I know this may sound like a worst-case-scenario, nefarious big brother concept, but get this:
Would you let a company copy your private, personal files to their servers in exchange of being able to later find your files more easily? Sounds bogus but that is apparently what’s going on behind Google Desktop.
You install the application, and in order to catalog and index the information it transfers files to the Google servers, just temporarily, they assure you. We’re talking your private, most sensitive files – unless you set the application to avoid some files or folders.
The EFF takes this a step farther: with the slew of government requests for information from the leading search engine providers, this means that the files Google temporarily stores on their servers, can be obtained with much less resistance than with a search warrant.
I will choose to stay away from Google Desktop.
Just hope that the next computer you buy does not come preinstalled with it…
Category: Computing
The ups and downs of working with computers
I am using two free Java-based UML tools for my software design and patterns class.
One is Violet, which is brilliant in the fact that it limits its own scope and functionality so much that it is extremely useful and very easy to pick up, while being limited.
The other is ArgoUML (I am using version 0.18.1) which is at the opposite end of the scope scale. It has a lot to offer but when you offer a ton, you sometimes compromise on the basics. ArgoUML used to offer all of the major UML diagrams, but apparently the implementation was buggy enough for them to disable sequence diagrams, among others. Their class diagram support, though is strong and the application is very servicable. Until certain little things come up.
Suppose you want to output an image of a small section of your very large model. The logical things that come to mind are:
- selecting the classes you want to output and selecting the ‘output to image’ function
- selecting the relevant classes, copying them to a new model with the relationships between them and then outputting the model to an image
Sadly in ArgoUML the first option will always output the entire model no matter what, and the second option will only copy the actual classes, but not the relationships (the lines) between them.
Next time you think how much Visio sucks, appreciate the little things.
The problem with Visio, is that its UML support is not great; the model looks sort of like correct UML, and it is very Microsoft-technology centric, as opposed to the Java-centric approach of ArgoUML (Violet is so basic it is agnostic – hence less is more!). And yeah, Visio costs an arm and a leg. And if you are paying, you can just as well get SmartDraw and be done with it.
I will stick with my limited but lovable tools for now.
More comments about ArgoUML:
– No undo/redo functionality
– Impossible to copy and paste method definitions
I am sure that many of us feel very warm and safe in knowing fundamental facts about Java. For example, a class variable like
private int h;
cannot be modified by any object other than the class it exists in, right?
Wrong – otherwise why would I waste my time here? The issue popped up when I was writing my solution to a class assignment and I noticed that instances of the same class can access each other’s private member variables.
Further investigation on the Java Tutorial reminded me of the very fundamental fact that the private access modifier specifies class visiblity, NOT instance visiblity. Definitely not something anyone would recommend using, just something you should keep in mind. Always.
