Bring your own Device

This issue is quite controversial and it applies to laptops, tablets and smart phones. Usually the „bringing“ is not really an issue, you can have anything in your bags and connect it via the mobile phone network as long as it does not absorb the working time. But usually this implies a bit more. There …

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tmp-directories

On all computers we have some concept of a tmp-directory. Typically it is /tmp on Linux- and Unix-systems and something like C:/TEMP plus some subdirectory in each users home directory on MS-Windows. In terms of software development this tends to be some dark area. Programs like to create some files there, store some stuff there …

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Powerful API Functions or Specific API Functions?

When designing APIs we should confront ourselves with the question what they should look like, what they should contain and what not. This is not mostly a question about development effort, but about creating a good API that can be used and save us development effort elsewhere. There are always simple answers, but in the …

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WannaCry or better learn from it?

The malware WannaCry became quite well known, especially because it manifested itself on the displays of the German federal railroad and it even blocked most of the hospital infrastructure in the UK. Find some discussion on Bruce Schneier’s Blog… You find a a href=“https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/05/did_north_korea_1.html“>more elaborate article on his blog as well. Read Bruce’s blog article, …

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ScalaUA 2017

About a month ago I visted the conference ScalaUA in Kiev. This was the schedule. It was a great conference and I really enjoyed everything, including the food, which is quite unusual for an IT-conference.. 🙂 I listened to the following talks: First day: Kappa Architecture, Juantomás García Molina 50 shades of Scala Compiler, Krzysztof …

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Using non-ASCII-characters

Some of us still remember the times when it was recommended to avoid „special characters“ when writing on the computer. Some keyboards did not contain „Umlaut“-characters in Germany and we fell back to the ugly, but generally understandable way of replacing the German special characters like this: ä->ae, ö->oe, ü->ue, ß->sz or ß->ss. This was …

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Tablet Computers

The idea of tablet computers is actually quite old and it has been tried a couple of times, at least up to prototypes. Probably a certain level of hardware and software was needed to make them both useful and affordable for enough people to become a mass product. This is actually a quite common thing. …

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User Friendliness

I have made an interesting observation in terms of user friendliness. Let’s call it an anti-pattern… I had booked a flight in the internet. Now the ticket was a number, which they sent to me by SMS. I went to the page of the airline and tried to do the check-in, in order to get …

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Eatable Devices

Wearable devices have become normal and it is hard to buy clothes these days that do not actually belong to this category. If you don’t know, the NSA knows. The new trend are eatable devices. It has been quite a challenge to create chips and batteries that can be chewed and swallowed without pain and …

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Do we still need Experts when everything is in the Internet

We find a lot of information about pretty much everything on the internet. We do not have to remember things because we are always online and always able to find the information we are looking for. It is true. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. Wikipedia, Google, Forums and of course specific …

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