Athens, Greece
Professor of Software Engineering, programmer, and award-winning author
Areas of Expertise:
- software engineering
- software tools
- domain-specific languages
- programming languages
- Unix
- C
- C++
- Java
- Perl
- hardware interfacing
- consulting
- speaking
- programming
- training
- writing
Biography
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Blog
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Diomidis's blog posts are hosted at:http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/
Basic Etiquette of Technical Communication
October 21 2009
Parents spend years trying to teach their children to be polite, and some of us had to learn at school how to properly address an archbishop. Yet, it seems that advice on courteousness and politeness in technical communication is in short supply; most of us learn these skills through what… read moreTags for Bibliography References
October 15 2009
I love writing my papers in LaTeX. Its declarative style allows me to concentrate on the content, rather than the form. I even format the text according to the content, keeping each phrase or logical unit on a separate line. Many publishers supply style files that format the article according to the journal's specifications. Even better, over… read moreApplied Code Reading: Debugging FreeBSD Regex
September 16 2009
When the code we're trying to read is inscrutable, inserting print statements and running various test cases can be two invaluable tools. Earlier today I fixed a tricky problem in the FreeBSD regular expression library. The code , originally written by Henry Spencer in the early 1990s, is by far the most complex I've ever encountered. It… read moreSeptember 02 2009
My colleague, who works for a major equipment vendor, was discussing how his employer was planning to lay off hundreds of developers over the coming months. “But I’m safe,” he said, “as I’m one of the two people in our group who really understand the code.” It seems that writing… read moreAugust 28 2009
The strange entries I've found over the past two weeks I've been researching a large database are innumerable. Some addresses, like Wastington , DC are simply annoying, while others, like Vancouver BC V6T 1Z4 United States , are mildly amusing. It's clear to me that the database has been populated by the massive application of a… read moreAugust 27 2009
I always admired the pilots of the two PZL M18B "Dromader" fire-fighting airplanes that were stationed in Cephallonia's airport. read moreAugust 20 2009
All my friends know that for the past 15 years I've been semi-attached to an HP 100LX palmtop PC (recently updated to a 200LX) for my personal information management and many other tasks. The device is extremely versatile, sturdy, and flexible. Amazingly, after so many years of hard daily use, I still find new applications for… read moreApplied Code Reading: GNU Plotutils
August 11 2009
Robert, a UMLGraph user sent me an email describing a problem with the GNU plotutils SVG output on Firefox. I firmly believe that code reading is a lot easier than many think: one can easily fix most software problems without detailed knowledge of the underlying system. I therefore decided to practice what I preach. read moreHow to Create a Self-Referential Tweet
August 05 2009
Yesterday Mark Reid posted on Twitter a challenge : create a self-referential tweet (one that links to itself). He later clarified that the tweet should contain in its text its own identifier (the number after " /status/" bit should be its own URL). I decided to take up the challenge ("in order to learn a bit… read moreJuly 22 2009
Earlier today I finished reading the Programming in Scala book. My review of the book should appear soon in the reviews.com site and the ACM Computing Reviews . Here I outline briefly my view of the Scala language . read moreJuly 13 2009
Numerous MP3 players around my house pull music from a central file server. The hardware I'm using is extremely diverse and many devices can nowadays be politely described as junk: they include 100MHz Pentiums with 16MB RAM, and an ARM-based prototype lacking support for floating point operations. For the sake of simplicity I've standardized the… read moreReal-Time Google Earth GPS Tracking
July 01 2009
In a recent trip I incorrectly assumed that real-time tracking of Google Earth's pre-cached maps with a GPS receiver would be sufficient help for navigating around the highways in Los Angeles. I therefore experimented with the way Google Earth's sparsely-documented real time tracking works, and wrote a small program to interface Google Earth with a… read moreGreek Numerals in OpenOffice.org
June 25 2009
OpenOffice.org doesn't support Greek numerals, and this is a problem for its Greek localization, because such numerals are often used for section and list numbering. As an exercise in large scale code reading and in the writing of code I'm supposed to teach to undergraduate students, I decided to contribute an implementation to OpenOffice.org. read moreImpact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2008
June 24 2009
The ISI Web of Knowledge recently published the 2008 Journal Citation Reports . Following similar studies I performed in 2007 and 2008 , here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the impact factor in computer science journals. read moreSoftware Architecture Challenges in the 21st Century
June 09 2009
A wonderful workshop, titled Software Architecture Challenges in the 21st Century , took place at the University of Southern California on June 8th. The workshop was co-sponsored by IEEE Software, USC's Center for Systems and Software Engineering, and UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research (ISR). Here is my personal summary of the talks; the presentation… read moreRecent Posts | All Posts
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