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Visual Lint 6.5.4.298 has been released

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

This is a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 6.5. The following changes are included:

  • If a "Lint" folder without the hidden attribute exists in a solution/workspace folder Visual Lint will no longer attempt to use it to store analysis results and will create a new ".visuallint" folder instead. This prevents Visual Lint from assuming that a user-created "Lint" folder is one which was created by an earlier (pre-v5.0) version of Visual Lint.
  • Fixed a crash which could occur when files were saved in the Eclipse plug-in. The crash seemed to particularly affect plug-in installations running within Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio and configured for per-project analysis with the "Re-analyse saved files using the preferred method" option set.
  • The project variables $(CEVER), $(ARCHFAM) and $(_ARCHFAM_) are now automatically defined when analysing Visual Studio 2008 projects for the NetDCU9 (ARMV4I) platform.
  • Corrected the "Supported development environments" help topic to reflect the fact that Atmel AVR Studio 5 and Atmel Studio 6.x/7.x are now supported via a dedicated plug-in.
  • Updated the PC-lint Plus message database to reflect changes in PC-lint Plus 1.2. Note that the definitions for Clang errors 5905, 5916 and 5922 have been omitted as the PC-lint Plus -dump_messages directive does not reveal either their titles or descriptions.

Download Visual Lint 6.5.4.298

Posted on

Visual Lint 6.5.4.298 has been released

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

This is a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 6.5. The following changes are included:
  • If a "Lint" folder without the hidden attribute exists in a solution/workspace folder Visual Lint will no longer attempt to use it to store analysis results and will create a new ".visuallint" folder instead. This prevents Visual Lint from assuming that a user-created "Lint" folder is one which was created by an earlier (pre-v5.0) version of Visual Lint.
  • Fixed a crash which could occur when files were saved in the Eclipse plug-in. The crash seemed to particularly affect plug-in installations running within Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio and configured for per-project analysis with the "Re-analyse saved files using the preferred method" option set.
  • The project variables $(CEVER), $(ARCHFAM) and $(_ARCHFAM_) are now automatically defined when analysing Visual Studio 2008 projects for the NetDCU9 (ARMV4I) platform.
  • Corrected the "Supported development environments" help topic to reflect the fact that Atmel AVR Studio 5 and Atmel Studio 6.x/7.x are now supported via a dedicated plug-in.
  • Updated the PC-lint Plus message database to reflect changes in PC-lint Plus 1.2. Note that the definitions for Clang errors 5905, 5916 and 5922 have been omitted as the PC-lint Plus -dump_messages directive does not reveal either their titles or descriptions.
Download Visual Lint 6.5.4.298
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Business school research in software engineering is some of the best

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

There is a group of software engineering researchers that don’t feature as often as I would like in my evidence-based software engineering book; academics working in business schools.

Business school academics have written some of the best papers I have read on software engineering; the catch is that the data they use is confidential. For somebody writing a book that only discusses a topic if there is data publicly available, this is a problem.

These business school researchers show that it is possible for academics to obtain ‘interesting’ software engineering data from industry. My experience with talking to researchers in computing departments is that most are too involved in their own algorithmic bubble to want to talk to anybody else.

One big difference between the data analysis papers written by academics in computing departments and business schools, is statistical sophistication. Computing papers are still using stone-age pre-computer age techniques, the business papers use a wide range of sophisticated techniques (sometimes cutting edge).

There is one aspect of software engineering papers written by business school researchers that grates with me, many of the authors obviously don’t understand software engineering from a developer’s perspective; well, obviously, they are business oriented people.

The person who has done the largest amount of interesting software engineering research, whose work I don’t (yet; I will find a way) discuss, is Chris Kemerer; a researcher who has a long list of empirical papers going back to the early 1990s, and rarely gets cited by papers by people in computing departments (I am the only person I know, who limits themself to papers where the data is publicly available).

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CppQuiz.org now uses C++17

Anders Schau Knatten from C++ on a Friday

CppQuiz.org is an open source C++ quiz site ran by me, with contributions from the C++ community. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you can read more in its “About” section.

Thanks to great help from Nicolas Lesser and Simon Brand, all the questions and explanations on CppQuiz.org have now been updated from C++11 to C++17. This task would have taken me a very long time to do on my own, but thanks to Nicolas and Simon, this was all done in no more than four days!

If you want to test your knowledge of C++, try out the quiz now!

If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to my blog, or follow me on Twitter.

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#NoProjects: Project Myopia is published

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

ProjectMyopiaNew-2018-09-10-11-17.jpg

Project Myopia – the original case for #NoProjects – has been a long time in the works but it is now done. Published. For sale on Amazon.

Projects fail. Some say 40% of all IT projects fail, some say 70%. And it has been that way for years. Each project fails for its own reasons but they all share one thing in common: the Project Model. Could it be the project model itself which creates failure?

Projects end. Successful software continues. Twenty-first century digital businesses want to continue and grow.

Project Myopia is available to buy on Amazon today – the physical version should joined the eBook in a few days.

Project Myopia gives the case against projects – the hard core #NoProjects arguments. A second book, Continuous Digital will join Project Myopia in a few weeks on Amazon. Right now copyediting isn’t finished on Continuous Digital, plus the physical copy needs to be worked out. In the meantime late drafts of Continuous Digital are available on LeanPub.

The post #NoProjects: Project Myopia is published appeared first on Allan Kelly Associates.

Posted on

#NoProjects: Project Myopia is published

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

ProjectMyopiaNew-2018-09-10-11-17-1.jpg

Project Myopia – the original case for #NoProjects – has been a long time in the works but it is now done. Published. For sale on Amazon.

Projects fail. Some say 40% of all IT projects fail, some say 70%. And it has been that way for years. Each project fails for its own reasons but they all share one thing in common: the Project Model. Could it be the project model itself which creates failure?

Projects end. Successful software continues. Twenty-first century digital businesses want to continue and grow.

Project Myopia is available to buy on Amazon today – the physical version should joined the eBook in a few days.

Project Myopia gives the case against projects – the hard core #NoProjects arguments. A second book, Continuous Digital will join Project Myopia in a few weeks on Amazon. Right now copyediting isn’t finished on Continuous Digital, plus the physical copy needs to be worked out. In the meantime late drafts of Continuous Digital are available on LeanPub.

The post #NoProjects: Project Myopia is published appeared first on Allan Kelly Associates.

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Reidolized

Paul Grenyer from Paul Grenyer

So Blackie Lawless decided to re-record my favorite album of all time and my initial thoughts are why did he bother. I’ve avoided buying it for months until last Friday when I was trying out some new headphones with the re-recorded guitar solo from The Idol and quite enjoyed the new layers and mix of the new version of the song. Although I’m not a musician, it feels like I know every note and I could really hear the difference. It’s not the original guitarist, and consequently the solo wasn’t the same or as good.


Having now listened to the first disk of the re-record I can only say there is one improvement, the extra songs, at least one of which was taken from WASP’s latest studio album and is magnificent. The removing of the swearing in the songs and intros feels wrong and a cop out and the lead guitar work just isn’t up to Bruce Kulik’s incredible standard.

The second disk is starting now….
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Cuboid Space Division – a.k.

a.k. from thus spake a.k.

Over the last few months we have been taking a look at algorithms for interpolating over a set of points (xi,yi) in order to approximate values of y between the nodes xi. We began with linear interpolation which connects the points with straight lines and is perhaps the simplest interpolation algorithm. Then we moved on to cubic spline interpolation which yields a smooth curve by specifying gradients at the nodes and fitting cubic polynomials between them that match both their values and their gradients. Next we saw how this could result in curves that change from increasing to decreasing, or vice versa, between the nodes and how we could fix this problem by adjusting those gradients.
I concluded by noting that, even with this improvement, the shape of a cubic spline interpolation is governed by choices that are not uniquely determined by the points themselves and that linear interpolation is consequently a more mathematically appropriate scheme, which is why I chose to generalise it to other arithmetic types for y, like complex numbers or matrices, but not to similarly generalise cubic spline interpolation.

The obvious next question is whether or not we can also generalise the nodes to other arithmetic types; in particular to vectors so that we can interpolate between nodes in more than one dimension.
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Help save CppQuiz.org! We’re porting to C++17.

Anders Schau Knatten from C++ on a Friday

[start helping now]

CppQuiz.org is an open source C++ quiz site ran by me, with contributions from the C++ community. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you can read more in its “About” section

All the CppQuiz questions are currently targetting C++11. We need to update them for C++17. Most questions will still have the same answers, we just need to update the explanations and references to the standard. A few questions will also have different answers.

Doing this all by myself is going to take months, so I would very much appreciate some help from the community. Everyone who helps will be credited in a blog post when the porting is done.

To make porting as simple as possible, I’ve created a repository containing all the questions. There is a directory for each question, named after the question number. That directory contains the source code of the question in a .cpp file, the hint and explanation in .md files, as well as a README.md explaining everything you need to do to port the question. There’s also an issue for each question, making it easier to track progress. The issue has the same information as the README.md file.

As soon as we’ve updated all the questions in this repository, I’ll import them back into CppQuiz, and from then on CppQuiz will always ask about C++17.

How to help porting questions

There are two ways to contribute, listed below. I prefer the first alternative, but if that prevents you from contributing, the second is also ok.

Contributing using a fork and pull requests

  1. Fork the repo by clicking the “Fork” button at the top right.
  2. Pick the issue for a question you want to port. Add a comment that you’ll be handling that issue.
  3. Follow the instructions in the issue to port the question.
  4. Make a pull request. Porting several questions in one PR is fine.

Contributing without a fork

If you think forking and PRs is too cumbersome, or you are not able to do this for other reasons, I’d still appreciate your help:

  1. Pick the issue for a question you want to port. Add a comment that you’ll be handling that issue.
  2. Follow the instructions in the issue to port the question.
  3. Paste the updated files as comments to the issue.

Other ways to help

  • Look for questions labeled “help wanted”. It means the person responsible needs a second pair of eyes.
  • Look at pull requests, review them and comment “LGTM” if they should be merged.
  • Other ideas for help are also welcome, please get in touch (see “Questions” below).

Questions

If you have any questions, either file an issue in the repo, contact @knatten on Twitter, or email me at anders@knatten.org.

[start helping now]

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Bulk adding items to Wunderlist using wunderline on Ubuntu MATE

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

If you use Wunderlist and want to be able to bulk-add tasks from a text file, first install and set up wunderline.

Now, to be able to right-click a text file containing one task per line on Ubuntu MATE, create a file called “wunderlist-bulk-add” in ~/.config/caja/scripts/ and make it executable. Paste the code below into that file.

(Note: it’s possible that this would work in GNOME if you replaced “caja” with “nautius” in that path – let me know in the comments.)

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -e
set -u
set -o pipefail

function nonblank()
{
    grep -v -e '^[[:space:]]*$' "$@"
}

for F in "$@"; do
{
    COUNT=$(nonblank "$F" | wc -l | awk '{print $1}')
    if [ "$COUNT" = "" ]; then
    {
        zenity --info --no-wrap --text="File $F does not exist"
    }
    else
    {
        set +e
        zenity --question --no-wrap \
            --text="Add $COUNT items from $F to Wunderlist?"
        ANSWER=$?
        set -e

        if [ "$ANSWER" = "0" ]; then
        {
            set +e
            nonblank "$F" | \
                wunderline add --stdin | \
                zenity --progress --text "Adding $COUNT items to Wunderlist"
            SUCCEEDED=$?
            set -e
            if [ "$SUCCEEDED" = "0" ]; then
            {
                zenity --info --no-wrap --text "Added $COUNT items."
            }
            else
            {
                zenity --error --no-wrap \
                    --text "Failed to add some or all of these items."
            }; fi
        }; fi
    }; fi
}; done