Industry-driven research considered harmful!

You've got to love Bill Buxton.

(Relayed by the Bitterman, thanks.)

Keeping my scientific paper notes pretty with ASCII drawings

When reading a scientific paper, I found it handy to sum it up in a plain text file that I put right next to the PDF version of the paper. Apart from describing the paper's main statements and ideas in my own words, I sometimes also want to keep a small diagram or architectural overview.

ASCII pictures are a good thing for that, but it's a pain drawing them manually even in an editor as wonderful as vim. So I did a web search and stumbled across JavE - a Java-based ASCII-drawing tool, which works quite nicely for me.

On a side note, JavE lets you chose between a generic and an algorithmic version of shapes. I seem to prefer the algorithmic ones.