SequenceDiagram IntelliJ plugin

 One of our KdG students pointed us to the SequenceDiagram plugin for the IntelliJ IDE. The plugin reverse engineers a method into a UML sequence diagram. You click on a method and get a graphical view of its inner workings and interaction with other objects.

 

It also has a nice solution for representing lambda's, something the UML standard does not have specific support for.

That's not all, from each method in the sequence diagram you can navigate back to your code. 

Only remark I have, is that return arrows are not entirely compliant with the standard notation.

But this is a nice effort, and way better respecting UML conventions than IntelliJ's own class diagram generator.

Salesforce buys Slack

 Cloud CRM juggernaut Salesforce has gobbled up the Slack team collaboration platform for $28bn.

Although Slack was still growing at a healthy pace, it was bypassed by MS Teams last year.

With the backing of Salesforce, Slack will be have the means to strike back.

 

A Salesforce MVP (Most Valuable Professional) : 

There is still no compelling reason to use Slack over Chatter. You still should NOT share your corporate data out to any external system, even Teams.

They're already convinced it's better than Teams. But why did day cash out all that money if they've got something better in house?

HP PRINT FREE FOR LIFE dies

HP rolled out a subscription policy for home use of printer ink.

The low tier of the subscription was... free. 

If you signed up for the print free for life plan, you could print 15 pages for free each month.

Life is short at HP is seems: after 3 years HP terminated the print free for life plan, and customers need to pay $12/year now.

more...

EU takes on amazon for monopoly abuse

The EU has, in a preliminary report, accused amazon of using data of third party retailers on the platform to position its own products.

The EU is also opening an investigation on amazon promoting its own products and those of parties using its services over other third parties on the amazon platform.

Android 12 allowing alternate playstores, disallowing alternate pay

After the controversy over the margins the play stores (Huawei, Epic Games...) Google is allowing alternate playstores on Android.

They will enforce over the exclusive use of Google Pay for all payments more strictly, however.

more...

Gitlab star a group: workaround

In gitlab we make extensive use of subgroups to organise projects.

I am member of a gitlab group with about manyu subgroups (about 50 direct subgroups, and > 1000 projects).

Maybe there is something wrong with this structure, but anyway, it is not easy to navigate to the subgroups I often use.

Problem in gitlab is that you can only start projects, not subgroups.

The solution is really simple: star a (dummy) project in the subgroup, navigate to it and go one level up.

TikTok deal with Oracle

Part of the global activities of TikTok will be sold to Oracle and other investors.
Oracle will also run the TikTok US infrastructure.
Seems like Larry Ellison has invested his money wisely.