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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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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Microsoft stops Windows Mobile

It seems that Microsoft is ending the development of Windows Mobile. After having tried with some effort to get into the mobile operating system business, it seems that the market share is now less than 1%, with Android being >85% and iOS close to 15% according to IDC. Because the market is so large, it …

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Shell Scripts

Shell scripts can be useful for writing small stuff like combining a few commands to pipes or doing a bit of „back ticking“. Even simple loops and if-conditions are possible. And if we want, it is almost a full programming language. A bit hard to tame, maybe, but quite a lot of stuff is possible. …

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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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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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