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Diomidis D. Spinellis Web Log
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The Internet soapbox of Diomidis Spinellis
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Git
Even by our field?s dizzying rate of progress I wouldn?t expect to revisit the subject of version control just six years after I first wrote about it in this column ( Version Control Systems . Software , 22(5):108?109, September/October 2005). Yet here we are. The new kid on the block is git, a distributed revision control system available on all mainstream development platforms through a Free Software license. Git, a brainchild of Linus Torvalds, began its life in 2005 as the revision management system used for coordinating the development of the Linux kernel. Over the years its functionality, portability, efficiency, and third-party adoption have evolved by leaps and bounds to make it its category?s leader. (Two other systems with similar characteristics are Mercurial and Bazaar.)
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How do Big US Firms Use Open Source Software?
We hear a lot about the adoption of open source software,
but when I was asked to provide hard evidence there was
little I could find.
In an
article I recently published in the
Journal of Systems and Software together with my colleague
Vaggelis Giannikas we tried to fill this gap by
examining the type of software the US Fortune 1000 companies use
in their web-facing operations.
The results were not what I was expecting.
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Package Management Systems
DLL hell was a condition that often afflicted unfortunate users of old Microsoft Windows versions. Under it, the installation of one program would render others unusable due to incompatibilities between dynamically linked libraries. Suffering users would have to carefully juggle their conflicting DLLs to find a stable configuration. Similar problems distress any administrator manually installing software that depends on incompatible versions of other helper modules.
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How to Decrypt "Secrets for Android" Files
Secrets for Android
is a nifty Android application that allows you to securely store
passwords and other sensitive data on your Android phone.
Your data are encoded with your supplied password using strong
cryptography and are therefore protected if your phone gets stolen.
Although the application offers a backup and an export facility,
I found both wanting in terms of the availability and confidentiality
associated with their use.
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Refactoring on the Cheap
The refactorings that a good integrated development environment can perform are impressive. Yet, there are many reasons to master some cheap-and-cheerful alternative approaches. First, there will always be refactorings that your IDE won?t support. Also, although your IDE might offer excellent refactoring support for some programming languages, it could fall short on others. Modern projects increasingly mix and match implementation languages, and switching to a specialized IDE for each language is burdensome and inefficient. Finally, IDE-provided refactorings resemble an intellectual straightjacket. If you only know how to use the ready-made refactorings, you?ll miss out on opportunities for other code improvements.
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