Git is one of those tools with a thousand uses. Now, it’ s 1001. Stefan Wehrmeyer has started to put texts of German laws into Git to make it easier to track changes.
Related articles:
BundesGit: Tracking Law Changes With Git
10. August, 2012
Leave a Comment » | 
Philosophy, Software | Tagged: GIT, Law | 
Permalink
Posted by digulla
Das Netz vergisst nichts!
9. August, 2012Netter Comic für junge Leute, die sich wundern, wo denn das Problem bei Facebook und Co liegt: Das Netz vergisst nichts!
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: German, Surveillance | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Takedown Instead of Touchdown
7. August, 2012Scripps News Service (one company of the E. W. Scripps Group. The same group owns United Media who publishes the famous Dilbert comic strip) sent YouTube a DMCA takedown notice claiming they were owning the copyright of one of the videos in NASA’s YouTube channel (again).
It’s like Einstein said: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
But now we have computers to bring dumbness to whole new levels.
Related:
- “NASA’s Mars Rover Crashed Into a DMCA Takedown” by Alex Pasternack
Leave a Comment » | Fun | Tagged: Curiosity, Fun, NASA, YouTube | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Terminal plug-in for Eclipse
6. August, 2012If you’re like me, then you’re spending a lot of time using console windows because some tasks are just so much more efficient (recalling old commands, pipes, …). If you use Eclipse, you will always struggle to squeeze the terminal window on the screen somewhere.
To help with this situation, Google has developed a plug-in to embed a command-line terminal into your workspace: ELT
It currently supports Linux (x86 32 and 64 bit) and Mac OS X (PPC, x86 32 and 64 bit) only. ANSI escape sequences (incl. color codes) are supported as well a hyperlinks.
2 Comments | Software | Tagged: Eclipse, ELT, Terminal | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Order Your Own Mecha
3. August, 2012Ever wanted to pilot one of those huge robots from Japanese Anime? Here is your chance:
Training video:
I especially liked “the system will fire when the pilot smiles. This feature is called ‘THE SMILE SHOT’. You will be able to take out all enemies with a single smile. Be sure not to cause a shooting spree by smiling too much!” 😉
And all that for a mere $2,051,200 US (with all extras enabled)!
Order form (needs flash)
Leave a Comment » | Fun | Tagged: Fun | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Symphony of Science
31. July, 2012When I reach to the edge of the universe
I do so knowing that along some paths of cosmic discovery
There are times when, at least for now,
One must be content to love the questions themselves— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Symphony of Science is a YouTube channel where they mix awe-inspiring images with vocalized texts. It’s a bit hard to explain but easy to understand. Watch this:
Leave a Comment » | Fun, Philosophy | Tagged: Fun, Symphony of Science, YouTube | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Excellent Explanation of PermGen Issues
27. July, 2012If you develop web apps, you have encountered java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen.
Nikita Salnikov-tarnovski wrote an excellent article where these come from and how to solve them: Busting PermGen Myths
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: Java, Memory Leaks, OutOfMemoryError, PermGen | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Musicians Need Strong Copyright Laws to be as Successful as They Already Are
25. July, 2012When I read “Britain’s share of the global music market is higher than ever” (source) and “We can only realise this potential if we have a strong domestic copyright”, I can’t help but wonder: Isn’t the industry so successful because they have the today’s laws?
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: Copyright, Law | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Software Development Costs: Bugfixing
21. July, 2012(Second part of three; first part is here)
Software has bugs – there simply is no way to avoid them. If you can’t avoid them, maybe you can handle them efficiently? Yes, you can:
As you can see, the cost of fixing bugs rises as time passes. Why is that?
There are many reasons:
- When you find a bug a couple of minutes after you created it, you probably still have all the information in your head that is necessary to understand and fix it.
- If you just created the bug, no code depends on it. As soon as you start writing unit tests and more code, fixing becomes more expensive because you start to have dependencies.
- People might have gotten used to the bug and developed workarounds. If you fix the bug, this will have an impact on them.
- A bug found in production is likely to be reported by a customer. Customers can’t see inside of your software, so extra effort will have to be spent to determine what the actual problem is. Google for “how to report bugs“
- When a bug is discovered at the customer, it might trigger meetings and scapegoat hunting. Think of it this way: A 1 hour 8 person meeting costs about $1’000. And no bug was ever fixed in a meeting.
- Some bugs escalate to the top-level management. Imagine for a moment what it would mean for you if their CEO called your CEO to complain about a problem you caused.
- Bugs might break expensive things, harm or even kill people or start World War 3.
This also explains why unit testing is so much more efficient to QA testing for many kinds of bugs: It simply catches them before they spread their bad influence.
So fix your bugs early, OK?
Related articles:
1 Comment | Software | Tagged: Agile, Agile Development, Agile software development, Software Development | Permalink
Posted by digulla
CBI or Taking The Pain out of Eclipse Builds
20. July, 2012When a project is young and dashing, mistakes are made. The PDE build process is such a mistake. If you ever tried to build Eclipse (or at least some of the older parts), then you know that this is brittle and the error messages are more like mysterious ramblings of an angry deity than helpful.
Enter stage CBI. From the FAQ:
The CBI build of the Eclipse platform is intended to produce the same output as the PDE build, and thus facilitate packaging without noticeable change. The noticeable difference the CBI build of the platform makes is ease of use to build the platform. For example, the prototype has consistently demonstrated that a newcomer without prior experience can build the Eclipse platform with under 30 minutes of effort on a machine with a supported JDK & Maven.
What can I say?
Finally!
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: CBI, Eclipse, Maven, PDE, Tycho | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Dark Views 