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I submitted my first tool/script today to the website, which you may have noticed by the new tab at the top called "Tools". This is where our uber-cool command-line tools and other scripts should be placed.
For now, I just created a new standard WordPress page, and inserted the tool description + download link "manually" (meaning, in the WordPress editor). I think we should probably make a new css file for the tools so that they have a consistent look, (title, icon, brief description, link to lengthy description and download link). I tried adding a description expansion (which WordPress offers in the editor), to allow the brief description to be expanded to a full one. However, it seems these are not functional on non-blog pages. I would like to make a cool css file, but to be honest, I'd like to do this under the supervision of Meck, since I have never really worked with stylesheets before. Speaking of which: Has anybody seen our Spanish friend lately? :-/

What does the porsche museum in stuttgart look like in the future? The new design from delugan meissl has given me really a shock. You can take a look at some photos of the museum in the planning stage at http://www.deluganmeissl.at/detail.php?V_PRIMARY=58. Full respect to the top team in Vienna!

One of my friend is studying architecture. He has told me the basic idea behind  this was already used by picasso. While picasso has successfully combined different sides of a human face harmoniously into a 2-D picture, the architect from vienna show all their ideas in a 3-D room.

If you are interested in viewing this kind of stuff. There are more interesting photos at the website. According to my friend, the  institute of architects is one of the tops in the world. At least it is a good alternation after a long time programming :).

Maybe the boss of sun have seen that many people have bought computers with a dual core processor. A new scripting language called fortress is released for high-performance computing.  The name looks a bit similiar to fortran and it is indeed considered to be a replacement of the old famous language.

The new language is declared to be rethought from groud up, although it runs on JVM 1.5 currently. The most interesting part I found is that fortress programmer have to explicitly declare when software should not run in parallel! Anyone who had a headache by the parallelism of c++ and java could hope the new language could save their lot of time if the sun people have done what they've said.

This goes out to our appartment-looking friends, Meck, Yaou, Xin and Kana! Contrary to earlier experiences, I found the internet to be a great place to look up appartments. In fact the first commercial link I clicked on in Google revealed this nice piece:
Die neurenovierte Wohnung befindet sich im 1. Obergeschoss eines 3-Familienhauses, das in einer Seitenstrasse am Rande des Zentrums von Kaiserslautern steht. Von hier aus sind Sie in 5 Minuten zu Fuß in der Stadtmitte.

Ausstattung
Auf ca. 130 qm verteilt sind hier 5 Zimmer, Küche und 2 Duschbäder. Ein ca. 24 qm großes Wohnzimmer und ein danebenliegendes Esszimmer mit ca. 14 qm, sowie drei weitere Räume mit je ca. 16 qm stehen als Eltern-, Kinder-, Ess-, Gäste- oder Arbeitszimmer zur Verfügung. Die im mediterranen Stil geflieste Wohnküche bietet ausreichend Platz für L-Einbauküche und große Essgarnitur. Ein großzügiges, neues Tageslichtbad mit Dusche und WC, sowie ein kleines, teilweise erneuertes Bad, ebenfalls mit Dusche und WC vervollständigen diese Wohnung.

This is so insane, I just had to share it with you: Have you ever heard of the wonderful country called "Sealand"? Until now, I hadn't either. And it's hardly a surprise, given that the country has an area of approximately 0,000611 km². To be more blunt: It's a goddamn platform swimming off the shores of England (see picture). But it claims to be a sovereign country, ruled by the powerful Bates monarchy. This is of course, heavily disputed by the remaining nations. See the article at Wikipedia, where there is also a German version.

Now why is this clunk of cement suddenly such an interesting place? This is where the largest BitTorrent tracker ThePirateBay comes in, which I'm sure you have all never heard of or made use of before :P. Although their home-country of Sweden is very liberal concerning copyright laws, the organization has been feeling international pressure in the past, sometimes even bringing down the site. So, to put an end to this all, our pirate-friends are now attempting to buy the entire country of Sealand. There, they can establish their own set of rules, and live in peace.

Today a thing happened to me, I have not seen for quite a LONG time: The famous kernel panic. While fooling around with vpnc (a vpn client for linux) the system freezed. Only the power button could help it. On the next reboot after the file system checks I got something similar to the picture I posted here.

Some lines told me what I had already suspected: The ndiswrapper caused the issue. For those who don't know: It's a kernel module allowing to use network drivers for windows under linux. I had to use it as a consequence of the lack of existing open source drivers for the new Apple wifi hardware.

Now I am not too depressed, I will see it as a system upgrade. I am already downloading the newest developer version of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn, Herd 2)... Wish me luck!

I have been waiting long for this day: The filesystem FUSE is finally available for the Mac. To all who have no idea what I am talking about, a brief intro: Programming a filesystem for Linux had always kind of been a pain in the butt. Anyone who has lowered themselves down to kernel-level will know what I'm talking about. Low-level programming, constant reboots and praying that the kernel still functioned are not the average developer's idea of "fun". So along came FUSE to put an end to this headache. FUSE itself resides in kernel-space and does all the low-level file I/O for you. Now the happy developer can control FUSE from user space, and implement a file system without ever needing to do any kernel programming.
Although programming file systems under the Mac does not feel quite as low-level, and is not as dangerous as on Linux (Darwin uses a hybrid-kernel, whereas Linux a monolithic one), it still required a good understanding of the system components. Plus, many great filesystems, such as an SSH filesystem had already been implemented for FUSE on Linux.

Hi dudes. I decided to fool around with another theme as you can see. This time I chose a more local banner. Give me your input or try our something else. Personally, I am not sure whether I like the total-blue look of it, but I thought I'd try out something less colorful.
I think we should start drafting out our final look now. Give your advice / ideas in the comments section, or build and upload your own theme. Looking forward to suggestions!

So it's that time of year again: The MacWorld San Francisco is coming up, and all Mac geeks are posessed by speculation of what their uber-lord Steve will present this year. It is, after all, the Mac-evangelist's most important holiday (christmas is just marks the beginning of the rumor season).
But things are different when even Steve Jobs himself goes crazy and starts inviting all of his buddies to the show. Steve-O only does that, if he knows he's not going to disappoint his friends (after all, he himself is somehow obsessed with being the loved-by-everyone messiah). Even more, some sources say, Steve hasn't been this excited since the introduction of the Macintosh. ...woah, quite some words. But let put this speculating aside: What do the official channels of Apple say?
They are hardly less promising. The current apple.com visitor is greeted with the slogan "The first 30 years were just the beginning. Welcome to 2007". And recent slogans included "Count the days. Count the minutes. Count on being blown away.", "It's like a backstage pass to the future", and my personal favorite: "Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond." Anyone who has read the rumor sites, knows that you can't grab much higher than that.

Here is some post for all Java programmers out there: Today I've been coding an object pool, that enables instance sharing. It could be used for example, if you have an application with many strings storing the same character data.

Basic idea is: Store all strings in the object pool - but only virtually. The pool itself will not create new strings, if it already possesses an equivalent one.

Now there is one problem: There are references to the objects not only within the application, but also from inside the pool. If the garbage collector wants to delete some unreferenced objects, my pool references will always prevent him from doing so. First I was thinking about some release methods for my pool and some reference counting stuff. Then I finally dropped this C++ style concepts and remembered the good old SoftReferences, that we learned in the lessons with PH. Now everything is smooth and without memory headaches.