Notes

Writing can be a fun exercise. However, like many other skills, you have to do your best to develop the craft. Regularly I reread two books trying to remind me that I should never give up on trying to improve such an important skill. The two books are: “Elements of Style” by Strunk & White “On Writing Well” by Zinsser Another one to also throw to the mix is “Writing with power: Techniques for mastering the writing process” by Elbow. However, If you are looking for something short and concise “Technical Writing for Fun & Profit” by David E. Goldberg is a must-read recipe for engineers. ...

I needed to merge together several SVN repositories together. After browsing a bit, I found a simple perl script named svn-merge-repos.pl published on December 2007 by Fabien Coelho. This script allows you to merge multiple repositories, properly interleaving the revisions by date. It also allows you to set specific target paths for the repositories being merged. The only issue I ran into was the limitation that you cannot target the same new directory as the destination for multiple repository sources on the same run. You can get around it using the usual svnadmin dump and svnadmin load sequence, but it is not as beautiful and it does not interleave the revisions… ...

Yesterday I was looking for a quick start guide for LaTeX that could help someone who never used it before to get going. After a bit of browsing I ran into a quick guide to LaTeX by Joost Winne. It may not be the most exhaustive and detailed one, but it is well organized and definitely a good place to start. If you are looking for more nothing can beat “The LaTeX Companion”. ...

Rose Tyler and The Doctor traveling away in the Tardis again. Long long time since last time we met. I am just catching up with the good old Doctor. The new BBC version is pretty interesting, although I still miss some of the old low budget versions. Started season three yesterday while typing some stuff away :)

Lately I have been exploring different alternatives for coordinating the execution of distributed applications. Yes, you guessed it right, I am working on the distribution of the execution of Meandre flows. Chopping the data-intensive flow and mapping the chunks onto a set of distributed processors requires several elements (graph analysis, resource management, etc.). However, the basic element that needs to be solved first is the need for a reliable and scalable coordination system. ...