Setup I recently needed to draw a UML sequence diagram. That’s usually something I’d do in Microsoft’s Visio ™. I was aware of text-to-chart utilities such as Medusa so I assumed that similar tools would be available for generating sequence diagrams. A quick search of the web yielded an open source tool called PlantUML. PlantUML is a set of tools for converting text scripts to various kinds of UML diagrams. To use the bare-bones setup for PlantUML, you’ll need a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

When I was a kid, my brothers gave me comic books to kind of start and fill out my collection. I wrote about the earliest ones I had owned here: https://jimlawless.net/blog/posts/my-first-comics/ When I started buying comics on my own, DC was probably my favorite publisher. I think the stories were more geared toward elementary school kids like me. At some point, I discovered this hero known as The Flash Justice League of America #97 ( MAR 72 ) I remember buying the above issue of the JLA off the spinner rack at our local grocery store.

The original version of this post was published on March 16, 2014. Back in the day, I used to write machine-language subroutines for the Commodore 64 that I would then call from a main program written in BASIC. I found it easier to use BASIC as the higher-order controller over a set of ML functions that usually did things for which CBM BASIC 2.0 was not well-suited. In one case, I wrote an Xmodem file-transfer protocol handler.

In the mid-1980’s, I’d owned a used TRS-80 Model I for about a year when I had a yearning for a newer system. I only had cassette-based storage which proved to be unreliable. I had a 16K machine and I had a few games and tools for the TRS-80. I learned Z-80 assembly language and I was having a lot of fun tinkering, but that particular line of computers had met its end.

Before I was in Kindergarten, I had a comic book collection. It began with some issues that were hand-me-downs and it grew slowly from the late 60’s into the early 70’s. I had plenty of exposure to Batman and Superman: “Night of the Reaper” scared the bejeebers out of me. The DC 100-Page Super Spectacular anthology issues were great! There were a few Marvels in the collection: Funny that the title of the story in my first issue of Avengers was Endgame … the same title as the last movie.

Once Upon a Time In 2009, I created an image capture utility for Windows called Pic2File. It wasn’t like a number of capture utilities. For Pic2File to function, images needed to be copied to the Windows clipboard. Pic2File would scan the clipboard periodically for images. If image content was present on the clipboard, it would save the image to the specified file format in a sequentially-numbered file. It then clears the clipboard data.

Shooter I was a little surprised when I saw an announcement from Krypton Comics in Omaha ( http://www.kryptoncomicsomaha.com ) that comics legend Jim Shooter would be the guest of honor on Free Comic Book Day, this year. I was very happy to chat briefly with him. I had wanted to bring something for Shooter to autograph, but I have had so many comic book purges throughout the years, that my original comics from his tenure at Marvel, Valiant, Defiant, or any other company are either long gone or packed away somewhere.

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration” – Edsger Dijkstra My early days of computing began in the late 1970’s. I used to go in to the Radio Shack in the mall where they would let the patrons type stuff into their display-model TRS-80. You could tell that none of the patrons were skilled in any type of computer language as the screen was filled with a line of nonsense followed by a line indicating that a syntax-error had occurred.

In the late 80’s, my programming team was in search of a decent programmer’s text editor for MS-DOS. At the time, a number of editors seemed to have comparable features. Any missing features could often be added via the embedded macro language that each of these editors sported. What was it that helped to make the decision? The advertisement from American Cybernetics above ( excerpted from the late, great Computer Language magazine ) caught our eye.

Originally published on: Sat, 22 May 2010 The first computer in my household was a Radio Shack TRS-80 pocket computer that my dad owned. My brother got it for him as a birthday gift in 1980. This was essentially a calculator with a pretty nifty BASIC interpreter built in. The BASIC was not without its own personality. Although it supported arrays, I found that if I DIM’ed an array “A” and placed a value in A(2) … variable “B” would get clobbered.