Tag search: "200907"

RSS feed for this tag:

Software engineering bromides revisited

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.

(27 July 2009)

Bonobo Conspiracy's Quick Guide to the LaTeX \linebreak command

Okay, one more time. (16 July 2009)

Japanese, Korean, KDE 3.5, Slackware Linux, and LaTeX

I recently started studying Japanese, and so I wanted my computer to work in Japanese too - if nothing else so I could use it to prepare study aids. I use a home-brewed configuration of Slackware Linux (effectively "Linux From Scratch," though I didn't actually follow that project's how-to documents) and I wanted the Japanese stuff to work nicely with the rest of my configuration, including the application software and tools I already use for Canadian English. And I wanted to typeset in Japanese with LaTeX. That meant it wasn't as simple as just choosing "Japanese" during installation of one of the more entry-level distributions. Here are some notes on what I had to do, which may be helpful for others in similar situations.

(5 July 2009)

Matthew Skala's home page

Home page of Matthew Skala: computer scientist, mathematician, intellectual freedom activist, and general creative person. (1 January 1997)