Category: Uncategorized

Serious!!!
Once again: it syncs with the iPhone address book.
I use it for reverse look up (phone number to address book entry) together with my telephone system in my home office, and that’s build around an AVM “FRITZ!Box“. The glue software got implemented by myself in ruby (w/o Rails).
Why ruby? I thought, I could make it run with Cocoa Ruby on the iPhone. But you know yourself: Apple fights those kinds of things. And just for running it with a GUI on a usual Mac OS X? No, that’s not worth my effort.

Update / 2010-06-16 11:45:
I forgot mentioning xing.com here. Downloading vCards from xing and adding them here – that’s just awesome!

I started using a Facebook “Profile Badge” here on this blog quite a while ago. Today I noticed, that all my Facebook status updates got shown here on that Profile Badge in the right column of this blog. Believe me: I seriously hurried removing that field “Status updates” from my Facebook Profile Badge.

To be very honest with you: no, this security leak was a giant one, not a tiny one.

I “always” also “copy” them for my Google Mail address book, which gets synced with my iPhone’s address book. This really makes my life so much easier  – recognising resp. remembering people by their faces is so much easier.
Update / 2010-06-16:
I forgot to mention, that I always use Xing’s vCards for new contacts to create resp. complete their entries in my Google Mail resp. iPhone address book.

• http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/07/12/options-and-configuration.html

Once again I came across this very nice and certainly very helpful article on O’Reilly’s perl.com.

I personally really have been loving the Art of Command Line Processing for a very, very long time. During one of my last projects (it was actually mainly using p*th*n as programming language because of some rather weird and esoteric guy, who made it his personal mission to reinvent all the software spread over the bank from perl to p*th*n, especially the one he had written himself in quite unreadable perl a couple of years ago) I faced the task of prepping up a Java program from JasperForge.org, and the major value I added to that utility was to add command line processing using libraries from Apache. I actually offered Teodor Danciu of JasperSoft, JasperReports’ inventor and main developer, to contribute my version of that utility to JasperForge, but he wasn’t interested. I was rather sad. Maybe he will rethink that decision.

Update / 2010-09-19:

I think, I sort of “lied” 🙂 here. I didn’t “offer” Teodor that extension of his own OSS software, that he had developed himself and then published under LGPL, I rather asked him this:

Is there any interest in a “‘-D’ command line / getProperty” version of TextApp?

I would really love to even write and contribute a new and better version of my old approach, which was 100% based on OSS.

Can you imagine, that I get legally threatened for the above question, because an organisation thinks to possess rights on these minimal modifications I applied? We are talking literally about a couple of lines.

Incoming e-mail messages may be worth getting recorded in a diary, of
course most of them are not, do you agree?

Quite some times I manually create diary entries from my procmail LOGFILE.
I should have written a script to do that a long time ago. Now I did. That effort was really, really little, but I like the results.

Update / 2010-07-23:
I used to copy the entries from that log to my diary, and then a little later I usually wonder, which ones got already processed and completed. So what was missing, was just a little aid, but it looked difficult so solve for a while.
Today I introduced something new and the entry now looks like this:

23 Jul 2010

        09:56:49 [_] From: abc@def.com;

That’s wicked cooled, isn’t it? Yes, I know.

python has long had it: symbolic groups. They allow you to refer to a substring matched by a symbolic group name: “(?P<id>)”, id in this case. Now perl has drawn equal: “(?<id>)” does the same job, and the feature is called named capture buffers. Read it up in the perlre manual page or online here! Basically the pieces go to “%+”, i.e. a hash array by the name of “+”. 

After I upgrading to emacs-23 quite a couple of months ago, all these functions called *-other-window split my screen horizontally instead of vertically, as they have done for the last 20 years or so.
Getting it split vertically was really a pain. Today I found, that I just needed to set split-width-threshold to nil (well, I have never dreamt of that thing so far …), best done through customization. I should have searched for that solution months ago …

Update 2013-02-21:
I had written this article quite a while ago, but still I had neither remembered this article nor the name of the variable to customize. Well, this ocurred to me (again…) after starting to use W32 emacs [Link]. I really experience getting split frames to windows horizontally as a severe pain.

… “Winterreise. Ein Cyclus von Liedern von Wilhelm Müller. …”