ScalaUA 2018

About a week ago I visited Scala UA in Kiev. This was the schedule. It was a great conference once again, as it was already in 2017 and I really enjoyed everything, including the food, which was great again… 🙂 I listened to the following talks on the first day: Tales from the trenches, developing …

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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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Water pressure CPU

All kinds of technologies are being investigated to become the successor of our decades old silicon chip technology: quantum computing using light instead of electricity using other semiconductors than silicon … But it is funny that the most obvious approach has not been investigated until recently. Now it has been leaked that companies in east …

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Usability: ATMs

It is interesting, how difficult it can be to use a simple device such as an ATM („bankomat“ in most languages). Sometimes it is just annoying, sometimes it is really hard to get the machine working properly at all… So what are the typical use cases? I would say, 90% of the time the intention …

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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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Hidden CPUs

How many CPUs does your computer have? If we go way back, we will discover that some time ago there were already ancillary CPUs in our computers. The floppy disk drive of the C64 had a CPU very similar to the one in the computer itself, but very little memory and it was hard, though …

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When to use Scala and Ruby

There are many interesting languages that have their sweet spots and of course a larger set of languages than just two should be considered for new projects. But Ruby and Scala are both very interesting languages that did not just pick up and sell concepts that were already known, but brought them to a new …

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Carry Bit, Overflow Bit and Signed Integers

It has already been explained how the Carry Bit works for addition. Now there was interest in a comment about how it would work for negative numbers. The point is, that the calculation of the carry bit does not have any dependency on the sign. The nature of the carry bit is that it is …

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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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Java Properties Files and UTF-8

Java uses a nice pragmatic file format for simple configuration tasks and for internationalization of applications. It is called Java properties file or simply „.properties file“. It contains simple key value pairs. For most configuration task this is useful and easy to read and edit. Nested configurations can be expressed by simple using dots („.“) …

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