Automatic editing

For changing file contents, we often use editors. But sometimes it is a good idea to do this from a script and do a change to many files at once or do the same kind of changes often. The classic approach to this is using sed, which is made exactly for this purpose. But most …

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Git for Linux System Engineering

Now that git has become the standard version control software, which is used by software developers. Now for system engineering and system administration purposes it used to be an approach to just login and do something and remember it or even note it somewhere. Some people tried to just use RCS or SCCS on the …

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How to calculate Square Roots and Cubic Roots

The functions sqrt and sometimes even cbrt are commonly available, but it is nice to see how they can be calculated. There are several approaches, but the most popular ones are Newton’s method and an algorithmic formulation of how roots are taken manually, for those old enough to still have learned it in school. Earlier …

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LongDecimal

Disclaimer: This article is an occasion, where you might need some of the presumably useless mathematics that you might have learned in school and university. If this bothers you, maybe you should wait for the next article in about two weeks time. LongDecimal is a library that I have provided for Ruby. It is available …

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TruffleRuby

The language Ruby is one of the most beautiful languages. A lot of things can be done, it has a good level of abstraction, it has chosen some very good defaults, has provided some great ideas that I have not discovered in any other language that I know well and provides a lot of flexibility. …

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Why am I learning Python

To be honest, what can be done with Python can also be done with Perl or Ruby. I am not working in areas, where there is much better library support for Python than for Perl or Ruby. And I like Perl and Ruby very much and I am somewhat skeptical about Python. But there are …

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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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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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