We use our computers and other devices everywhere. While phones are of course equipped with a SIM card that at least part of the time allows relatively cheap internet access via the GSM-network (of course today UMTS or LTE or whatever comes next), laptops usually do not have SIM cards, even though they could. So …
Autor-Archive: bk1
Do it yourself..
We often observe that something that needed help by an employee is now done by ourselves. Our automobile-affine friends have to fill in gasoline themselves since the seventies in Germany and now even the payment is often done with cards, so that there is no human on site, but only video surveillance, I assume. In …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …