This blog is now deprecated. No new posts or any other kind of contents will be added here. Please go to http://herraiz.org/blog for the new location of my blog. If you were reading this blog through a feed reader, you will not need to change anything. The feed will automatically point you to the new blog.
The old content is left here for reference purposes, but no new comments or trackbacks are allowed.
I am migrating this blog to a new location. In the new blog, I will leave Wordpress and I will start to use Jekyll, combined with Git and Emacs org-mode.
If you are reading this blog using a feedreader or through any of the planets that syndicate this blog (like the Master on Free Software Planet), you don’t need to change anything. The current feed will automatically show the new entries.
If you read this blog through its website, I will publish the new URL once the blog is done. The new blog will not include the old entries included here, so I will let this blog open in read-only mode,
The International Journal of Social and Organizational Dynamics in IT (IJSODIT) has just been created. It provides an international forum for practitioners and researchers from social sciences, along with information systems professional practitioners to contribute and share developed, useful, and innovative research regarding the impact and future of IT in the workplace. Covering all aspects of social issues impacted by information technology in organizations and inter-organizational structures, IJSODIT presents the conceptualization of specific social issues and their associated constructs. This journal encompasses designs and infrastructures, empirical validation of social models, and case studies illustrating socialization success and failures relating to Information technology.
Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Michael B. Knight
Published: Quarterly (both in Print and Electronic form)
URL: http://www.igi-global.com/ijsodit
Mission of IJSODIT
Social issues related to information technology represents one of the most often discussed underpinnings in information systems research throughout the tenure of the IS field. Social issues are those research topics most aligned with the human factor in terms of information systems planning, development and utilization. The International Journal of Social and Organizational Dynamics in Information Technology includes all aspects of social issues that are impacted by information technology affecting organizations and interorganizational structures. This includes the conceptualization of specific social issues and their associated constructs, proposed designs and infrastructures, empirical validation of social models, and case studies illustrating socialization success and failures. Some key topics may include: (1) ethics, (2) culture, (3) relationships, (4) human interaction, (5) security, (6) design, (7) building relationships, and (8) diversity in the IT workforce.
Recommended Topics
Topics to be discussed in this journal include (but are not limited to) the following:
Types of Social Constructs
The types of constructs that will be considered for review and
publication would include, but would not be limited to, the following:
| Confidence | Commitment | Judgment |
| Flexibility | Certainty | Satisfaction |
| Utilization | Stability | Influence |
| Presence | Change | Support |
| Collaboration | Cohesiveness | Participation |
| Consent | Creativity | Understanding |
| Trust | Synergy | Perspective |
| Accountability | Excitement | Power |
Instructions for paper submission
Prospective authors should note that only original and previously unpublished articles will be considered. INTERESTED AUTHORS MUST CONSULT THE JOURNAL’S GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS at http://www.igi-global.com/development/author_info/guide.asp PRIOR TO SUBMISSION. All article submissions will be forwarded to at least 3 members of the Editorial Review Board of the journal for double-blind, peer review. Final decision regarding acceptance/revision/rejection will be based on the reviews received from the reviewers. All submissions must be forwarded electronically to knightm _at_ uwgb _dot_ edu
Publisher
The International Journal of Social and Organizational Dynamics in Information Technology is published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference”, “Business Science Reference”, and “Engineering Science Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit http://www.igi-global.com.
Last year, when I submitted my tax declaration, I felt like going to live to the woods so I could avoid being ripped off by the government. It turns out that the idea is not new, and already two hundred years ago, Henry Thoreau though of it. He wrote his experiences in a book entitled Walden, so I went to my local library to borrow a copy of that book. But they did not have any book of Henry Thoreau. Actually, the archives were pretty scarce, and I almost was tempted to donate some of my books to the library (so they can get dust in the library’s shelves rather on mine’s).
Fortunately, the book has gone to the public domain, and it is available from Project Gutenberg and even Google Books (downloadable as a PUB or a PDF files). All that I had to read it while going in the metro was my mobile phone. And reading on a phone sucks. So I decided to buy an ebook reader.
After some research on the topic, I decided to buy a Sony Reader PRS-600. From all the devices available out there, it is the most open that you can find. It reads everything: PDF, TXT, HTML, DOC, RTF and a lot of strange e-book formats. The screen is 6″ and tactile, and you can take notes, mark pages, lookup words in a dictionary, underscore, etc, just tapping the screen with the stylus, or with your fingers. It can also play MP3 and show images in different formats (JPG, PNG, etc). The internal memory is 512 MB, and the device comes with a SD card and a Sony memory stick slots.
The device comes with a CD with software to manage your library and synchronize your computer with the e-reader, but it does not work on GNU/Linux. However, I have found an alternative that in my opinion is superior to the Sony’s software: Calibre. With CALIBRE, you can transform documents and books to different formats, copy books from and to the e-reader, fill the metadata of the books using a ISBN database or Google Books (really really useful). It can also subscribe to RSS channels, update regularly (say at 7AM every morning), and transform the output to a PDF or a e-book, so you can have for instance the newspaper in your e-reader up to date every morning, before going to work.
I have now about 200 books in the device, that I got mainly from exchanging with friends, the Gutenberg Project, and some authors that make their books available in the Internet, like Cory Doctorow (I strongly recommend you his novels Eastern Standard Tribe and Makers, that are available in e-book format specially formatted for the Sony reader).
There is also a Sony E-book store with books that are not as pricy as in Amazon. In any case, you can read pretty much any kind of document in this device, so it does not matter from where you get your books, as long as the format is widely adopted.
The reading experience is pretty good. I have read 6 books since I bought it: three books of the Foundation series, Eastern Standard Tribe, Makers, Programming the Universe, and I think I will not carry a paper book with me anymore. However, it is not as good for technical papers formatted at two columns, with formulas, figures, etc, because the screen is smaller than the usual paper size, and you have to zoom to have a decent font size (or maybe I am just getting old).
The battery lasts ages. Actually, it is not measured in time but in page turns. The screen is not like a computer screen. It is not continuously refreshing the image; when the image gets fixed, it does not need to reprint it. So it is not consuming battery to show the page, only to change or refresh it. The refresh of a page takes very little, and the experience of turning pages is very similar to a paper book. The specs say that the battery lasts for 7000 page turns. I have not counted them, but I usually recharge the device once a week
In short, the device is very good for reading novels and similar documents. The image produced by the screen is very similar to a paper page, and very comfortable to read. It can read many different formats, and with Calibre you don’t have even to worry about the format of the documents because it transforms e-books when needed. It does not come with any book, just a couple of excerpts from best-selling current books, but you can find easily books out there. The price is around 300 Euros, although I think it is not being sold at this moment in all the countries (I got mine in Canada).
Definitely, it is time to donate my paper books to the local library.
Last week I attended the 25th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) at Edmonton, where I presented a paper in the doctoral symposium, entitled “A statistical examination of the evolution and properties of libre software”. It is about my PhD thesis; find out more information about my thesis, and download my data sources and scripts.
The abstract of the paper is the following:
How and why does software evolve? This question has been under study since almost 40 years ago, and it is still a subject of controversy. In the seventies, Meir M. Lehman formulated the laws of software evolution, a first attempt to characterize the dynamics of the evolution of software. With the raise of the libre (free / open source) software development phenomenon, some cases that do not fulfill those laws have appeared. Are Lehman’s laws valid in the case of libre software development? Is it possible to design an universal theory for software evolution? And if it is, how? This thesis is a large-scale empirical and statistical approach to analyze the properties and evolution of libre software, using publicly available data sources, hence enabling repeatability of the results and third parties verification, fundamental aspects of any empirical study. The main results are that a small subset of basic size metrics are enough to characterize a software system, software systems are self-similar, and software evolution is a short range correlated (short memory) process.
Download a PDF copy, the BibTeX citation, or the slides of the presentation.
I am preparing a presentation for the doctoral symposium of ICSM, and I have done a tag cloud of the text of my PhD thesis (idea stolen from Tom Zimmerman’s presentation, shame on me). This is what it looks like:
I am surprised because it is pretty accurate. It would not have been any better if I would have chosen the tags myself (well, I have removed some common words, but that’s all).
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered a post in Abram Hindle’s blog about editing techniques, and reading aloud to edit research papers. He includes some scripts and configuration stuff for Emacs. I have adapted his scripts to suit my system. Here it is what I have added to ~/.emacs
(defun tex-speak ()
(interactive)
(shell-command-on-region (point)
(mark) "untex -m -o -e -a - | festival --pipe ~/bin/festivaltts > /dev/null" nil nil))
(global-set-key "\M-t" 'tex-speak)
It removes LaTeX formatting from a paragraph, and pipe the output to festival, that reads the text aloud (you will need to install untex and festival). I am using Alt+t to make Emacs to read the currently selected region, that I think it is assigned to another option by default. But it is an option that I don’t use at all. If it interferes with your setup, just change the keybinding.
The file ~/bin/festivaltts configures the voices used to read the text, and in my case it contains the following
(tts_file "-")
(quit)
which means that festival will read just with the default voice that it includes.
But more important than just making Emacs reading texts, it is that I have discovered a new way of writing papers. I have started a couple of papers since I set up this, and I think I am writing text of much higher quality if Emacs reads it back to me after some advances. Besides, it helps you to avoid a lot of usual mistakes that happen while writing papers, like misspellings, repeated or missing words, etc, because it just sounds awkward when Emacs reads it.
I strongly recommend to anyone writing papers, a PhD thesis, or whatever, to try this out, in particular if you are a non-native English speaker.
I have just uploaded to my website the latest paper I wrote, in collaboration with Gregorio Robles and Jesús González-Barahona. The paper’s title is “Research Friendly Software Repositories”, and it was accepted for the Joint International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution and ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution (IWPSE-EVOL). The abstract of the paper is the following:
What is the future of software evolution? In 1974, Meir M. Lehman had a vision of software evolution being driven by empirical studies of software repositories, and of a theory based on those empirical results. However, that scenario is yet to come. Software evolution studies are often based on a few cases, because the needed information is scarce, dispersed and incomplete. Their conclusions are not generalizable, slowing down the progress of this research discipline. Libre (free / open source) software supposes an opportunity to alleviate this situation. In this paper we describe the existing approaches to provide research datasets that are mining libre software repositories, and propose an agenda based on the concept of research friendly software repositories, which provides finer granularity and integrated data.
Download a PDF copy, the BibTeX citation, or the slides of the presentation.
I have just released the 0.2 version of x30bright, an utility to set the brightness in Samsung X360 laptops. Brightness can now be indicated using percentages rather than raw values, and I have added a couple of more commands to get the current brightness and set the brightness, as well as increasing and decreasing it. Check the README file for details. Download x360bright.
My personal website is done using Emacs org-mode as a sort of wiki syntax. I always liked the idea of having my web written in a wiki, but I don’t like the usual wikis, with Edit buttons, and a lot of stuff that reveals that your web is actually a wiki.
My first attempt included writing my own wiki engine in Python, based on the Creole wiki syntax (I was going to call it Piripiwiki), and also adapting Ikiwiki, that has become popular among Debian developers and geeks alike. However, I could not resist the beauty of doing web publishing just with Emacs, and I finally chose org-mode above any other option.
Org-mode has lots of documentations, tutorials, even a Google Talk. But I found it difficult to set everything up for web publishing. Because of that, I have done this little package, that includes a template, a nice CSS stylesheet and a makefile to run everything very easily. Just edit the file publish_config.el, because you need to indicate the directories where your web is, and the Makefile, because as well as generating HTML, it can also upload everything automatically, using scp. Just set the host name and target directory (and maybe also username and/or password). If you want just to obtain HTML, do make html. If you want to get rid of the HTML output and other intermediate files, do make clean. To generate HTML and upload, just do make.
The first time you generate and upload your web, it will upload everything. The next time you change something, it will only re-generate and upload what has been changed since the last change, so you don’t waste bandwidth uploading stuff that is already in your web.
There is a header/header.org file that contains common code for all the pages. It includes a links bar, and a HTML macro to include common HTML code that must be in every page. I use that for the Google Analytics Javascript, to count the visits to my web.
I maintain these sources in a personal Git repository, but it is only to keep track of all the history of my web, and to get my personal sources in other computers easily. You do not need any kind of version control to get the “upload changes only” feature that I mention above.
To get everything running, you have to install both Emacs and org-mode. It has been tested with Emacs 22 and the latest available version of org-mode. I am not sure whether it will work with every combination. If you find any problem, just drop a comment here or e-mail me.
For the lazy ones who did not read the post, here is again the link to the template: