This is

as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

. Here I write about many things. In the past I wrote about other things but the past is past. I write code for people to play with, I write about my life on Twitter, and I write here.

On I wrote The power of good software, on the subject of Howtos and Linux.

My boss said, “The managing partner would love to see a diagram of how all our systems link together, because he saw one that another firm had done and was impressed. No big rush; some sort of Visio thing or something, if you get a chance.“. And then he left for the day. Off I went and downloaded GraphViz. Great little tool; I’ve never actually used it in anger before, but I’ve heard about it. Five minutes reading the manuals, and I discover that it’s an utter piece of piss. Simply create a file, mygraph.dot, like this: 

digraph mygraph {
 system1 -> system2; 
 system2 -> system3;
 system1 -> system3;
 system3 -> "The Big Complex System";
}
and get a lovely PNG of the output with dot -Tpng mygraph.dot -o mygraph.png.

He just walked back in, ten minutes after he left: apparently a building has fallen down near the Mailbox here in Birmingham, and traffic is fierce. Was quite surprised to see that the graph was done. Visio! Huh!

Senji

GraphVis is just cool; although it’s very tempting to build something so big that you can’t actually use the graph for anything worthwhile….

OCB

Hmm, not convinced that GraphViz is a replacement for Visio – certainly not for most users anyway. Its an interesting question though, what is Linuxs’ Visio.

In the past Ive given people OpenOffice draw. Is there anything else (apart from GraphViz)

sil

Blimey, I’m not suggesting that people use GraphViz instead of Visio for everything. I am suggesting that people use GraphViz for things where it’s really good and Visio isn’t; the issue here is the “it’s got boxes and lines, therefore Visio must be the best tool” mindset. Same way that “it needs bold and italic, I’ll write a Word document and send that” rather than either HTML mail or (better) HTML mail and plain-text mail.

mrben

I’ve never used Visio, so don’t quote me on this, but I believe that Dia is supposed to be a Visio-like app for Linux.


HTH

OCB

I accept your argument up until HTML email but HTML email? Are you kidding ?? HTML email is wrong wrong wrong !

Mr Benn, thanks I shall have a look at Diag – is that available as Win32?

sil

Your baldness is clearly getting in the way of your reading ability :)

I think HTML mail is a jolly good idea, as long as you put in a plain-text equivalent so that people without HTML reading ability can still read the mail…

OCB

I dont think so Mr Aq – HTML email with plain text also is just as bad, if not worse. Send the same information twice in every email?

sil

I think that formatting can add quite a lot to communication; not just bold and italics, but headings, embedded images, all that sort of thing. Therefore, I think that HTML mail is a good idea. However, I also think that people shouldn’t be obliged to understand HTML in order to read email. Therefore, sending the same information twice in every mail is not a perfect solution, but it’s the least of three evils, to my mind.

N/A

OCB: http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/
or if you just wanted to see what it looks like: http://hans.breuer.org/dia/screenshot.htm

OCB

/“\
\ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
X against HTML e-mail
/ \

sil

On Call: ha! See? It doesn’t line up right. Why should I have to display all my text in monospace just so ascii art lines up? :)

This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.