Today, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group released their first beta of PostgreSQL 8.3.
It has a pretty number of improvements which want to be tested. 
Technorati Tags: postgresql
Author Archive for Simon
Wincent Colaitua has written an interesting, worth reading blog post why functional programming could become more and more important in the future.
Note to myself: Have a deeper look at Haskell.
Technorati Tags: functional programming
A few months ago I wrote about a mechanism which allowed simple Pattern Matching with NSPredicate.
Although it is a good method to check if a string matches a Regular Expression it lacks a lot of features you normally expect while you’re doing something with Regular Expressions, such as capturing subpatterns or doing search and replace.
Philip Hazel (who also wrote my favourite SMTP server, Exim created a library called PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions) a long time ago which implements the Regular Expression syntax used in Perl (sometimes I miss that time) for the C Programming Language.
While PCRE is great for doing Regular Expressions in C, it’s usage with Objective-C is some kind of cumbersome as NSString objects must be converted to plain C strings and back again.
But recently John Engelhart released an alpha version of his PCRE-based RegexKit framework, which provides a sweet object-oriented interface to Regular Expressions. It looks very mature and there is also a very good documentation available.
Thank you very much, John!
Technorati Tags: objective-c, regular expressions
I started this project because I was faced with the following problem:
Let’s say you want to plan a skat tournament with 12 players and you have four tables available. So three players are sitting on every table playing one round against each other. After a round the players are changing their seats so that no player is playing against an opponent he or she already played against.
The question now is: Can I arrange my players in a way so that every player is playing five times and not playing against an other player twice? And if so, how would this arrangment look like?
Technorati Tags: combination, skat tournament
Continue reading ‘Brute Forcing best Arrangement for a Skat Tournament’
Although I’m in my semester break now I hardly can find any time to get my things done. During the day I’m working and in the evening I currently don’t know where to find additional time to get on with my personal projects.
The last months I repeatedly heard about a concept called Getting Things Done developed by David Allen.
According to what I have read about this concept so far and what people say who are planning their time according to GTD, it increases productivity by simultaneously decreasing your stress-level. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Well, I just ordered my copy of Allen’s book Getting Things Done to try it on my own. I’ll let you know if it worked for me.
Technorati Tags: getting things done
I am currently working on a interesting project written in C (more about the project in a few days or weeks) which requires a very clean memory management. I decided to write it in C because it does pretty long and complex calculations and I wanted to do it fast. But using C also means to do the whole memory management by myself. This can be a very hard job especially if a program is very memory-intensive.
Technorati Tags: MallocDebug, memory leaks
Since my old PGP/GnuPG keypair expired, I created a new one. The new public key can be found here.
Recently I called a hotline of a not-so-small software company because I had a question regarding an order I placed a few days ago.
As expected a nice computer voice read out a endless list of possibilities from which I had to choose from.
Technorati Tags: hotline
Recently I was flooded with e-mails a friend sent me. Mails with PowerPoint or PDF attachments of hundreds of kilobytes with jokes. Although I told him to stop this he ignored me and continued sending me this crap.
I could create a rule in Mail.app which deletes such mails but that wouldn’t help as the rule mechanism only works with received mails. But I don’t even want to have to download them.
A better solution is to let the mail server (here Exim) deny such mails while they are delivered.
Technorati Tags: Exim
Continue reading ‘Block specific e-mail addresses with Exim’
About a year ago I first got in contact with Ruby on Rails. I don’t know anymore what fascinated me more, Ruby itself or the “on Rails” framework. But that doesn’t matter, it just felt so good. I did a project with Ruby on Rails and it was a great experience how fast Web Application Development can be. But unfortunately Ruby isn’t (yet?) as widespread as PHP on webservers, so doing it the on-Rails-way was limited to this one project. But then I I found the symfony framework a open source web framework for PHP.
Technorati Tags: php, ruby on rails, framework
Continue reading ‘Doing Web Application Development the right way’
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