I am happy to announce that our paper “Automated Unit Test Generation for Python” (with F. Kroiß and G. Fraser) was accepted at the 12th Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering (SSBSE 2020) in Bari, Italy.
You can download a pre-print version of the paper, it is also available on arXiv.org; I’ll link the final version as soon as it is available.
I am happy to announce that my paper “Generating Tests to Analyse Dynamically-Typed Programs” was accepted at the Doctoral Symposium of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) in November in San Diego, CA, USA.
I am going to present my paper at the Doctoral Symposium, which will take place on November 11, 2019.
You can download a pre-print version of the paper, the final version can be found in IEEE Xplore.
Email is there since a long time ago; it dates back to the early 1970s, thus it is much older than most of its users. With this page I want to present some things that are important to me in my daily email workflow. I want to ask you to respect this, especially if you are a student asking for advice or similar.
I know that there is a large number of email clients out there. Many users even prefer the web interfaces provided by their email providers—a habit I cannot understand at all, since they feel so bloated and shiny to me, which distracts me from actually getting information transferred. I am almost exclusively using neomutt, a console-based email client running in a terminal. neomutt is a fork of the well-known mutt mail reader, with added features bundled instead of adding them via patch application.
Due to this client choice my mail is shown on a terminal, which avoids me from seeing all your shiny colourful nicely designed stuff you send with your emails. Thus, it is completely useless to send me HTML email. Actually, you should avoid HTML email at all and for all times! It only increases size of the mail (not the best argument in 2019); furthermore, there are privacy concerns, because they can include whatever external content is referenced there, can be abused easily for phishing attacks or to spread malicious software.
Worst is, if your email client sends HTML only, ignoring that there should be a text-only version of the text as well. This results in me either saving the HTML to a file and open it in a browser—because technically, you are sending a web page to me—or deleting the mail without reading it.
Thus, configure your email client properly, such that it sends plain-text only. For your own good, I’d recommend to also deactivate the rendering of HTML for all mails you receive. Consider to also have a look at the useplaintext web page.
Do not send me large binary attachments without notifying me beforehand. Furthermore, please use open formats, such as plain text, TeX, or the open-document format from Open-/LibreOffice. Do not send me Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files, I won’t open them!
I prefer email encryption using GnuPG. See the about page for my key. Please send encrypted email whenever you can. We can also meet in person to cross-sign our GnuPG keys.
Just do me one favour: configure your email client to not encrypt the subject. This is a new bad habit by Thunderbird plugins, which make searching for emails even more painful.
Please never use top posting! Consider the following example, why it is such a bad idea to top post (example taken from Wikipedia):
1 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
2 Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
3 A: Top-posting.
4 Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
The article provides a large explanation, which styles are common and which shall be used. I use a combination of interleaved and bottom posting, depending on the context. If your email client does not support this style and you cannot configure it it is maybe time to switch to a proper mail client :-) But beware: “every mail client sucks” (from the mutt motto).
This page exists now for more than one year, without being to much used or updated by me. To overcome this, I’ve now decided to update the page and use it more regularly.
Most prominently, I’ve added pages about my research interests as well as the teaching I am doing. Besides that, I’ve changed the theme of the page.
The blog will be used as my personal note keeping, where I post things that I’ve learned, put random notes to, and provide some other stuff, maybe not too interesting for you.