Will Java, C, C++ and C# be the new Cobols?

A few decades ago most programming was performed in Cobol (I do not want to shout it), Fortran, Rexx and some typical main frame languages, that hardly made it to the Linux-, Unix- or MS-Windows-world. They are still present, but mostly used for maintenance and extension of existing software, but less often for writing new …

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Oracle buys the NSA

Wonderful coincidences have been discovered. The NSA has excellent technological knowledge, especially in the area of storing and processing huge amount of data. And the US government wants to move one step ahead with privatization of state run activities. So the US government and the Oracle corporation have agreed to sell the NSA to Oracle. …

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Frameworks for Unit Testing and Mocking

Unit testing has fortunately become an important issue in many software projects. The idea of automatic software based unit and integration tests is actually quite old. The typical Linux software that is downloaded as source code and then built with steps like tar xfzvv «software-name-with-version».tar.gz cd «software-name-with-version» ./configure make sudo make install often allows a …

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The Language Issue

I had started a poll about the issue if this blog should be written in German or in English. I would consider it a tie, but I have established the habit of writing this blog in English and translating a small fraction of the articles to German and I will keep it like that for …

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Perl Training in Switzerland

Very soon we will have the opportunity to participate in advanced Perl trainings and even some trainings about presentations. Here are the Details. I found these trainings useful, when I visited them. They are done by Damian Conway, one of the core developers of the Perl programming language. The courses will be held in English. …

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Microsoft SQL Server will be available for Linux in 2017

Deutsch Microsoft has officially announced that their database MS SQL Server will become available for Linux in 2017. I think the time has come for this. Since the departure of Steve Ballmer Microsoft has become a little bit less religous and more pragmatic. There are good reasons to be skeptical about companies like Microsoft and …

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How to make a scanned PDF smaller (Linux)

When scanning a paper, it is possible to use a lot of parameters within xsane. The output format can be chosen also, for example PNG, JPG or PDF. The outcome may be a PDF-file that is way too big, easily more than 10 megabytes for a single page. It is quite easy to transform it …

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Chemnitzer Linux-Tage

In the German city Chemnitz the conference „Chemnitzer Linux-Tage“ (Chemnitz Linux days) will take place from 2016-03-19 to 2016-03-20. Links: * Informatik aktuell (German) * Wikipedia (German) * Offiical page (German)

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Laziness

In conservative circles, laziness has a slightly negative connotation, but in IT it should be seen positive, if we understand it right. If we as humans get our job done in a more efficient way, by working less, this laziness is a good thing. So let’s be lazy by becoming more efficient. For now, just …

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Update of captcha-Plugin does not work

My wordpress installation suggested the update of a plugin for captcha, but it actually failed with an error message mentioning permissions and the files „captcha/cache/index.php“ and „captcha/cache/.htaccess“. What did help: In the directory of the wordpress-installation go to wp-content/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/captcha/cache Then delete the files index.php and .htaccess Make a backup of them outside of the wordpress …

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