The power of good software
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!
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….
8 hours later
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)
9 hours later
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.
20 hours later
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
21 hours later
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?
24 hours later
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…
27 hours later
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?
46 hours later
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.
2 days later
OCB: http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/
or if you just wanted to see what it looks like: http://hans.breuer.org/dia/screenshot.htm
3 days later
/“\
\ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
X against HTML e-mail
/ \
4 days later
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? :)
4 days later