IT Sky Consulting GmbH
In many countries of Europe we have to readjust our watches and clocks today, unless they do it automatically. It is interesting, that dealing with this has always been a great challenge for software engineers and a very high two digit percentage of software that in some way or other deals with time, does not …
Java uses a nice pragmatic file format for simple configuration tasks and for internationalization of applications. It is called Java properties file or simply „.properties file“. It contains simple key value pairs. For most configuration task this is useful and easy to read and edit. Nested configurations can be expressed by simple using dots („.“) …
„Java Properties Files and UTF-8“ weiterlesen
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 …
„Using non-ASCII-characters“ weiterlesen
In the old days of the web, more than 20 years ago, we found a possibility to write German Umlaut letters and a lot of other letters and symbols using pure ASCII. These are called „entities„, btw. Many people, including myself, started writing web pages using these transcriptions, in the assumption that they were required. …
„ä ö … in HTML“ weiterlesen
Deutsch Whoever is working with MS-Windows, should know these black windows with CMD running in them, even though they are not really popular. The Unix and Linux guys hate them, because they are really primitive compared to their shells. Windows guys like to work graphically. Or they prefer powershell or bash with cygwin. Linux and …
„MS-Windows-Encodings with CMD: Bug or Feature?“ weiterlesen
The PDF format has experienced a success story on its way from being a quasi proprietary format that could only be dealt with using Adobe tools to a format that is specified and standardized and can be dealt with using open source tools and tools from different vendors. It has become accepted that PDF is …
„PDF and PDF/A formats“ weiterlesen
Deutsch It is a nice thing to be able to use random access files and to have the possibility to efficiently move to any byte position for reading or writing. This is even true for text files that have a fixed number of bytes per character, for example exactly one, exactly two or exactly four …
„Random-Access and UTF-8“ weiterlesen
Deutsch Since about 20 years we have been kept busy with the change to Unicode. The good thing: We all know that Unicode and usually UTF-8 as representation is the way we should express textual data. The web is mostly UTF-8 today. But it has been a painful path and it still is sometimes. Why …
„Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1: Why is it so difficult?“ weiterlesen
Deutsch It is quite common that we need to enter a date into a software or read a date displayed by a software. Often it is paired with a time, forming a timestamp. This might be a birthday or the deadline of an IT project nobody likes to be reminded of or whatever. We deal …