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2020-09-16
I’ve been using the Swiss keyboard layout for most of my life. Things changed when I first had to work on a Mac Book. If the Swiss keyboard layout is not great for programming on a usual keyboard, because it requires combinations with Alt-Gr to type in braces and brackets, I consider the Mac version of it outright horrible, because braces and brackets are located on the digits row. Those symbols are not even painted onto their respective keys, which makes the transition for non-Mac users even harder.
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2020-09-12
A week ago, I’ve installed OpenBSD on my Thinkpad. I’ve been using it now and then, and already have changed a couple of things in respect to the original setup described in the article. I also installed OpenBSD on the Dell Optiplex on which I previously installed FreeBSD a month before. This means that I’m no longer using FreeBSD on the desktop, at least not for the moment. However, FreeBSD is running on a disk station I built earlier this summer.
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2020-09-05
Let’s install OpenBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad X270. I used this computer for my computer science studies. It has both Arch Linux and Windows 10 installed as dual boot. Now that I’m no longer required to run Windows, I can ditch the dual boot and install an operating system of my choice.
Preparation First, I grab my work Thinkpad running Arch Linux and some USB dongle big enough for the amd64 miniroot image (roughly five megabytes, that is).
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2020-08-11
I’m a happy user of Arch Linux both on my private computers and on my work laptop. I even managed to get through four years of university with my setup, and only had to bring a Windows machine on some rare occasions, even though some professors are openly hostile towards a Linux setup. (It doesn’t run Microsoft Project and the real Excel, after all…)
Recently, I got interested in the BSDs, especially in OpenBSD and in FreeBSD.
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2020-08-05
In my last article, I outlined the purpose of a stock program: a non-trivial coding exercise to be done in every new programming language somebody is learning. I also stated that «Four in a Row» is becoming my personal stock program, and that I’d like to implement it in Haskell.
The main challenge in Haskell is the functional programming paradigm. Immutability is the main difference between an implementation of «Four in a Row» in a functional programming language compared to rather structured programming languages such as C or Python.
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2020-08-03
In a recent interview, Brian W. Kernighan said that he always re-implements the same program when he’s learning a new programming language. In his case, it’s a programm to process a text file containing a variable number of lines. In this task, his programming language AWK (Kernighan is the «K» in «AWK») shines, for it was designed for that kind of a task.
Such a stock program allows to evaluate a programming language from a certain perspective.
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2020-08-01
I’d like to dig deeper into system administration tasks. At work, I have to manage a fleet of Linux servers with Puppet. And in my spare time, I’d like to manage the servers I run with Ansible or Puppet in the future.
Virtual Machines are easily obtained nowadays. Cloud providers such as Digital Ocean or Exoscale offer virtual machines with various operating systems at rather moderate prices. You only have to pay for the time the virtual machines are actually running, so you can save money by shutting those hosts down when not needed.
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2020-07-22
Many universities teach programming in Java. Writing unit tests is one of the subjects being taught. Many professional Java programmers, but also university professors, suggest to build those test cases according to a pattern. Given, When, Then is a common pattern, and so is Arrange, Act, Assert. Both patterns prescribe the following structure for a test case:
Given/Arrange: An environment (in the broadest sense) is built up. When/Act: The function or method to be tested is invoked.
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04.07.2020
Ich habe diesen Frühling Heute schon einen Prozess optimiert? von Gunter Dueck gelesen. Der Autor beschreibt in diesem Buch, wie in Deutschland (und im ähnlichen Stil wohl auch in anderen Ländern) derzeit Prozessoptimiertung überall das Gebot der Stunde ist. Historisch gesehen habe man das Wirtschaftswachstum seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg vor allem Prozessoptimierungen im zweiten Wirtschaftssektor (in der Industrie) zu verdanken. Die Autos, die wir heute fahren, unterscheiden sich nicht grundlegend von denjenigen, die vor 50 Jahren produziert worden sind.
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28.06.2020
Ich verwende seit 2005 hauptsächlich Linux als Betriebssystem. Dabei habe ich schon Erfahrungen mit verschiedenen Distributionen sammeln können. Meistens hatte ich eine Hauptdistribution, die praktisch auf all meinen Rechnern installiert war. Dies ändert sich jetzt vielleicht. Doch der Reihe nach…
Mandrake: Wie alles begann Meine ersten Erfahrungen mit Linux habe ich im Jahr 2004 gemacht. Alles begann damit, dass eMule (das damals wichtigste File-Sharing-Tool, das einen Stellenwert hatte, wie es heute BitTorrent hat) auf dem Windows-Rechner der Familie nicht mehr richtig funktionierte.