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Building PostgreSQL on Leopard

As you might know the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is currently working on the final version of the PostgreSQL Database Management System (DBMS) 8.3 which has some nice features. Unfortunately, there is no prebuilt package available for Mac OS X of the current beta versions. But fortunately building PostgreSQL is very easy on Leopard:

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Leopard and Adobe Creative Suite 3

If you plan to use Adobe Creative Suite 3 on Mac OS X Leopard make sure that the filesystem Creative Suite is installed on is Mac OS Extended (Journaling), and NOT Mac OS Extendend (case-sensitive, Journaling).
Otherwise, the Creative Suite installer ends with an error message which says that the filesystem is not supported, argh. :(

Third party applications on iPhone and iPod touch

Today, Steve Jobs announced a native SDK for their mobile OS X devices (iPhone and iPod touch).
This SDK allows third-party developers to create their own applications running natively on the iPhone and iPod touch.
Apple plans “to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February”. Well, that sounds very interesting. :-)

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PostgreSQL 8.3 beta 1 out!

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. ;)

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Wincent Colaitua on functional programming

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.

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Full Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions in Objective-C

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!

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Brute Forcing best Arrangement for a Skat Tournament

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?

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Getting Things Done, Hopefully…

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.

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Locating Memory Leaks with MallocDebug

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.

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New PGP/GnuPG public key available

Since my old PGP/GnuPG keypair expired, I created a new one. The new public key can be found here.