Using ‘dot’
The last couple of days, I built a series of functions to parse source code which will be used to spit out html markup for use in the custom and automatic documentation. The most difficult aspect of software is that when you walk away from it, you shed the details and just remember the overall intent of procedures. Now, I comment the heck out of my code, and that helps, but still procedures after procedures after procedures tends to create an amnesia and having a tool in colorful and hyperlinked text to quickly assess the structure of code is a necessity to improve productivity. Eventually, I can interface it with the factory method I’m working on in my PIM. Ah, but so much code to write, and so little time to write it.
I read and annotated the introductory manual to dot, and I really dig it. Unlike Cmap which hides the functions from the user, to see the commands is to see a veneer of texture created by the underlying code. Particularly interesting is the varieties of formats for output: cmapx, pdf, ascii, png, ps, ps2, svg, vrml, and wbmp. I briefly sketched out the dbms tables that would be required and their relationships and with the appendices listed, would like eventually to try to create an interface to output graphs that way; low priority however. Having a single platform for all my information needs is a gargantuan task, one that I look at as a five-year goal.
Yesterday at work, I was able to help out some colleagues by using the Windows 7 package manager and with a friend’s help, tunnel through a wall to score putty so they could renew their credentials working with SAS. What strikes me as amazing is the sheer diversity and complexity of software and hardware that goes into the modern corporate network interfaced with the Internet. The SAS administators want their lusers (and reasonable so) to use ssh instead of telnet, and yet, they don’t disable the telnetd on their AIX box. Enterprise-IT refuses the download of everything, requiring you to put in a call to corporate support, which is not the same as local IT support. Local IT support is the only team that has access to your admin account, but they’re constantly trying to migrate and maintain their fleet. The whole experience just reinforces the notion that developing a web-based solution for most packages is the best way to function for portability and longevity, and if a faster client really is needed, then hack together an ODBC-using executable after the fact.
