UML and Patterns

UML is an essential tool in SE today. I’m especially interested in finding ways of introducing MDE to students and for that UML and OCL are an essential requirement.

I’ve been reading “Applying UML and Patterns”, 2nd Ed by Larman and I really like it. The site offers good resources, especially in the “diagrams” section. You can download Visio sources of the UML diagrams used in the book which are really helpful in creating presentations for courses.

You can find them here.

Internal Evaluation Marks Published

Internal evaluation marks for all my subjects are now online. They will be updated to reflect the latest.

View internal evaluation details.

Course Notes on Different Subjects

I came across this homepage of Frank Pfenning — a CMU professor. He has lots of course handouts on different subjects including compilers, logic programming, automated theorem proving etc. Shaz, you might find the compiler notes helpful. The handouts have questions and exercises too.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses.html

Web Typography

An important but neglected aspect of designing for the web — and in many places, for print — is typography. It’s really important part of presentation. Here’s an presentation describing typography for web. It has audio/transcript of the talk in the conference too.
Web Typography Sucks | Slides and notes from SxSW 2007

Also, here’s a nice article giving brief tips on getting your type right.

5 Simple Steps to Better Typography

Robot Car Race

If you’re wondering what AI people are doing nowadays — and you might be doing just that if you’re trying to finish the final assignment I set for my AI course — you might find this link useful. Stanford guys seem to be doing really good on the DARPA race challenge. There’s also an interview with the designer by Robert Scoble.

DARPA Challenge invites Stanford Racing team to build a robotic car

BuzzWord and Adobe AIR Review

I just got signed up for Virtual Ubiquity’s “first real word processor for the web”. It’s called Buzzword and it’s lovely. I’ve just seen the first introductory document but many things have caught my eye.

For one, they have a nice collection of fonts. Much better than Verdana and Tahoma — the usual stuff you see on the web. They’ve even got Minion Pro. I’m not sure if you need the font installed on the system for it to work but even so, it’s great to see Minion Pro on a web-based word processor.

Secondly, the design is very good and unobtrusive. I especially like the way comments and table manipulation work in it. List handling is pretty good too.

Trouble is that without proper document structure such as header and footers, sections, page orientations, no word processor will even challenge MS-Word or any other desktop application. Besides, on my laptop (which is not that fast) it’s simply not possible to work effectively on a web-based app.

Which brings me to the second app I’ve tried. Adobe AIR. It “lets developers use their existing web development skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.” I just got a twitter client app for AIR but even that small an app caused my system to stop responding for a second or two. So, it’s not for me right now.

Something needs to be done for the speed of browsers. I’m not talking about the bandwidth. I’m talking about the rendering speed.