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2008.05.30

Denise Rousseau on Publishing to Top Tier Journals

Yesterday I heard a talk by Denise M. Rousseau, President of the Academy of Management and the 1998-2007 Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior. During the talk (which turned out to be an interesting Q&A discussion) I wrote down some of the tips she gave. Here they are.

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Last modified: Friday, May 30, 2008 10:25 am

2008.05.24

Interoperability, at Last

Language is a very powerful way to describe behavior. Therefore even when I create pictures, instead of dragging around my mouse, I use declarative tools like GraphViz, gnuplot, and UMLGraph. These allow me to describe what I want to draw, instead of how I want the end-result to look like. The truth however is that the end-results are not always perfect. Today I realized that the state of the art has advanced to the point where I can create the drawing declaratively, and then visually polish the final drawing.

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Last modified: Saturday, May 24, 2008 9:48 pm

2008.05.17

A Visit at BMW's Leipzig Factory

Yesterday I had a chance to tour the BMW Leipzig factory. It was a unique experience, in which I witnessed the sophistication of modern production methods, and the most well-organized complex human undertaking I have seen first hand. The factory literally runs like a clockwork, eerily bringing to my mind the descriptions of Mars's factories in Bogdanov's science fiction novel Red Star.

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Last modified: Saturday, May 17, 2008 3:20 am

2008.05.16

Open and Closed Source Kernels Go Head to Head

Earlier today I presented at the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering a research paper comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows (its research kernel distribution), OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. For the comparison I parsed multiple configurations of these systems (more than ten million lines), and stored the results in four databases, where I could run SQL queries on them. This amounted to 8GB of data, 160 million records. (I’ve made the databases and the SQL queries available online.) The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization. To my surprise there was no clear winner or looser, but there were interesting differences in specific areas.

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Last modified: Friday, May 16, 2008 1:44 am

2008.05.02

Software Builders

The tools and processes we use to transform our system’s source code into an application we can deploy or ship were always important, but nowadays they can mean the difference between success and failure. The reasons are simple: larger code bodies, teams that are bigger, more fluid, and wider distributed, richer interactions with other code, and sophisticated tool chains. All these mean that a slapdash software build process will be an endless drain on productivity and an embarrassing source of bugs, while a high-quality one will give us developers more time and traction to build better software.

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Last modified: Tuesday, May 6, 2008 12:04 am

Creative Commons License Last update: Thursday, September 22, 2016 9:56 am
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material on this page created by Diomidis Spinellis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Greece License.