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An Update on UMLGraph

Today I released version 5.0 of UMLGraph. This release contains a couple of important changes: six new shapes (components, nodes, collaborations, use cases, notes, and active classes), a facility for adding notes, and the hosting and packaging under its own domain name umlgraph.org.

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Cover Letters for Publications in LaTeX

I admit it. Although I compose most of my journal publications in LaTeX, I use Microsoft Word for writing the cover letters. The university's letterhead is provided in Word, and setting up and compiling a LaTeX document for a single text page is not worth the trouble.

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On Paper

A box of crayons and a big sheet of paper provides a more expressive medium for kids than computerized paint programs.

— Clifford Stoll

This column came to life as I was trying to devise an algorithm for analyzing initializers for C arrays and structures. At the time I was using the CScout refactoring browser to look for possible differences between closed and open source code. I had already processed the Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows research kernel source codel and only the OpenSolaris kernel remained. Unlikethe other three code bases, Sun’s code didn’t appear to use any exotic compiler extensions, so CScout uncomplainingly devoured one file after the next. Then, after aspproximately six hours of processing and 80 percent along the way, it reported a syntax error.

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