At the company I worked for until very recently we mostly used 'UML as a sketch' on the whiteboard as a way of turning our ideas into something concrete we could implement. Simply having a standardized set of whiteboard notations hugely improved the effectiveness of communication between team members.
We mostly used class and sequence diagrams, the latter being very effective for dealing with multithreaded code.
To a much lesser extent we used computer generated UML when reverse-engineering with tools like Together to understand older, pre-existing code.
We didn't get into formal use of UML for requirements and design in our small team.
We've been watching huge displays of the aurora from Central Scotland - just north of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Very impressive having not seen them before! We first saw them at around 1845 GMT and the display is still good intermittently at 2240 GMT. Huge beams from the zenith to the horizon if you can get away from local light pollution.
The save mechanism used by RISC OS in which is consisted pretty much of just an icon representing your document which could be dragged to either the Filer (i.e. file manager) or even directly into another running application has yet to be beaten, in terms of ease-of-use. The much-copied Windows Save As dialog box just doesn't cut it. Why should I have to tediously navigate to a directory in the save dialog box, when there is a representation of it already on my screen?
The ROX Desktop has gone someway to implementing this on X - rather than blindly re-implementing the Windows Way like so many other projects.
We use the PerlStream classes to integrate a Perl interpreter into our C++ applications - it was covered in the January 2002 C/C++ Users Journal - with great success.
Our ASCII file import parsers are written in Perl and the data read into Perl data-structures. The contents of these data structures can then be accessed directly from C++.
The code is on the web (it has some subtle C++ bugs needed fixes using the base-from-member inititialisation idiom) here
If you're using Windows, open Excel and move the active cell around using the arrow keys. Then toggle scroll-lock and scroll the window using the arrow keys.
Birmingham Aiport (BHX) in the UK West Midlands sported a commercial operating Maglev between the terminal and the main-line railway station for eleven years. It has recently been replaced. There's a relevant Scientific American article here.
In the UK books are exempt from VAT (Value Added Tax) at 17.5%. However, this does not apply if the book has a CD-ROM inside the back cover. So for anybook including a CD you're paying 17.5% over the odds.
Now that's unfair! How many people ever actually use the CD included anyway - as most code samples are usually available on the publishers web-site. Including the actual text of the book only on the CD is criminal!
...and Open Inventor has been available for Win32 platforms for years through TGS - and it integrates superbly with Visual C++ 6.0. From nothing to a working Inventor app in 30 minutes with this, that can open, save, print, etc...
IRIS Explorer and a whole load of other (particularly scientific) visualisation apps are based on Inventor. Also check out most stuff by TGS like 3SpaceAssistant, and Amari 3D. I coded a load of stuff using the Inventor API last year on Windows and it really is very good - not just for prototyping but for full blown applications.
Surely all those embarrassing goverment leaks over the past couple of weeks from TB and his buddies could have been easily avoided if their memos were sent using signed, encrypted e-mail. If only they used the technology they are trying to stop, they could prevent themselves a huge amount of embarrassment and adverse publicty!
There must be oodles of folks out there with high end graphics cards who never use the 3D facilities. Surely the logical progression of the 2-D desktop metaphor is something with a little more true depth. I'm not talking about a VRML office here - just something a little less flat. Definitely a good question for 'Ask Slashdot'.
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How does the human rate on performance/Watt compared to the machine? Isn't that what's important these days?
At the company I worked for until very recently we mostly used 'UML as a sketch' on the whiteboard as a way of turning our ideas into something concrete we could implement. Simply having a standardized set of whiteboard notations hugely improved the effectiveness of communication between team members.
We mostly used class and sequence diagrams, the latter being very effective for dealing with multithreaded code.
To a much lesser extent we used computer generated UML when reverse-engineering with tools like Together to understand older, pre-existing code.
We didn't get into formal use of UML for requirements and design in our small team.
We've been watching huge displays of the aurora from Central Scotland - just north of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Very impressive having not seen them before! We first saw them at around 1845 GMT and the display is still good intermittently at 2240 GMT. Huge beams from the zenith to the horizon if you can get away from local light pollution.
Open up Excel and change the current cell using the arrow keys. Now turn on Scroll-lock and change cell again.
The former changes cell without (unecessary) scrolling, the latter scrolls the window contents.
The ROX Desktop has gone someway to implementing this on X - rather than blindly re-implementing the Windows Way like so many other projects.
We use the PerlStream classes to integrate a Perl interpreter into our C++ applications - it was covered in the January 2002 C/C++ Users Journal - with great success.
Our ASCII file import parsers are written in Perl and the data read into Perl data-structures. The contents of these data structures can then be accessed directly from C++.
The code is on the web (it has some subtle C++ bugs needed fixes using the base-from-member inititialisation idiom) here
If you're using Windows, open Excel and move the active cell around using the arrow keys. Then toggle scroll-lock and scroll the window using the arrow keys.
Birmingham Aiport (BHX) in the UK West Midlands sported a commercial operating Maglev between the terminal and the main-line railway station for eleven years. It has recently been replaced. There's a relevant Scientific American article here.
In the UK books are exempt from VAT (Value Added Tax) at 17.5%. However, this does not apply if the book has a CD-ROM inside the back cover. So for anybook including a CD you're paying 17.5% over the odds. Now that's unfair! How many people ever actually use the CD included anyway - as most code samples are usually available on the publishers web-site. Including the actual text of the book only on the CD is criminal!
...and Open Inventor has been available for Win32 platforms for years through TGS - and it integrates superbly with Visual C++ 6.0. From nothing to a working Inventor app in 30 minutes with this, that can open, save, print, etc...
IRIS Explorer and a whole load of other (particularly scientific) visualisation apps are based on Inventor. Also check out most stuff by TGS like 3SpaceAssistant, and Amari 3D. I coded a load of stuff using the Inventor API last year on Windows and it really is very good - not just for prototyping but for full blown applications.
Surely all those embarrassing goverment leaks over the past couple of weeks from TB and his buddies could have been easily avoided if their memos were sent using signed, encrypted e-mail. If only they used the technology they are trying to stop, they could prevent themselves a huge amount of embarrassment and adverse publicty!
There must be oodles of folks out there with high end graphics cards who never use the 3D facilities. Surely the logical progression of the 2-D desktop metaphor is something with a little more true depth. I'm not talking about a VRML office here - just something a little less flat. Definitely a good question for 'Ask Slashdot'.