Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
I had a little research task today at work where I needed to evaluate which MySQL storage engine and technique would be the fastest to retrieve lots of (like millions) log data. I stumbled upon this post which explained the new horizontal partitioning features of MySQL 5.1 and what I ...
Posted in Free Software, Work | 3 Comments »
Friday, May 21st, 2010
If you haven't got the news already: The Federal Court of Justice in Germany recently declared software patentable without any reasonable limitation (German version on news service heise.de here and here).
While there are many efforts in the United States to fix the brokeness of their patent system - also in ...
Posted in Free Software | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
I was pointed yesterday to a page from the Free Software Foundation Europe (fsfe short) which describes the changes between the original and current draft for the "European Interoperatibility Framework" EIF - to quote the conclusion:
[...] we can only conclude that the European Commission is giving strong preference to the ...
Posted in Free Software, Standards | No Comments »
Monday, March 1st, 2010
Just in case you wonder why a simple sudo zypper install sometimes loads dozens or more unneeded, but possibly related packages, its not a bug, its a feature!
While Debian by default only hints you to these additional packages during the install phase, openSUSE installs them all by default. Try it ...
Posted in Free Software, openSUSE, Rants | 2 Comments »
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
I used to create packages for a couple of open source projects for the openSUSE Linux distribution. They have this really nice build service running on build.opensuse.org, on which you can - despite of its name - also build packages for other Linux distributions like Fedora, Gentoo or Debian.
While the ...
Posted in Free Software, MacPorts, openSUSE | No Comments »
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
I actually don't know where this guy got his name from, nor how exactly I stumbled upon him or his excellent book on Ruby, but one is for sure: He's one of those adorable people with more than one or two skills. You can already get this if you read ...
Posted in Coding, Free Software | No Comments »
Friday, January 9th, 2009
I was recently asked how to read encrypted emails securely in some untrusted environment via webmail. Imagine you're sitting on someone else' computer and absolutely need to check your inbox for this one encrypted email which contains a password without which you can't continue. Or you're in some internet cafe ...
Posted in Free Software, Life | 3 Comments »
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
So I wanted to make my application updater for guitone SSL-aware the other day. The server setup was an easy job: Add the new domain (guitone.thomaskeller.biz) to cacert.org, create a new certificate request with the new SubjectAltName (and all the other, existing alternative names - a procedure where this script ...
Posted in Coding, Free Software, Qt | No Comments »
Friday, July 11th, 2008
If you're a programmer and you're using a command line heavily, you've certainly come across a big nuisance in the usage of GNU's grep utility: The verbosity you need to exclude files from being searched, such as backup files (*~ or *#) or any kind of vcs inventory stupidity like ...
Posted in Coding, Free Software | 7 Comments »
Monday, May 26th, 2008
Its not that I'm a newbie, but sometimes I just feel that way. People start and talk in acronyms on IRC, and then it comes out that these acronyms stand for apparently famous people in the Free Software world I should know...
Lets start with an easy one: rms.
Yeah, that was ...
Posted in Coding, Free Software, Life | No Comments »
