July 15, 2014

Ode to IBM Rational Rhapsody

Ode to Rhapsody

to the tune of “Comme d’habitude” / “My Way”

And now, the end is here
And so I face, the final codegen
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I state my Use Case, I’ll draw a Lifeline
I’ve declared a class that’s pure
I created each and every dependency
And more, much more than this, I did it in Rhapsody

May 26, 2014

Software Metrics and Craftsmanship

Software Development Metrics are a notoriously difficult area, there exists a large allure of quantitative measurements that can be condensed into a top-level dashboard showing progress, plan alignment, effort , costs and so on. However, the unfortunate reality is that the collection and analysis of Software Development Metrics is difficult for a number of factors such as complexity, variance, meaning and gaming of the system. Often it is a difficult case of understanding if we are more interested in the performance of the project (Health) or the performance of the developer (Efficacy).

May 19, 2014

UI Navigation - Android

Up vs. Back or in other terms hierarchy vs. chronology is one of the User Experience aspects touched upon in my post UML: Modelling User Interfaces Part 1 – Hierarchy and Navigation. The Android methodology for UI navigation has received some attention over the years and the largest change to date was brought in with the introduction of the Action Bar as part of Android 3.0+.

May 11, 2014

UML: Aside - Completeness vs Clarity and other CvCs

One of the recurring issues I have experienced with UML, or more generally Model Driven Design is the continual struggle between definition and interpretation. One of the tenants of UML is to abstract upwards towards a level that avoids implementation specifics. However, this introduces the potential for a need of a “Leap of Faith”, something that was discussed my post UML: Modelling User Interfaces Part 1.

May 5, 2014

Android Resource and the Eclipse switch Quick Fix

In the process of updating and refactoring an old Android project I unwittingly changed a Project configuration option (the “Is Library” option) that lead to my resource file being generated differently. E.g

Before

[java] public final class R { public static final class id { public static final int button1=0x7f090001; public static final int button2=0x7f090002; public static final int button3=0x7f090003; } } [/java]

After

[java] public final class R { public static final class id { public static int button1=0x7f090001; public static int button2=0x7f090002; public static int button3=0x7f090003; } } [/java]

A subtle change indeed but one that caused the following compiler error for each line

case expressions must be constant expressions

April 28, 2014

C and C++ Preprocessor: warp, Clang and GCC

I belatedly came across the news regarding warp, a C and C++ preprocessor written by Walter Bright in a joint project with Facebook. This has been released under the Boost license and is available at https://github.com/facebook/warp.

The Facebook blog makes the following statement with regards to improved efficiency over the GCC preprocessor

Replacing gcc’s preprocessor with warp has led to significant improvements of our end-to-end build times (including linking). Depending on a variety of circumstances, we measured debug build speed improvements ranging from 10% all the way to 40%, all in complex projects with massive codebases and many dependencies

April 22, 2014

UML: Modelling User Interfaces Part 1 - Hierarchy and Navigation

This is the first post in a series that looks at the modelling of User Interface (UI) related software using UML.

The main purpose of the post is to explore how we effectively model the navigation of a tree-like hierarchy, especially when considering the premise “In a tree structure there is one and only one path from any point to any other point”.

The tl;dr is that UML does not necessarily have the ability to represent UI concepts of hierarchy and navigation effectively.

Antimatter Poster

During university I produced a poster on the topic of Antimatter as part of a Communicating Science module.

I put this up on the web in 2007 and years on, I am seeing traffic to the site driven by a link contained in a Rutgers assignment concerning Information Design. Unfortunately, across the years the poster image had become unavailable…. until now. While the poster was discoverable via a Google search (finding it hosted without permission on other sites, another story) in order to help out those eager students I will host it here permanently.