The reality of Stefan Scholl

New Blogging Software

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 14:05:00 GMT

Had to change the blogging software again. Blogger isn't offering FTP publishing anymore and I was searching for months to find a fitting solution.

In the end I "just" wrote a new blogging software for myself.

I have no intention in publishing it, because there are so many blogging engines out there, that you don't need another one which only barely fits your own requirements.

Lessons learned:

You can't rely on any free service on the net.
Nothing fits your requirements 100%.
Customizing existing blogging engines is as much effort as writing one yourself
You don't need all the features.

And again: Sorry if the feed shows old posts as new.

LHC explained

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:22:00 GMT

So, the LHC is on the news again. If you have missed it last year, don't miss it this time:

Large Hadron Rap

Getting the old open tab behavior back into Firefox 3.6

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:13:00 GMT

Set browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false.

99 Bottles of Beer in Factor

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:38:00 GMT

99 Bottles of Beer in Factor.

A naïve implementation from someone who is just beginning to (re)learn the language and doesn't want to (nor can) show off the flashy features, like so many other examples of 99 Bottles of Beer.

USING: combinators io kernel make math math.parser sequences ;
IN: 99bottles

: bottles ( n -- str )
  {
      { 0 [ "no more bottles" ] }
      { 1 [ "1 bottle" ] }
      [ number>string " bottles" append ]
  } case ;

: verse-0 ( n -- )
  drop
  "No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.
Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall."
  print ;

: verse-n ( n -- )
  [ dup bottles % " of beer on the wall, " % dup bottles %
      " of beer.\nTake one down and pass it around, " %
      1 - bottles % " of beer on the wall.\n" % ] "" make
  print ;

: verse ( n -- )
  dup 0 number= [ verse-0 ] [ verse-n ] if ;

: 99bottles ( -- )
  100 reverse [ verse ] each ;

MAIN: 99bottles

Flash Gordon and NoSQL

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:05:00 GMT

No matter if they say that MongoDB got its name from "humongous", for me it's the planet Mongo from Flash Gordon.

Other blogging software, again

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:37:00 GMT

It was time again to change the blogging software. Sorry if the newsfeed is showing old messages as new.

Nice Anti Register Globals Code

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:45:00 GMT

Found in Textpattern:


     if (@ini_get('register_globals'))
        foreach ( $_REQUEST as $name => $value )
                  unset($$name);

Benchmarks are merciless

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:18:00 GMT

A number 1/4 for A vs. B means that B is 4 times slower than A.

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game is more a community benchmark than a programming language benchmark. You get some ballpark figures that confirm what you already know beforehand: C++ is faster than Ruby :-)

But it's still depressing to see that a current implementation of JavaScript is faster than Python.

IE is not a current browser!

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:39:00 GMT

It's an OS extension that got recently updated to support over 10 year old standards.

Bookmarklet for HQ Videos on YouTube

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:25:00 GMT

YouTube sometimes gives you an HQ button to switch to a version with higher quality. But not all videos have this button. You can add "&fmt=18" to the URL and most of the time the video is better than the default one.

Or you can bookmark (or better drag and drop it on the bookmark toolbar) the following bookmarklet: YouTube-HQ

This was done quick and dirty and may stop working tomorrow. It depends on the current HTML code on the page.

Just watch a video on YouTube and then select the bookmarklet. The page gets reloaded with "&fmt=18" attached to the URL.

Binary Clock in the Sidebar

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:16:00 GMT

I have a binary wristwatch and had a simple binary clock in the sidebar for some time (no pun intended) now.

But now it looks a bit more like the real watch.

The first row shows the hours and the second row the minutes. It's 11:46 on this picture. 8 + 2 + 1 hours, 32 + 8 + 4 + 2 minutes.

It gets refreshed every minute via JavaScript. I'm using the <canvas> element of HTML 5. I wanted to give it a try for some time now.

It's supported by all current browsers, tested on MacOS X, Linux, and Windows XP.

MacOS X:

Firefox 3.0.8
Safari 3.2.1
iCab 4.5
Opera 9.64
Chromium in a development version r12443 ("soon" to be Google Chrome 2)

Linux:

Firefox 3.0.8

Windows:

Firefox 3.0.8
Safari 3.2.2
Google Chrome 1.0.154.53

Update: Removed after change of blogging software

Yes, that's me

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:28:00 GMT

$ grep -r 'Stefan Scholl' /usr/lib/ruby/1.8 | wc -l
3

CodeIgniter likes the eval()

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:20:00 GMT

$ grep -r 'eval(' codeigniter/ | wc -l
20

Version 1.7.1. From the changelog: Fixed an arbitrary script execution security flaw

Well, who would have expected that?

Old Perl Code

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:50:00 GMT

Uh, oh. Just found some old Perl code of mine. It's from 1998-05-31:


[...]
return undef unless defined($findit);

return 1;
}

Well, in my defense: It's Perl. ;-)

OK, this can't excuse it. But don't be afraid: The program isn't used anymore.

Plone is like Emacs

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:50:00 GMT

Not about beer

No, this has nothing to do with the Emacs is like beer article. The article was about Emacs users and this is more about the critics of Emacs and Plone.

Emacs

People (mostly vi users) laughed at Emacs, because it was a big, fat editor. "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" was the meaning of the name back then.

Today Vim isn't much smaller anymore and we hardly remember the time when 8 MiB of RAM were a lot of memory. Emacs looks relatively small when compared to big IDEs, written in Java.

Plone

That's similar to Plone.

Plone is an Open Source CMS written in Python. And it has the reputation of being fat and slow. A resource hog that needs a big server just to show a few pages in bearable time.

The speed got better from release to release and is still an important point in the development. But what's more important: Today's servers have more than just 256 MiB RAM, as recommended for a straightforward Plone site.

The server setup of plone.org:

Dual 3 GHz XEON

4 GiB of RAM

You can get a similar system for about 60€/month from respected hosting companies.

We programmers are always looking for technology that scales and can handle many concurrent users. That's the reason for the rise of Erlang web frameworks and the downfall of Ruby on Rails. But most of the time our projects won't get as many hits in a year as Plone.org gets in a day. A medium sized server can handle more than one medium sized Plone site for you.

So, Plone is like Emacs. Once laughed at because of the size. But computers became bigger and faster, making this a non issue. What stays is the question of the complexity. To quote Wikipedia: Plone's weaknesses include Python and Zope experience requirements for those wishing to add or extend the feature set, making for a considerable learning curve for developers.