The UML stencil for Microsoft Visio supports symbols of the UML 2.0, specified in OMG UML Superstructure Specification, formal/05-07-04, as well previous UML versions 1.5, 1.4, 1.3 and 1.1. The stencil also contains several non-normative UML symbols, that are not specified in the standard, but used in some UML books and papers. These non-normative symbols are always last items on the right-click menu, below the menu item called “non-normative”.
Paolo pointed me to this nice post (in Italian) that aims at outlining some costs sustained for the war in Iraq and how these money could have been spent for something different. Personally I buy the cause and I translate an interesting quote below:
“It is a theoretical reasoning but if the 200 billions of dollars ‘trashed’ for this war were used to buy solar cells, we could have installed 40 gigawatt of solar energy, able to produce 1000 terawatt/hour of electrical energy: 2,5 times the energy derived from Iraq’s crude oil.”
Below the text in Italian:
“E’ un discorso teorico, ma se i 200 miliardi di dollari buttati nella guerra (a cui ha dato il suo contributo servile anche l’Italia di Berlusconi) fossero stati utilizzati per comperare dei pannelli fotovoltaici, si sarebbero potuti installare 40 gigawatt di energia solare, capaci di produrre 1000 terawatt-ora di energia elettrica, 2,5 volte l’energia proveniente dal petrolio iracheno. La cosa più sconvolgente è che per via dell’economia di scala, una tale quantità di pannelli sarebbe sufficiente a ridurre il prezzo del kilowatt- ora fotovoltaico da 20 a 8 cents, rendendolo competitivo col petrolio nella generazione di potenza su larga scala. Addirittura, se questi 200 milardi di dollari fossero stati utilizzati per installare fattorie eoliche offshore, si sarebbero potuti produrre circa 5000 terawatt-ora di energia elettrica, come dire il 5% del fabbisogno energetico italiano primario corrente, per 50 anni. Le emissioni di CO2 verrebbero ridotte così di circa 3700 milioni di tonnellate, una quantità sufficiente a mantenere l’intera Unione Europea entro i limiti di Kyoto (-8% sui 4245 MMT di CO2E del 1990) per i prossimi 10 anni. ”
Finally I managed to find a couple of minutes to post some of the pictures I took during our last week end in Vancouver and Victoria. The trip started awfully as we had to wait 2 hours in the car due the cue at the Canadian border (Davide was not very happy). Finally we managed to reach Vancouver. We lodged at University of British Columbia. All the student, in this period of the year, spend the whole afternoon doing picnic on the sea side :-). The weather was amazing. The next day we could meet some Italian friends that cooked for us “Gnocchi”: something incredible compared to the “junk” food to which we got used.
We had the chance to visit Vancouver, a truly beautiful city. Lots of skyscraper in Granville but no chaos at all. The air was really clean. On the way to the ferry we spotted Buckminster Fuller‘s dome (one of my little passions), a construction hosting a science museum. On the ferry heading Victoria we spotted some Otters swimming close to the boat.
Victoria was amazing. I could not believe to find so many interesting things to visit and British people all in one place! The Royal BC museum was wonderful as well as the seafood.
Hundhausen, C.D., & Brown, J.L. (In press). Designing, Visualizing, and Discussing Algorithms within a CS 1 Studio Experience: An Empirical Study. To appear in Computers & Education. [pdf]
—-
This paper presents an empirical comparison of art supplies and the ALVIS Live! algorithm visualization software within the context of a “studio experience”—a novel CS 1 pedagogical activity in which student pairs develop solutions to algorithm design problems, create accompanying visual reprsentations, and finally present their visual solutions to the class for feedback and discussion. The centerpiece of the article is a series of post-hoc content analyses of the presentation sessions. These analyses highlight not only the pedagogical benefits of visualization-mediated discussions, but also the pedagogical tradeoffs of art supplies and ALVIS Live! in this context.
The PyNSource python code scanner and UML modelling tool can generate UML text diagrams, which you can paste into your source code for documentation purposes. You can use an Text Art editor to arrange your text UML pictures into properly laid out diagrams and embed them in your doc strings inside your source code. Here is an example of a UML ascii doc string:
Provides the API for talking to the game, from the AI’s point of view.
Tags: art, ASCII, software visualization
TheBroth connects you with people around the world to interact in a massively multiplayer, real time global mosaic, made of 1000 colorful tiles. Tow aspects of it are interesting: the choice between a constructive and destructive behavior and the social rating of the behavior of the users.
Tags: art, collaboration tools, human computer interaction, interaction design, maps
I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.
Duke Ellington, jazz pianist, composer, and conductor (1899-1974)
Proc. COMPSAC97, 21st Int’l Computer Software and Applications Conference, August 1997, pp. 6-13. Preliminary version, “Toward Boxology: Preliminary Classification of Architectural Styles,” Proc. Second Int’l Software Architecture Workshop, October 1996. [pdf]
——
This paper list a taxonomy of graphical style used by computer scientists to describe their system architecture. The paper highlights different architectural styles: the set of design rules that identify the kinds of components and connectors that might be used to compose a system or a subsystem, together with global and local constraints on the way composition is done. What diffenrenciate the styles it is largerly the interaction among the components. The paper identifies how each style is best fitted to represent a particular architectural structure.
Katherine M. Everitt, Scott R. Klemmer, Robert Lee, James A. Landay. Two Worlds Apart: Bridging the Gap Between Physical and Virtual Media for Distributed Design Collaboration. CHI 2003: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: pp. 553–60. [pdf]
——
A tension exists between designers’ comfort with physical artifacts and the need for effective remote collaboration: physical objects live in one place. Previous research and technologies to support remote collaboration have focused on shared electronic media. Current technologies force distributed teams to choose between the physical tools they prefer and the electronic communication mechanisms available. We present Distributed Designers’ Outpost, a remote collaboration system based on The Designers’ Outpost. The system provides a shared workspace that employs physical Post-it notes as interaction primitives. We implement and evaluate two mechanisms for awareness: transient ink input for gestures and a blue shadow of the remote collaborator for presence. We informally evaluated this system with six professional designers. Designers were excited by the prospect of synchronous remote collaboration but found some coordination challenges with the interaction with shared artifacts.
The primary topic of the Fujaba Tool Suite project is to provide an easy to extend UML and Java development platform with the ability to add plug-ins. Fujaba Tool Suite combines UML class diagrams and UML behaviour diagrams to a powerful, easy to use, yet formal system design and specification language. Furthermore the Fujaba Tool Suite supports the generation of Java sourcecode out of the whole design which results in an executable prototype, ideally. Moreover the way back is provided, too (to some extend so far), so that Java sourcecode can be parsed and represented within UML.
Tags: reverse engineering, modeling tool, software visualization
