Thursday, April 29, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Street Art: Great Crevase Edgar Mueller
Together with up to 5 assistants, Mueller painted all day long from sunrise to sunset. The picture appeared on the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire , Ireland , as part of the town's Festival of World Cultures
He spent 5 days, working 12 hours a day, to create the 250 square metre image of the crevasse, Which, viewed from the correct angle, appears to be 3D. He then persuaded passers-by to complete the illusion by pretending the gaping hole was real.
'I wanted to play with positives and negatives to encourage people to think twice about everything They see,' he said. 'It was a very scary scene, but when people saw it they had great fun playing on It and pretending to fall into the earth. 'I like to think that later, when they returned home, they might reflect more on what a frightening scenario it was and say, "Wow, that was actually pretty scary"..'
Mueller, who has previously painted a giant waterfall in Canada , said he was inspired by the British 'Pavement Picasso' Julian Beever, whose dramatic but more gentle 3D street images have featured in the Daily Mail.
He spent 5 days, working 12 hours a day, to create the 250 square metre image of the crevasse, Which, viewed from the correct angle, appears to be 3D. He then persuaded passers-by to complete the illusion by pretending the gaping hole was real.
'I wanted to play with positives and negatives to encourage people to think twice about everything They see,' he said. 'It was a very scary scene, but when people saw it they had great fun playing on It and pretending to fall into the earth. 'I like to think that later, when they returned home, they might reflect more on what a frightening scenario it was and say, "Wow, that was actually pretty scary"..'
Mueller, who has previously painted a giant waterfall in Canada , said he was inspired by the British 'Pavement Picasso' Julian Beever, whose dramatic but more gentle 3D street images have featured in the Daily Mail.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Codeless AJAX
Take a look at Alpha Five v10, a tool for building data centric Web applications evaluated @ http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Alpha-Five-v10-Boasts-Codeless-AJAX-876475/
PowerPivot
Microsoft’s PowerPivot add-in for its Excel 2010 enables users to work with much larger sets of data - say 3 million records.
Another reason to go to Office 2010.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/PowerPivot-Raises-the-Bar-on-Row-Limitations-441592/
Another reason to go to Office 2010.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/PowerPivot-Raises-the-Bar-on-Row-Limitations-441592/
Friday, April 9, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Software Repair & Maintenance
Repair (de-bugging) and maintenance work in software field has nothing to do with mass-production or software factories. The schedule and the cost of these activities are not programmable in advance. And a great infrastructure of documentation, control, and surveillance is needed , as well as tacit knowledge of the system and its context.
One can learn a lot about de-bugging and maintenance of software by studying how the Swiss fix their potholes; see "Fixing Swiss Potholes" @
http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2001/2001-025.pdf
One can learn a lot about de-bugging and maintenance of software by studying how the Swiss fix their potholes; see "Fixing Swiss Potholes" @
http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2001/2001-025.pdf
Managing Employee Communications
At the end of an article titled "Managing employee communications" by Mathew D. Sarrel in the March 15 issue of eWeek, we read:
"Employee communications can be stored and analyzed forever. On the bright side, this isn't just for information security. Understanding how employees interact with each other—and with customers—over social networks can provide valuable insight to marketing teams."
I find this morally repulsive as it facilitates the destruction of social trust and consequently, human liberty. The wide deployment of such devices injects fear in all levels of society. In the United States, where much of social, commercial, and governmental transactions are trust-based, these devices will have a corrosive effect.
I think it was in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" that Milan Kundera related how the Communist Government of Czechoslovakia, used eavesdropping on the private conversations of dissidents to discredit them by broadcasting those recorded conversation on the state radio.
Free (of retaliation or consequence) exchanges of ideas and opinions, as well as subjects of more personal nature, will consequently be severely harmed by the users of social computing systems (IM, eMail, etc.) due to the injection of the fear of exposure, intimidation, or blackmail. In more oppressive states, these types of devices will serve to enhance the power and the reach of repressive state organs.
These devices, being promoted and sold under the guise of enhancing security, are a threat to human Freedom & Liberty. Their security model is that of a Police State and not that of free individuals engaged in free and unencumbered exchanges with one another.
"Employee communications can be stored and analyzed forever. On the bright side, this isn't just for information security. Understanding how employees interact with each other—and with customers—over social networks can provide valuable insight to marketing teams."
I find this morally repulsive as it facilitates the destruction of social trust and consequently, human liberty. The wide deployment of such devices injects fear in all levels of society. In the United States, where much of social, commercial, and governmental transactions are trust-based, these devices will have a corrosive effect.
I think it was in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" that Milan Kundera related how the Communist Government of Czechoslovakia, used eavesdropping on the private conversations of dissidents to discredit them by broadcasting those recorded conversation on the state radio.
Free (of retaliation or consequence) exchanges of ideas and opinions, as well as subjects of more personal nature, will consequently be severely harmed by the users of social computing systems (IM, eMail, etc.) due to the injection of the fear of exposure, intimidation, or blackmail. In more oppressive states, these types of devices will serve to enhance the power and the reach of repressive state organs.
These devices, being promoted and sold under the guise of enhancing security, are a threat to human Freedom & Liberty. Their security model is that of a Police State and not that of free individuals engaged in free and unencumbered exchanges with one another.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Fun With VMware V. 7 Workstation
VMware V. 7 of Workstation supports multiple processors with multiple cores and it can handle the Aero interface. It works on both hosted on and running 64-bit operating systems. It supports the various forms of USB 2.0 devices.
There is the ability to record an activity and rerun it, stepping into and back out of bugs; and the Workstation also has the ability to interact directly with a VM from within leading IDEs.
A tester can duplicate an unexpected event and run the software in the VM and turn on recording. He may capture the recording in a file and log the bug in the defect tracker with a URL pointing to the saved file as the recording files are very large—they capture the entire VM, and so can reach multiple gigabytes.
The developer may replay the saved file and watch the defect appear again. Rewinding the recording enables the defect to be replayed as many times as necessary. Workstation also enables flags to be set at any point so that various events can be highlighted in the replay.
The natural extension to the concept of playback is that of saving an entire VM as a static snapshot. At any point, you can throw out the modified VM and return to the previous (snapshot) version
It will also be useful for performing software reviews; install the software to be reviewed within the VM and let the VM’s registry get corrupted. When you’re done, either save the VM to a DVD or throw it out, and use the original snapshot as the basis for new clean VMs.
Snapshots need not occur just once. VMware has a way of scheduling them to be captured at regular intervals so that you can easily return to a previous point in a lengthy process.
Similarly, one can install the entire software tools and testing data needed to develop or to sustain a system - Requirements, Modeling, IDE, Compiler, Testing, Database - on a reference VM and distribute that to the developers on the team. This will obviate the need for each developer to acquire, install, and configure all the tools and data that would be needed to develop or to sustain that system.
SpringSource tools are part of this release. They enable developers to automatically start Workstation, power on a virtual machine, revert to a specific snapshot, inject the SpringSource server, copy the project to the virtual machine, start the application, and attach a debugger”—all from within the IDE (Eclipse and Visual Studio).
VMware Workstation can run multiple VMs simultaneously. You can identify a group of VMs that are to boot together and be treated as a group.
Price is $189 per seat.
There is the ability to record an activity and rerun it, stepping into and back out of bugs; and the Workstation also has the ability to interact directly with a VM from within leading IDEs.
A tester can duplicate an unexpected event and run the software in the VM and turn on recording. He may capture the recording in a file and log the bug in the defect tracker with a URL pointing to the saved file as the recording files are very large—they capture the entire VM, and so can reach multiple gigabytes.
The developer may replay the saved file and watch the defect appear again. Rewinding the recording enables the defect to be replayed as many times as necessary. Workstation also enables flags to be set at any point so that various events can be highlighted in the replay.
The natural extension to the concept of playback is that of saving an entire VM as a static snapshot. At any point, you can throw out the modified VM and return to the previous (snapshot) version
It will also be useful for performing software reviews; install the software to be reviewed within the VM and let the VM’s registry get corrupted. When you’re done, either save the VM to a DVD or throw it out, and use the original snapshot as the basis for new clean VMs.
Snapshots need not occur just once. VMware has a way of scheduling them to be captured at regular intervals so that you can easily return to a previous point in a lengthy process.
Similarly, one can install the entire software tools and testing data needed to develop or to sustain a system - Requirements, Modeling, IDE, Compiler, Testing, Database - on a reference VM and distribute that to the developers on the team. This will obviate the need for each developer to acquire, install, and configure all the tools and data that would be needed to develop or to sustain that system.
SpringSource tools are part of this release. They enable developers to automatically start Workstation, power on a virtual machine, revert to a specific snapshot, inject the SpringSource server, copy the project to the virtual machine, start the application, and attach a debugger”—all from within the IDE (Eclipse and Visual Studio).
VMware Workstation can run multiple VMs simultaneously. You can identify a group of VMs that are to boot together and be treated as a group.
Price is $189 per seat.
Automated Function Point Analysis
I am pleased to learn that CATS Software has developed a semi-automated tool for function point analysis. See http://www.castsoftware.com/Product/Automated-Function-Points.aspx
However, we are still not where we ought to be, i.e. using UML or DFD as our starting point and then computing the function points from those artifacts automatically - once the system boundary has been established.
See http://www.ing.unife.it/docenti/FabrizioRiguzzi/Papers/LamMelRig-PAP98.pdf and http://www.ing.unife.it/docenti/FabrizioRiguzzi/Papers/GraLamMel-TR97.pdf which use DFD as their starting point and http://www.cs.unibo.it/~cianca/wwwpages/labspo/uemura.pdf which uses UML.
The first tool was a research project that was never turned into a product and the second one was a commercial sponsored research project the details of which could not be disclosed.
However, we are still not where we ought to be, i.e. using UML or DFD as our starting point and then computing the function points from those artifacts automatically - once the system boundary has been established.
See http://www.ing.unife.it/docenti/FabrizioRiguzzi/Papers/LamMelRig-PAP98.pdf and http://www.ing.unife.it/docenti/FabrizioRiguzzi/Papers/GraLamMel-TR97.pdf which use DFD as their starting point and http://www.cs.unibo.it/~cianca/wwwpages/labspo/uemura.pdf which uses UML.
The first tool was a research project that was never turned into a product and the second one was a commercial sponsored research project the details of which could not be disclosed.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
About Me
- Babak Makkinejad
- I had been a senior software developer working for HP and GM. I am interested in intelligent and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.