Quick Note on Diagrams and the Blog
People often ask me what tool I use to make the diagrams in my Software Illustrated posts. I use MS Visio 2007. It has a ‘themes’ feature that allows you to set fill and line options that apply to all the shapes in a diagram, making it faster to produce decent looking things. It still takes a surprising amount of work to get good pictures, but overall I’m pretty happy.
Also, I have tried to use colors to convey meaning. They’re not just for pretty. For example, memory colors follow these conventions across all diagrams:
These colors hold from the earliest post about memory to the latest. This convention is why the post about Intel CPU caches shows a blue index for the virtually indexed L1 cache. So far I’ve written a lot about kernel and x86 internals, but that’s sort of a coincidence. I’m a generalist, not an OS guy; there’s a wide range of CS topics I hope to write about. (All this internals talk though made me want to write Linux kernel code again. I might look for some subsystem or driver to work on. What’s that sleep supression pill again?)
Finally, in the next couple of months I plan to change my blog template. The new one will have a hand-maintained ‘Archive by Topic’ page to serve as a coherent index to all posts, plus other usability improvements. I hate the current site as far as that goes. I can handle the logic and markup, but if anyone out there is interested in doing a small design/CSS job on this blog, please drop me a line. I also have a quick question. Many people access the site via iPhones and other mobile devices. How does image width impact you? Would it be painful if diagrams were wider than their current 700-pixel limit? I’d appreciate input on this and suggestions in general. Thanks! I’m off to check out the Denver LAMP meetup. Here’s a good song if you’re bored.
January 28, 2009 at 6:21 pm | Filed Under Meta, Software Illustrated
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17 Responses to “Quick Note on Diagrams and the Blog”
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[...] were based on Linux and MySQL. Now I could have copped out and used IronRuby (Microsoft’s Quick Note on Diagrams and the Blog - duartes.org 01/29/2009 Also, I have tried to use colors to convey meaning. They’re not just for [...]
I just have 1 problem with wider images. I usually take a print-out and read at home at my leisure. If the images are too wide, they get clipped sometimes
And I can’t enjoy the images anyway, my print-outs are black-and-white.
Good song!
Srikanth: Great point, print outs. I will experiment with the width wrt to printing and make sure the stuff prints on A4 without clipping.
It also reminds me I want a CSS for print media because a number of people have told me they print stuff out, and one person actually asked for a ‘print’ view.
Glad you like the song - that’s a good album.
Hey Gustavo (are you brazilian?), congrats for this blog. One of the best technical resources I’ve found on the internet. I’m a simple system analyst (with no engineering/cs background) but you make these things easy to understand and despite my age (30, not that young for programming) I really like to learn these stuff.
Thank you man and keep it up!
Jose
Hi Gustavo,
I recently discovered your blog and I’m glad I did. It’s very interesting and insightful, and I’m working my way through previous entries.
If you are looking for an “archive” solution that works, as I definitely was a while ago, I can’t help but recommend the “Clean Archive Reloaded” plugin for Wordpress. You can see it at work on my blog here: http://antoniocangiano.com/table-of-contents/. I’m not sure if this is what you are looking for, but it works well for me.
Cheers,
Antonio
@Jose: I am Brazilian
Are you? I used to have a longer about page but it’s down for now. It’ll come back after I change the blog around.
But man, 30 is _young_! My mother in law got into programming (as a job) when she was about 50 years old. You’ve got decades of good learning ahead of you.
@Antonio: thanks for the feedback.
I am in fact looking for something exactly like that, so thanks for the suggestion! I want two archives: “By Date” and “By Topic”. Clean Archive Reloaded solves the former beautifully. The Topic one I’ll keep by hand, because it’ll need some human tending to be friendly (ie, how to organize/categorize the stuff).
Thanks very much! I was wanting to ask how you make the diagrams, they are very nice. Too bad you use Visio
I’ve personally taken a liking to pic (which Richard Stevens used: http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/pic.examples.ps). Thought the workflow involved is not really ‘modern’.
@a2800276: I have fond memories of TCP/IP Illustrated.
I did try out a few things, but ended up on Visio because of the color and good looks of the diagrams. I’m happy to hear about alternatives though.
Nice work Gustavo!
Can you post some screencast about creating so such nice graphics?
I love the Consolas font - great choice
Damn. this is is amazing.
you’re in my RSS feed now
@peace: I like the idea, the problem is time. If I get set up for webcasts, I’d do a Visio one.
@Naseer: me too. It’s what I use in Visual Studio.
@Raja: thanks!
Hi Gustavo,
I got introduced to your blog very recently and the very first time i went through your posts, i was amazed… am sure lot of people would have told you this before… you posts are real easy to understand (for dummies like me ;)). Keep up the good work and thanks again!
@Nithish: we’re all dummies, it just varies by subject
You’re welcome for the posts, they’re lots of fun to write. Thanks for reading.
Oh,it seems that I don’t master VISIO well :(.I keep using visio with the default theme when installed.
The width doesn’t impact me much on my iPhone since I’m reading via Google Reader which resizes them automatically.
@Jordan: that makes sense - thanks for clueing me in