01-12)

How to Get a Glowing Recommendation Letter (2009-12-27)

The Risk of Air Gaps (2009-11-25)

Basic Etiquette of Technical Communication (2009-10-21)

Tags for Bibliography References (2009-10-15)

Applied Code Reading: Debugging FreeBSD Regex (2009-09-16)

Job Security (2009-09-02)

The Price of Cheap Labor (2009-08-28)

Real Heroes (2009-08-27)

HP-200LX Remote Control Hacks (2009-08-20)

Applied Code Reading: GNU Plotutils (2009-08-11)

How to Create a Self-Referential Tweet (2009-08-05)

A Tiny Review of Scala (2009-07-22)

Madplay on an Intel Mac (2009-07-13)

Real-Time Google Earth GPS Tracking (2009-07-01)

Greek Numerals in OpenOffice.org (2009-06-25)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2008 (2009-06-24)

Software Architecture Challenges in the 21st Century (2009-06-09)

Revisiting the Antikythera Mechanism Emulator (2009-05-27)

A Bug Creates Art (2009-05-16)

Democracy in Europe: The Telecom Package (2009-05-10)

Fixing the Orientation of JPEG Photographs (2009-05-07)

Best Day to Blog (2009-04-30)

Dual-Use Technology (2009-04-26)

A Tiling Demo (2009-04-20)

Drawing Tools (2009-04-15)

Precision in Comments (2009-04-08)

Open Source Opens up for Business (2009-04-01)

Earth Hour: A Geek's View (2009-03-28)

Tim Berners-Lee Addresses the First Web Science Conference (2009-03-18)

YouTube vs. TOSEM (2009-03-10)

Parallelizing Jobs with xargs (2009-03-04)

Start With the Most Difficult Part (2009-02-25)

The Information Train (2009-02-18)

Visualizing Revision Logs with a UML Sequence Diagram (2009-02-10)

Beautiful Architecture (2009-02-04)

The World's Smallest Domain-Specific Language (2009-02-03)

A Well-Tempered Pipeline (2009-01-25)

Paper-Based Publishing Meets the Web (2009-01-22)

Brian Kernighan on 30 Years of Software Tools (2009-01-21)

The Changing Value of Knowledge and Skills (2009-01-01)

Europeana Launches, Again (2008-12-24)

No Blinkelichten, Please (2008-12-22)

Sound-Bytes from the Open World Forum (2008-12-02)

Robert Kaplan on Strategy Execution (2008-11-10)

The Value of Computing Paradigm Diversity (2008-11-07)

Monitor Process Progress on Unix (2008-10-27)

A Look at Zero-Defect Code (2008-10-18)

Missing the Point (2008-10-16)

An Inadvertent Denial of Service Attack (2008-10-08)

Suspend Windows from the Command Line (2008-10-06)

Web Services Come of Age (2008-09-24)

Central Planning Hurts Research (2008-09-16)

Unzipping Files in Order (2008-09-11)

Daring Youth: Then and Now (2008-09-06)

UMLGraph Version 5.1 (2008-08-27)

Saving the Editor's History (2008-08-25)

Two More Years of Wikipedia Data (2008-08-08)

A Child's Crontab (2008-08-05)

Top Researchers in Computer Science and Informatics (2008-07-31)

Wikipedia Faces no Limits to Grow (2008-07-30)

Eric K. Clemons on Monetizing the Net Without Advertising (2008-07-16)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2007 (2008-06-27)

The Way We Program (2008-06-26)

Denise Rousseau on Publishing to Top Tier Journals (2008-05-30)

Interoperability, at Last (2008-05-24)

A Visit at BMW's Leipzig Factory (2008-05-17)

Open and Closed Source Kernels Go Head to Head (2008-05-16)

Software Builders (2008-05-02)

In Presentations Less is More (2008-04-28)

Assigning Responsibility (2008-04-20)

LTO Tape Drive Compression Considered Harmful (2008-04-18)

A Minute Minute Minder (2008-03-28)

Using and Abusing XML (2008-03-01)

Backwards Compatibility in Office Open XML (2008-02-21)

The Power of an Integrated Platform (2008-02-02)

What I'd Say to Bill Gates (2008-01-27)

The Mysterious TreeMap Type Signature (2008-01-23)

Rational Metaprogramming (2008-01-13)

The Relativity of Performance Improvements (2008-01-07)

Curing MIDlet Bluetooth Disconnects (2008-01-04)

Losing the War (2007-12-28)

Many Ways to Skin a Window (2007-12-13)

Global Web Site Redirect (2007-12-08)

An Update on UMLGraph (2007-11-29)

Cover Letters for Publications in LaTeX (2007-11-22)

On Paper (2007-11-10)

International BSD Conference in Turkey (2007-10-21)

Creative Commons Around the World (2007-10-11)

The Memory Savings of Shared Libraries (2007-10-06)

A Programmer's Bookshelf (2007-09-27)

Handling Traffic (2007-09-20)

Cooperative Development at the Speed of Light (2007-09-14)

Abstraction and Variation (2007-09-02)

The Treacherous Power of Extended Regular Expressions (2007-08-28)

Location-Based Dictionary Attacks (2007-08-02)

Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2006 (2007-07-10)

A Phone Exchange Rootkit (2007-07-08)

The Tools we Use (2007-06-28)

The Double-Edged Sword of Proprietary Platforms (2007-06-21)

Handling Downtime (2007-06-15)

Palindromic Palindrome Checking (2007-06-06)

Decyphering Modern Texts (2007-05-23)

Using the Open-Sourced Java Platform (2007-05-10)

Of Wine and Software (2007-05-02)

Silver Bullets and Other Mysteries (2007-04-30)

Modularity and Troubleshooting (2007-04-21)

Breaking into a Virtual Machine (2007-04-16)

I Spy (2007-04-09)

A Humbling Upgrade (2007-04-04)

One Traffic Light Per Child (2007-03-25)

Software Development Productivity Award (2007-03-23)

Make vs Ant: Observability (2007-03-15)

Software Rejuvenation is Counterproductive (2007-03-09)

The Power of Reusable GUI Elements (2007-03-06)

A Peek at Beautiful Code (2007-02-27)

Malware on the Fly (2007-02-16)

How to Embed Citations in Diagrams (2007-02-04)

Open source as a paradigm for evolving complex systems (2007-01-19)

Landscape vs Portrait Monitors (2007-01-15)

The Perils of Naive Sorting (2007-01-12)

Why Key Fingerprints are Important (2007-01-08)

The Capacitor Plague Hits a Baby Monitor (2006-12-25)

The Escape of a Small Program (2006-12-21)

Cracking Software Reuse (2006-12-15)

Secure Passports and IT Problems (2006-12-13)

(Not) Hacking the Digipass Go 3 OTP Dongle (2006-12-01)

Internet Explorer's Cleaner Look (2006-11-28)

So Long as there's a Jingle in your Head, Television isn't Free (2006-11-22)

White Noise Calms Babies (2006-11-15)

Converting RIS to BibTeX (2006-11-08)

The Return of Performance Engineering and Trendy Programmers (2006-11-03)

A Solution for Web Citations (2006-10-24)

SQO-OSS Launched (2006-10-20)

Research in Domain Specific Languages (2006-10-13)

Web Page Hits, Amazon.com's Sales Rank, and Actual Sales (2006-10-11)

Code Finessing (2006-10-06)

Cross Compiling (2006-09-30)

Choosing a Collection: A Discussion with Kent Beck (2006-09-27)

The Verbosity of Object-Oriented Code (2006-09-25)

UML Class Diagrams from C++ Code (2006-09-21)

NASSCOM Quality Summit 2006 (2006-09-17)

Hardware and Software Debugging (2006-09-02)

Open Source and Professional Advancement (2006-09-01)

SeaMonkey vs Internet Explorer Revisited (2006-08-08)

What Can System Administrators Learn from Programmers? (2006-07-23)

Efficient Human Multitasking (2006-07-19)

Boot Lock (2006-07-11)

Quality, Democracy, and Code (2006-07-02)

Choosing a Programming Language (2006-07-01)

Dave Prosser's C Preprocessing Algorithm (2006-06-26)

Interoperability Requires Temperance (2006-06-25)

Batch Files as Shell Scripts (2006-06-16)

Security is a Problem of the Weakest Link (2006-05-24)

Surprising Findings on Software Reuse (2006-05-07)

Debuggers and Logging Frameworks (2006-05-01)

Public Bookmarking (2006-04-24)

Xerces v Flex (2006-04-13)

Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective (2006-04-12)

Efficiency Will Always Matter (2006-04-03)

Active Voice v Passive Voice (2006-03-16)

Bug Busters (2006-03-01)

Management Support Technologies (2006-02-22)

A Malfeasant Design for Lawful Interception (2006-02-15)

How Not to Cook an Egg With Your Cell Phone (2006-02-07)

A General-Purpose Swap Macro (2006-01-30)

Google in China (2006-01-25)

A Tree of Mentors (2006-01-07)

Disappearing Hardware (2006-01-03)

Project Asset Portability (2006-01-01)

Who Will Edit the Editors? (2005-12-19)

If STL Had Been Designed by a Committee (2005-12-07)

A Clash of Two Cultures (2005-12-05)

How to Sort Three Numbers (2005-11-17)

Supporting Java's Foreach Construct (2005-11-14)

US Military Removes Word Documents from the Web? (2005-11-09)

Working with Unix Tools (2005-11-01)

Human Thought and the Design of Computers (2005-10-28)

MIT's $100 Laptop (2005-10-14)

Hard Disk Failure (2005-10-04)

The Other Side of Digital Preservation (2005-09-30)

Slashdot Story: The Future of Windows Software Distribution (2005-09-26)

Information Kiosk (2005-09-15)

Preparing for the Exams (2005-09-05)

Version Control Talk Demystified (2005-09-02)

Version Control Systems (2005-09-01)

Everything Old is New Again (2005-08-09)

C++0X Enhancement: Rational Metaprogramming (2005-07-19)

GCC Obfuscated Code (2005-07-17)

C++0X Enhancement: Packaged Libraries (2005-07-15)

Tool Writing: A Forgotten Art? (2005-07-01)

XML Abstraction at the Wrong Level (2005-06-23)

An Open Letter to a Copy-Editor (2005-06-09)

Today's Dynamic is Tomorrow's Static (2005-05-26)

Cats and Cigarette Lighters (2005-05-19)

Warum einfach, wenns auch kompliziert geht? (2005-05-13)

Ordnung muss sein (2005-05-11)

Google's Web Accelerator as a P2P CDN (2005-05-05)

Java Makes Scripting Languages Irrelevant? (2005-05-01)

Solving Singh's Substitution Cipher (2005-04-27)

A Pipe Namespace in the Portal Filesystem (2005-04-13)

Vatican's Prescient Web Masters (2005-04-09)

UMLGraph Update (2005-03-26)

A Plea for Usability Design in Children's Electronic Toys (2005-03-14)

Self-Healing Systems Will Age (2005-03-02)

Dear Editor (2005-03-01)

XML Versus Text Files (2005-02-18)

The Efficiency of Java and C++, Revisited (2005-02-15)

An Open Source Java Metrics Toolset Is Hard to Find (2005-02-11)

The Efficiency of Java and C++ (2005-02-10)

Macro-based Substitutions in Source Code (2005-02-07)

Maintainability of the FreeBSD System (2005-02-04)

Java: the New Straightjacket (2005-01-20)

The Tools at Hand (2005-01-01)

Who Maintains the GNU Plotutils? (2004-12-27)

Lack of Progress in Palm Applications (2004-12-13)

Measuring the Effect of Shared Objects (2004-12-11)

Code Reading Example: the Linux Kernel Load Calculation (2004-11-25)

Poster Presentations (2004-11-19)

Book Review: C++ Coding Standards (2004-11-14)

Accuracy and Precision in Scientific Publications (2004-10-27)

Involving Students With Open Source Projects (2004-10-24)

A Toddler Discovers Globalization (2004-10-16)

Apple's Presence in Greece Appears to be a Joke. (2004-10-06)

Cracker Code Review (2004-10-05)

A Survey of Language Popularity (2004-09-25)

System administration stories: The Revolt (2004-09-11)

Digital Data Makes Anything Possible (2004-09-01)

U.S. military sites offer a quarter million Microsoft Word documents (2004-08-31)

Continous Bookmarking (2004-08-25)

Detective Work and Dropped TCP Connections (2004-08-23)

The hypot() Mystery (2004-08-16)

Patching Framework III (2004-08-11)

Not All Open-source Systems Are Perfect (2004-07-20)

Google Mail and Privacy (2004-06-25)

Optimizing ppp and Code Quality (2004-05-15)

Computer Languages Form an Ecosystem (2004-04-18)

Technological Complexity (2004-04-10)

Binary File Similarity Checking (2004-03-19)

Putting the Jini Back into the Bottle (2004-02-18)

A Spam-resistant Email Network (2004-02-03)

How Not to Conduct a Poll (2004-01-21)

Writing, GUIs, and 4000 Years of Progress (2004-01-20)

Changes in Web Site Rankings (2004-01-11)

A Unix-based Logic Analyzer (2003-10-25)

Software Complexity: Open Source vs Microsoft (2003-10-03)

Well-behaved Web Applications (2003-09-26)

An Interesting Remote Control (2003-07-12)

Security researcher beguiled by email spoof (2003-06-28)

FreeBSD Committer (2003-06-21)

Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective (2003-05-20)

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