Homework #10 - 9/17

Response to readings

     While the readings for today were not the most exciting, I can see why they were important. We have many UML diagrams to explain different parts of a computer software project, from class diagrams which describe the actual classes in the code, to sequence diagrams that describe how different actors in the program or environment communicate with each other, but there's so many different types of diagrams and they can be too cumbersome at times, I feel. The "higraphs" that the author introduces seems to solve the issue of being able to describe nearly any type of diagram or graph with one standard, allowing for dynamic meanings of edges, directed or non-directed, and also modular definitions of the "blob" which represents a set of elements. A blob within a blob could represent the entire set of the outer blob, or not, its meaning adjusts to whatever you want it to be. I also really like the idea of being able to express the Cartesian products of sets with higraphs. I happen to be in the databases class this semester and certain queries we've learned will calculate the Cartesian product of two tables, then apply the filter to select only the tuples of interest, so being able to express this visually without having to do the calculations is useful, as with large sets, the product can get out of hand very quickly. The only issue I have with these higraphs is because they are so versatile, you may have to explain the graph to viewers, and it may not be as intuitive to understand as some of the more traditional diagrams. 

     Aside from the readings, I'd also like to talk about my experience selecting candidates for my group's open-source project. We met on Saturday to get a good first idea on what project to do, but I feel like we were pretty distracted by all of the other roommates present. Only two of us had our computers with us, so while I browsed the H/Foss list, another group member was looking at projects on sourceforge.com. He suggested a few gaming related programs that are being developed and put them on the list, which we would later vote on. After what turned out to be a mostly unproductive meeting, we decided that each member would go home, find another project of their choosing to add to the list, and try and compile/run them. I went home and installed a bunch of software on my laptop - a VM program, eclipse for C/C++ and Java EE, as well as some other programs I thought I would need, and attempted to compile some of the source code of a couple of the game related programs. I'm not sure if it's just me, or if the eclipse IDE is complicated, but I couldn't get anything to compile and run. I was greeted with build path errors, project names not matching files, and other issues as well. So I threw in the towel and searched for the program I would contribute to the list. While I do like games, I felt that we should focus on something more meaningful, and that would look better on a resume, so I suggested a music composition/sheet music program. We'll see what the group thinks soon enough.