I just started / finished work on a new skin for Spacenations. I called it B&W Skin (how innovative). It´s very clean and meant for those who are in an environment where they need something unobstrusive. Btw, it loads blazingly fast due to the lack of a lot graphics.
I will publish more skins on my static page http://www.schriner.de/sn.htm.

On the Eclipse Developer mailing list there were a couple of emails mentioning some Java String memory quirks.
Continue reading "Interesting Java String Things"

After reading this and this I thought: heck, you might give that old lady one more try.
Continue reading "Gave Netbeans 4.1 Beta a try"

Trying to write a shell script with someone else (for the first time for me), thought to myself:

What would I do on Windows as an equivalent?

And I came up with a Javascript solution. Now thinking further I thought: Why not try to write a script that will run within the Windows Scripting Host, the .NET CLR and a browser?

The funny thing is: You can actually write such a script. The only thing (with such a simple script) that differs is IO. But thanks to Javascript´s try - catch (Which I hadn´t known of until three weeks ago, and I have done a lot of JS), that is not a problem either.

You can take a look at the script here. It´s nothing spectacular, takes a date, adds X days an returns the new date, all without the Date object (I did the script as a pre-version of the shell script, so I kept all the fancy stuff out).
Continue reading "Having fun with Javascript"

I just survived a nightmarish presentation at university (That is: it was my true nightmare before the presentation). It was on "Geometric dilation of planar curves", nothing too exciting. Although it´s not my field of expertise it got me thinking about the stuff, and caused me the worst nightmares in years, maybe because my schedule was far from perfect and I finished jit. The presentation itself went rather well, there were a lot of questions, and at least one was quite fruitful.

Grab the slides here. By the way, it was in german.

As the $ is at an all-time low against the €, I got myself a couple of english books.

One of these is Joel on Software. It´s an amusing read, althought a bit dated..

I think that he is wrong about the first choice for teaching programming languages; While he is right that Java is easy and C forces you to learn the internals of your CPU, I know that it is possible to learn about the complexity of algorithms independent of any language.

Now designing this page is fun. But the standard HTML Code of Serendipity is pretty rotten. Plenty of superfluous classes, nested divs;

Moreover someone most have forgotten that underscores are not allowed for standard-compliance CSS.

I will have to rewrite a lot of the templates, but the themeing is quite modular, so that is really an option.

This is my first blog entry; I will change the visual style of this blog soon.