Better now than later
2011/04/27
Two time management slogans that I like:
- “Sooner is better than later”
- “There are infinitely many ways to lose a day … but not even one way to get one back”
The former comes from “Time management for System Administrators“; the later from Tom DeMarco‘s “The Deadline“.
arfparse is a utility used to parse mailbox archives and extract ARF information, as described in RFC 5965 “An Extensible Format for Email Feedback Reports“.
It is meant to work as a preliminary processor, therefore output of the program is kept as simple as possible. Example usage:
$ arfparse -m ~/mail/aol.net
This will extract ARF information sent from scomp@aol.net assuming the FBL reports are archived in ~/mail/aol.net
arfparse is developed on OpenBSD with Panda-IMAP and should work with UW-IMAP too. It is the product of structured procrastination.
You can grab arfparse via subversion:
svn checkout https://rainbow.cs.unipi.gr/svn/arfparse
Feel free to send me flames, suggestions and improvements.
PS: Yes, I would post about arfparse in the comments section here, but comments seem to be locked for now.
(χωρίς τίτλο)
2011/04/18
Kostis Palamas, 2011-04-18
Dimitris sent me “The Deadline” as a gift for my birthday. Written by Tom DeMarco (author of “Peopleware“) it is a novel that aims to introduce the reader to the complicate and cruel world of software project management. It also explains why most software projects fail. Clearly. In a buy-this-book-for-your-manager-to-open-his-eyes way. Team formation, design, quality control, unrealistic deadlines, goals and schedules, it is all in there. So if you need psychological support when a project goes bad, you should read the book. It is a good bus read.
It is also a book that opens doors to new worlds. Thanks to the book I learned about the adventures of Mr. Tompkins by George Gamow in which he aims to explain modern scientific theories to a popular audience. I see my stack of unread books getting higher again. I also learned about iThink which seems pretty cool (but then again I find Systems Thinking interesting enough). Pity though that iThink costs as much as it does (should I write my half-baked hack of systems thinking software? Damn! When I cannot buy, I try to write code instead and thus pay in time).
What would I change in the book? I would completely discard the very last chapter. Totally unnecessary. But no harm done, since the story is only the vehicle for the project management message and the message does get through. I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with managers like Mr. Tompkins; for this I want to end this post with the very first notes in Mr. Tompkins’s journal:
Four essentials of Good Management:
- Get the right people
- Match them to the right jobs
- Keep them motivated
- Help their teams to jell and stay jelled
(All the rest is Administrivia)
Amen to that!
Cool thing I learned from twitter today:
For files larger than diff(1) can handle there exists diffh.c from Bell Labs (and has been around since the PDP-11 days). But even diffh is not always good enough. So why not use idiffh which works on any system with a C compiler and knows of no limits in file sizes and strings?
A New Kind of Science
2011/04/07
I first learned about Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science” while reading Chaitin’s “Meta Math! The Quest for Omega“. And from there is all that I know about NKS, for its volume is prohibiting for my spare time. However, for anyone interested, NKS is available online and there’s an iPad version too.
ORA-24550
2011/04/03
When you get an ORA-24550, it might be because there’s a NULL returned from a SELECT statement that your code is not handling properly (like a string pointer equal to NULL instead of pointing to “”).
Στο CAS προσφεύγει ο Ολυμπιακός
2011/04/01
Στο CAS αναμένεται να προσφύγει ο Ολυμπιακός επικαλούμενος αντικανονική συμμετοχή του Νίκου Ζήση στον 4ο αγώνα της σειράς πρόκρισης στο Final Four της Ευρωλίγκας. Υπενθυμίζεται πως ο Ολυμπιακός έχασε 88-76 στον αγώνα αυτό.
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