Mike Papazoglou gave an interesting keynote talk at ENASE 2009 in Milan last week. I especially enjoyed this sentence:
Do you remember programming languages?
He said that in a longing, melancholic tone, as if he was reaching deep inside his memories of long gone conferences of yore when people actually discussed programming languages. It’s true. We don’t discuss programming languages nowadays. They seem to have been relegated to specialised conferences. Programming used to be most of what software was. Today, it’s just a small part. A very small one.
Exactly four years after version 1.0, OutlookConfig 1.1 is available now from my website.
OutlookConfig 1.1 helps you change Outlook’s SMTP server settings as you move your laptop from one place to another. If you use different Internet access providers to access the Internet from different locations (work, home, hotel, etc.), you may need to use different SMTP servers for each access provider. You may also probably have multiple e-mail accounts, and changing the SMTP server settings for each of them as you roam from site to site is extremely inconvenient. OutlookConfig helps you do that automatically.
Version 1.1 incorporates an SMTP Port setting that allows you to set the port for each configuration as well as the SMTP server name.
Some people have told me that this is wrong, and that I should not be doing this. I am not quite sure why though. It’s up to you to download and use my tool or not.
A couple of months ago I announced an opening for a PhD student at the Heritage Lab where I work. The deadline for applications is closing on 15th January, so I encourage you to have a look at the call ASAP if you’re planning to apply.
This is why I love my job. I get to do all this experimental stuff and I get paid for it!
Okay, let me explain.
We are undergoing some reorganisation at work. In case you still don’t know, I work at a research lab of over 40 people where I try to apply software engineering to cultural heritage. Most of my workmates, however, are archaeologists, historians, anthropologists or soil scientists. Anyway. A few weeks ago we decided that we should define a few key roles that people should be playing at the lab. How do you define a role? Mmmmm… Well, ISO/IEC 24744 says that a role is a collection of responsibilities that a producer can take, where a producer is, usually, an individual in an organisation. I like ISO/IEC 24744 because I believe it can be applied to much more than software development methodologies, and the definitions are quite good. The fact that I was a key contributor to it has nothing to do, of course.
I’ll be giving an invited talk at the Heritage and New Technologies mini-conference organised by the European Virtual Engineering Technology Centre (EUVE) in Vitoria, Spain, next Wednesday 12th November. My talk is titled “Information Technologies and Cultural Heritage: Learned Lessons”, and I’ll be describing the whys and hows of a few technologies that I and my team tried to apply to archaeology and heritage management in the past with various success rates; some were promising but didn’t work, and some did work albeit they lacked a solid foundation.
If you happen to be nearby Vitoria on the 12th, contact EUVE and drop by!
What do throat lozenges and OO modelling have in common?
In particular, what do Juanolas and whole/part relationships in class diagrams have in common? I guess you’ll understand if you follow the links, or if you are familiar with both Juanolas and OO modelling.
Let me give you some background.
I am participating in a project where a formal language for the description of heritage buildings is being developed. The project team is made of two archaeologists, an architect, and me as the software guy. They are the domain specialists; I am the techie. From the very beginning, I started using class diagrams to capture the information that my three colleagues would consider relevant, and they seemed to like them. They got themselves a copy of Visio and started producing their own class diagrams. I gave them a quick description of what specialisation, whole/part relationships and associations mean, and showed them how to use different symbols to depict them. No, I didn’t use UML symbols. UML is broken and invariable drives you to irresoluble quandaries, so I wouldn’t be so mean to expose my poor software-virgin humanities friends to mind-twisting UML. I used OPEN/Metis notation, as I have been doing for almost a decade now.
The outcomes of all this is that, after a few weeks, my team mates are actually class modelling now. Amazing. The only unorthodox bit is that they call whole/part diamonds “Juanolas” for evident reasons.
As I said a few days ago, I am seeking excellent candidates to do doctoral studies with me here at CSIC. We are offering a good grant/position package plus extra funding for travel and stays.
You can download the full text of the call in Spanish and English here.
If you are interested, please let me know by 30th November. Thanks!
I am trying to build up a team to do research on information technologies applied to cultural heritage. This is not an easy task, the major difficulty being, of course, finding the right people. At the moment I am looking for somebody who would like to to enroll as a PhD student in this area and also for a good software developer with experience with the Microsoft .NET platform.
