Numeric types in Perl

Dealing with numeric types in Perl is not as strait-forward as in other programming languages. We can use „scalars“ out of the box, but then we get floating point numbers, more precisely what is called „double“ in most programming languages. This is kind of ok for trivial programs, but we should make a deliberate choice …

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Scanning, sorting and processing large numbers of photos

I guess for most of us this is more an issue of their private life rather than done professionally, and those woo do this for money should already have answers for everything…. But the IT aspects of this are interesting anyway… So some of us, including me, have hundreds or thousands of photographs that have …

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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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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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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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How to create ISO Date String

It is a more and more common task that we need to have a date or maybe date with time as String. There are two reasonable ways to do this: * We may want the date formatted in the users Locale, whatever that is. * We want to use a generic date format, that is …

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Christmas 2015

Crăciun fericit − Natale hilare − ميلاد مجيد − God Jul! − Vesele bozicne praznike − Buon Natale − Mutlu Noeller − Честита Коледа − Glædelig Jul − Vesele Vianoce − Bon nadal − Merry Christmas − Срећан Божић − Gleðileg jól − Su Šventom Kalėdom − Bella Festas daz Nadal − Kellemes Karácsonyi Ünnepeket …

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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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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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