Tag, Log, Debug!

I was presenting with my friend Alex Romanov our work on "Automated Log Generation and Analysis using Collaborative Tagging" at the IBM Programming Languages and Environments seminar 2008, yesterday (25/6).


This is Alex with the poster describing our work:






More info on this work can be found here: http://ed.finnerty.googlepages.com/taglogdebug.
Here you can find the initial paper.
And finally, a blog that will follow our work was opened here: http://taglogdebug.blogspot.com

Eclipse Plugins Tutorial (OOPSLA '07)

I was asked where can people get the materials from the tutorial on "Creating Plug-ins and Applications on Eclipse Platform" that Alex Romanov and I gave in Montreal on OOPSLA '07. It was while ago, and the materials are on the web already. But here are the links, as it seems google is not doing a good job referring people to the googlegroups site we created...

The tutorial deals with all the important things for getting started with Eclipse plug-ins: creating a plug-in project, the components of a plug-in project, GEF, MVC in the Eclipse Plug-in architecture, SWT, Actions, RCP and more.

So here is the companion booklet.
And here are the slides.
Both can be printed or redistributed, as is, for any purpose, referring back to the source.

Hope you can find it useful.

False Requirements

Suppose you are assigned to design a system that should carry out people from place to place, and occasionally let's say once in ten years, would have to travel a giraffe. It's tricky, but you may be able to come out with some strange car with a very high ceiling, working out the balance and stabilization. It may not be so economic, but who is going to be piker when it comes to carrying giraffes. (One can of course suggest a car without a ceiling at all, which might be a good solution, but one of the other requirements rejects a convertible.)

It turns out that we are often bending and twisting simple systems just to carry the giraffe. And in many cases when digging into, we find out the giraffe was not even in the formal requirements to begin with! It grew in somewhere, in one's imagination, and became an important part of the system. Oh, how much we could have saved without this giraffe, and the system could have been much simpler...

Let the giraffe travel on its own!

If it was in the original requirements, go back to the system analyst or the guy who wrote the requirements and ask him: do you really need this giraffe thing? maybe we can send him with another vehicle?

Giraffes are nice, but don't let them into your system.
Unless you want to run a zoo.