Software

I recently converted my system to KDE 4, because some software I wanted to run required it. I'm less than impressed: it seems the developers decided to break a bunch of things that were not broken, in the name of progress. That's the sort of thing I expect from commercial operations who need to justify every new version as new and different; I hope for more stability from free software. Here are some notes on making the new system livable.

People who care about such things are talking about an article by Tom DeMarco in IEEE Software entitled Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone? (PDF file). Well, that's what I said 13 years ago. At the time I was taking, and hating, a second-year university software engineering course; I'd just come off a co-op term working in the real world making actual software people would use, and I wasn't too thrilled to be told a pack of lies about how the ricidulous "methodologies" of software engineering were not only helpful, but absolutely necessary, when I'd just seen validation of my long experience as an amateur, writing software and learning what actually worked. I wrote the article below, and it stayed on my Web site for a long time, and then I eventually took it down because I was remodelling, it had never attracted the attention I'd hoped for, and I didn't want to continue maintaining it and a bunch of other old material. This January (2009) one of my friends who actually works in the industry - I did a few more co-op terms and then headed for the academic path instead - was telling me how he thought I should put the "bromides" article back up. He said other people were catching on to similar ideas, he'd even discussed it with some famous software engineering writer whose name I don't remember (could even have been Tom DeMarco, could have been anyone) who had agreed substantially with my friend's description of my ideas, and the only problem was I'd been ahead of the curve writing about it in 1996. So, maybe the time for this article has finally come.

When I run mplayer to view a video file, it does something to the X server so that if I subsequently run ogle to view a DVD, ogle appears to run normally except that the video appears as just a black window (or black screen in full-screen mode). This anticompetitive behaviour seems sub-optimal. Stopping and restarting the X server returns it to a state in which ogle can run, but that requires killing all the clients, and is not something I want to do regularly. Web searches for this problem found other people experiencing it, asking about it, and receiving such helpful advice as this gem from a Gentoo mailing list:

Here's a template (ZIP format) created by stripping most of the content out of my PhD thesis source code to leave just the formatting. If you're using LaTeX to typeset a thesis for the University of Waterloo, especially in computer science, you might find this helpful. No warranties, but as far as I know it meets the current GSO formatting requirements. My thesis made with it passed their review on the first try. It's also supposed to look good, to the extent possible within the requirements. I got some favourable comments from my committee members on the formatting of my thesis, so I think I was at least sort of successful on that score. It comes with documentation on how to use it. You will need at least an intermediate level of LaTeX knowledge, because it uses a bunch of external packages for fonts and so on. I'm releasing it to public domain.