Microsoft laying off 18000 employees after announced loss

Deutsch It looks like Stephen Elop’s und Steve Ballmer’s idea to take over the mobile phone branch of Nokia in order to bring MS-Windows as mobile operating system on the success road has failed and will be stopped now. For the mobile phone branch that is now part of Microsoft, Microsoft-CEO Satya Nadella announced, that …

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Conversion of ASCII-graphics to PNG or JPG

Images are usually some obscure binary files. Their most common formats, PNG, SVG, JPEG and GIF are well documented and supported by many software tools. Libraries and APIs exist for accessing these formats, but also a phantastic free interactive software like Gimp. The compression rate that can reasonably be achieved when using these format is …

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System Programming on Linux and MS-Windows

Quite honestly I admit that I really love the Posix-APIs for system programming and even some Linux specific extensions to it. I/O, Locking, Semaphores, Shared Memory, Message Queues, Signals, named and anonymous pipes, Unix Domain Sockets, TCP/IP programming, Terminal I/O, pthreads and a lot more are very powerful and fun to program. I do discover …

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Future for IT-Contractors

Deutsch Some of us are working in IT. And there you can finde some working models. You can work directly as employee of the company whose work you are doing. You can work as contractor (freelancer), with one of several slightly different setups, depending on the country. Or you can work as an employee of …

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Scala Days 2015

I have visited Scala Days 2015 in Amsterdam. As usual, I took the night train to get there and back. Creative Scala Prior to the conference we did a training session for Scala beginners together with underscore. Some volunteers, including myself, joined the effort and so we were actually more teachers than students. It was …

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Update of WordPress

Deutsch The update of WordPress and its Plugins did not really work. A small change helped a lot: In .htaccess put the following line to the beginning of the file: AddHandler php56-cgi .php … Then all updates seemed to work fine. Maybe this helps others observing the same problem.

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Find the next entry in a sequence

In Facebook, Xing, Google+, Vk.com, Linkedin and other of these social media networks we are often encountered with a trivial question like this: 1->2 2->8 3->18 4->32 5->50 6->72 7->? There are some easy patterns. Either it is some polynomial formula or some trick with the digits. But the point is, that any such sequence …

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Thread local variables

The idea of threads is to share almost all information between the threads of the same process. This implies more effort to avoid creating inconsistencies by simultaneous access to the same data. But sometimes it is necessary to have data private to one thread. This is usually easily accomplished by just using local variables and …

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How to multiply long numbers

Assuming we have a multiplication of n-bit-numbers already available. Other than typical compiled languages, which assume that the multiplication result fits into the same size as the two factors, we should take a closer look. Unsigned n-bit-numbers as factors and fullfill         So we have for the product     So we …

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Testing Java- and C-programs with Ruby and Perl

It is very important to write good unit tests for software that is non-trivial and that is relied on by other pieces of software. Often the logic of the software can easily be covered by the native testing facilities of the programming language, like JUnit for Java or, much less well known but available, CUnit …

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