Unicode and C

It is a common practice in C to use arrays of char as strings. The 0 is used as end marker. The whole thing was created like that in the 1970s and at that time it was kind of cool to get away with one less language feature and to express it in terms of …

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Tips and Tricks: Typing Unicode

I found this on netzwolf.info: You can enter arbitrary Unicode characters (more precisely code points) in X11 on Linux, if you know their Hex-Code: Press Shift-Ctrl (keep them pressed) Press also the letter u Release the Ctrl-Key Release the u-key Keep the Shift-key pressed Enter the Hex-Code of the Code point with the number of …

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Tip: how to make Thunderbird use ISO Date Format

After an upgrade, my Thnderbird started to use a weird US-date format and forgot my setting for this. I did not find any setting either. But this seems to work fine: Create a shell script #!/bin/bash export LC_TIME=sv_SE.utf8 export LC_DATE=sv_SE.utf8 exec /usr/bin/thunderbird and make sure that this gets called when thunderbird is started instead of …

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Logging

Deutsch Software often contains a logging functionality. Usually entries one or sometimes multiple lines are appended to a file, written to syslog or to stdout, from where they are redirected into a file. They are telling us something about what the software is doing. Usually we can ignore all of it, but as soon as …

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LF and CR LF in git and svn

Typically we observe that line endings of text file turn out to be „linefeed“ (LF or „\n“ or 0x0a or Ctrl-J) on Linux and Unix-like systems (including MacOSX), while they are „carriage return and linefeed“ (CR LF or „\r\n“ or 0x0d 0x0a or Ctrl-M Ctrl-J) on MS-Windows. See the little obstacles of interoperability. This can …

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Microsoft is buying Github

It seems that Microsoft is buying Github for about 7.5 billion USD worth in their own stock. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Probably no reason to celebrate, but Microsoft under Nadella seems to run a totally different strategy than Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. Selling licenses of MS-Windows and MS-Office is probably …

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The little obstacles of interoperability

Deutsch A lot of things in today’s IT landscape have been unified and interoperability is much better than 20 years ago. Some examples: Networking: Today networking is TCP/IP. Even the physical cables with RJ45/Ethernet and the wireless networks have been standardized and all kinds of devices can use the same networks. In the old days …

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Encryption of Disks

Today we should use encryption of disks for many situations. I recommend at least encrypting disks of portable computers that contain the home directory and portable USB disks. They can easily get stolen or lost and it is better if the thief does not have easy access to the content. We should even consider encrypting …

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Daylight Saving

In many countries of Europe we have to readjust our watches and clocks today, unless they do it automatically. It is interesting, that dealing with this has always been a great challenge for software engineers and a very high two digit percentage of software that in some way or other deals with time, does not …

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Source Code of Apple-iOS leaked

It seems that the parts of the source code of Apple’s iOS 9 have leaked via github. They might have been removed from there, while you are reading this, but probably they will be passed around in the internet anyway. Some sources say that this is a risk to security. It might be, but in …

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