Published on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 6:08 am .
For the long 4th of July weekend Thilo and I have planned to do a nice little road trip from Cupertino to Las Vegas.
With our rented Pontiac convertible we headed east on Thursday short after noon and of course we hit the first traffic jam just one hour later. Fortunately, that was the only traffic jam on our tour before we arrived in Las Vegas ten hours later.
As we drove through the Death Valley we had about 106°F in the middle of the night and during the day it was hardly possible to walk around in Vegas without a hat, enough water and a strong belief in survival.
Driving through the Strip at night is very impressive and is unimaginable how much money all these swanky hotels and casinos must have been cost.
And indeed, everything is very expensive. If you don’t want to live on fast food a lunch or a nice dinner could eat up your budget for the slot machines.
Visiting Las Vegas for three days was great but I wouldn’t want to stay there much longer. If you don’t have the money for seeing shows or do other fun (and therefore expensive) things you’d probably stay in the hotel or casino (not gambling) for most of the time which becomes pretty boring sooner or later.
Thanks to Thilo for that amazing road trip and an awesome time in Vegas!
Here are a few pictures.
Published on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 7:24 am .
Thilo, a friend from Germany arrived on Saturday in San Francisco. After cruising around the Bay Area with a rented convertible we were on the watch for some more fun.
We stumbled across the website of iFly, a indoor skydiving facility. That looks great!
Unfortunately, they are booked up until Wednesday. I’ll let you know how fun this is!
Update: Although it was kind of expensive (2 mins for $49) it was awesome! And it is harder than it looks. 
Published on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 2:59 am .
I started using version control management systems with CVS several years ago.
But soon it was clear that using Subversion instead of CVS would make version control a lot less cumbersome and error prone process. And for the last years Subversion was the system of my choice.
But then I saw Linus Torvalds’ Tech Talk speak at Google about his new version control system called Git.
Although Linus’ talk was a little bit offensive on other version control systems I liked the idea of Git being a distributed system. Other features like the true ease of branching/merging or its speed made it even more attractive.
So I played around with it for a while and I started to like it. This weekend I decided to switch all my Subversion managed projects to Git.
There are some good tools that come with Git which make this process very easy. I don’t want to give another tutorial how to move your Subversion to Git. There are a lot of websites that do that.
But here are some links which helped me doing the transition:
Published on Monday, April 28, 2008 at 2:34 am .
It’s been six week since I started interning at Apple and it is still overwhelming when I ride down the Infinite Loop to building 3.
All the people are very nice and helpful and everybody seems to love what he/she is doing. So do I. The projects I got are highly interesting and - what I really appreciate - they are of real use, not just to keep the intern busy. I also really like the freedom which I have in realizing the projects.
The next important thing: the food at Apple. I think Cafe Macs is one of the best known cafeterias, at least in the Macintosh world. The food is delicious and multifaceted. From salads, pizzas, burgers over sushi, burritos and pasta, they have anything you need (ok, sometimes I’d like to have a some swabian food like Spätzle but hey, I can eat that, when I’m back in Germany).
What I really like at Cafe Macs is that you can also have dinner there, so you don’t have to drive around to get some food in the evening.
A fellow student who interns in Palo Alto drives down to Cupertino once a week just to have lunch in Cafe Macs.
And yes, once I saw Steve having lunch there, too.
The next thing I really like here in the Silicon Valley is the nice weather. During the time I’ve been living here we had only two rainy days and the temperatures are usually between 66 and 78 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve never been a guy who cared a lot about the weather, but now, since I have to ride 3 miles to work with the bike every day I really appreciate it.
Currently there are about 30 interns at Apple, but there will be like 350 interns in the summer. Apple really cares a lot about their interns. It seems like that interns are normal employees with 3 or 6 month contract and that’s what I really like. As an intern you get most of the benefits a normal employee would get: discounts, massages, access to the Apple gym, and internal events. There also will be trips in the summer and a lots of events just for the interns. Not to forget to mention the Executive Talks where Interns will have to opportunity to talk to Apple executives (Steve will be there, too). I’m really thrilled about that and what happens the next few months.
All in all, I think getting the Internship at Apple is one of the best things that could have happened to me and I’m really afraid of the day I have to leave one of the best companies in the world.
Published on Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 10:29 pm .
They did it! Today Apple released a beta version of the iPhone/iPod touch SDK for developers to create their own applications for these devices. The final SDK is about to be released in June this year.
Unfortunately Apples ADC website seems to be overstrained at the moment with all the developers trying to download the SDK.
Published on Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 10:18 pm .
After I bought a Garmin outdoor GPS device last week I was looking around the web for some additional information about GPS.
What I found was a website about geocaching. I didn’t know what geocaching is before so here are a few words about it:
Continue reading ‘My first Geocache’
Published on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 3:06 pm .
It’s been a dream for me for the last several years but now it’s really getting real: I will be doing an Internship at Apple! That’s really cool and I’m totally thrilled about it.
In less than two weeks I’ll be leaving Germany and heading for sunny Cupertino for half a year to work at the Build & Integration department at Apple. Oh, you cannot imagine how excited I am. 
Published on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 12:50 pm .
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of version 8.3 of the high-performance object-relational database management system. This release includes a record number of new and improved features which will greatly enhance PostgreSQL for application designers, database administrators, and users, with more than 280 patches by dozens of PostgreSQL contributors from 18 countries.
Published on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 9:36 pm .
On March 8, 2008 the Cocoa Dev House Munich will take place at equinux AG in Munich. There are already nearly 30 attendees on the list and I hope that I can write my name on that list soon, too.
Published on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 9:20 pm .
Implementing syntax highlighting can be a painful task. Lots of regular expressions and thinking may be required to master this.
On the search for an easy way to implement a syntax highlighting mechanism for NSTextView I found an easy and fast (regarding runtime) way to do this. By using flex (a tool with its roots in the 1970’s) defining the rules of what should be highlighted makes it a lot more easier and structured.
flex is the GNU version of lex, the lexical analyzer generator (Buzzword jackpot!) developed by Eric Schmidt and Mike Lesk in 1975. By defining some rules (mainly regular expressions) it generates a C program which allows us to scan through a text and do something with the text, e.g. divide it into tokens. Tokens are chunks of characters with a special meaning (as defined in our rules). Confused? Read on, this concept will become very clear soon.
In this article I want to show you how we can use this ancient but very powerful tool to implement a basic syntax highlighting within a NSTextView.
Continue reading ‘Syntax Highlighting for NSTextView with flex’
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