2010.08.28
UML, Everywhere
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.
Continue reading "UML, Everywhere"Last modified: Saturday, August 28, 2010 11:48 am
2010.08.24
Sane vim Editing of Unicode Files
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.
Continue reading "Sane vim Editing of Unicode Files"Last modified: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 1:24 am
2010.08.04
Batch Files as Shell Scripts Revisited
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.
Continue reading "Batch Files as Shell Scripts Revisited"Last modified: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 11:21 pm