the corner office

Dooby doo... twiddling thumbs... how long does it take 3 megs of source code to compile? The weekend's been spent on a Theory of Programming Languages assignment. The last 2 questions need diagrams of call trees and activation records and fun stuff like that. Last year I'd been doing my assignments with MS Word and using Word's Draw tools which did a decent job of generating simple diagrams. On Linux and having to make do with OpenOffice now, alternative arrangements are needed. For most of my assignments this year, I've just printed out the typed-up pages and hand-drawn whatever diagrams I'd needed, and submitted the assignments dead-tree style. Since this assignment is fast approaching the less charitable definition of 'late', I don't want to have to schlep to a drop-off box tomorrow and wait days before UNISA marks it as received, so I want to submit it electronically (and preferably before the clock strikes midnight.)

This means I need me some diagrammin' software so's I can create jpegs and drop them into the document. I just read Tom Duff's review of a free software for dummies book, and he mentions Dia. I haven't used Dia since about 2002, when I tried it on Windows and where it looked so dog-awful with its old Gtk widgets, that I didn't spend much time with it. But it's just what I need now, so I'm in the middle of a quick download & compile. Here's hoping it'll do the job.

Apart from that, it's been a fairly uneventful week. I'm getting a bit more cosy with T-SQL these days, which is fun, with a chapter here and there I've made my way through book 7 of WoT and on to book 8, but getting next to no work done on the new blog app. Given the mountain of assignments I've got to catch up, that seems unlikely to change soon.

Hmm, Dia's compiled. Back to work...

(Update: three cheers for Dia. Although they could win a lot more first-impression kudos if they simply halved the default line thickness in diagrams, so that things looked professional off the bat instead of looking like they've been drawn with the graphic equivalent of a kid's crayon.)