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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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2018-12-16
Programming is the process of writing code in order to solve a problem. Software Engineering is programming, combined with the factors time and other programmers. (I owe this insight to Russ Cox.)
Tests cannot prove the correctness of a program. A test case makes sure that a couple of hand-picked values from the input set are mapped correctly to a …