As an ArgoUML contributor I'm going to blog my activities here, so that they may draw interest by other developers or help other developers when doing tasks similar to what I've done. AND(!) the grand vision that makes an Argonaut what he is, TO THRIVE IN THE BIG DANGEROUS WORLD, TAKING THE Argo TO A GOOD SHORE ;-))

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Improve Emacs HTML mode by adding an automatic translator between accented chars and their HTML / Unicode entities

I would like to improve Emacs HTML mode so that when I enter an accented character it would replace it with the corresponding HTML Unicode entity. I don't know if this would have to be some kind of hook which captures the entrance of specific characters or if I could implement if as a gigantic search and replace operation. The later option isn't so attractive because it gets into the flow of writing. But the former would also...

Currently Emacs HTML mode provides the sgml-name-char (C-c C-n) command that almost enables the same thing, but, it gets a bit in the way of my flow of thought. (Actually, writing directly in HTML also gets in my thought process anyway... Maybe I should write first and then edit. But I digress...)

So, how could this be implemented? A way would be a minor mode for HTML for automatic translation which mainly defines a minor mode key map that overrides the global and major mode keymaps for accented characters and invalid HTML characters. Is this an interesting idea?

How to implement an Emacs minor mode? A good example is flyspell-mode, which source is available just C-h f flyspell-mode and following the link to the source.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Idea for Git demo: show its power for sweeping changes in SISCOG-UTIL and CREWS

At SISCOG we are using Git as a development tool, but, not as the official version control system. I was challenged to make a demo / presentation on what would be the changes to the processes and working methods if SISCOG was going to use Git.

One idea I had recently was to show what Git could do if I need to change CREWS in a more automated and integrated way, so that I might have an easily mergeable branch of CREWS and SISCOG-UTIL, how would I proceed? Would Git solve the problems easily? How could I demonstrate this?

Showing off the power with defsystem to ASDF migration? How would that give them the thrill of power? Try, don't be shy to fail and earn time, quality and satisfaction.

Para convencer alguém eu tenho de mostrar o que é possível
e não como lá chegar!!!
Eu tenho de estar mais com as pessoas
e só assim as poderei motivar.

Idea: make the binary data library of PCL book parallel friendly

I'm still reading and learning from the Practical Common Lisp book by Peter Seibel [it is hard to believe that I started in 2007!]. When reading the chapter 24. Practical: Parsing Binary Files, which describes and provides a library for reading binary files, and upon reaching the variable:

(defvar *in-progress-objects* nil
  "TODO or FIXME, how to make this part of the code more parallel friendly?")

I stopped reading and started wondering about the TODO or FIXME I just wrote. The following is the resulting ideaware...

His it worth it or will the disk access eat the advantages?

Yes if there is parallel disk access, meaning in disk array architectures and for really big files. For small files the parallel access isn't worth it because the disk array will know how to do it in a parallel way.

Design

An additional option to a certain binary-class would mark that binary-class as one that would spoon a new process or thread for writing (NOTE to self write and read operations aren't symmetric from a performance point of view) or reading an instance of that binary-class.

Additional bindings of the dynamic variables would have to be created for the symbol that are to be called in parallel, i.e., a new thread based call would mean a new lexical environment is created in which the new binding exists.

It would be fun to port this library to Clojure / JVM languages. I think that this would be allowed because it isn't the original work that would be made available.

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