Over the last year I have gotten quite a lot of traffic, so I think it is time to create a top ten list of the most successful articles since then.

e — Extract Any Archive — The little program “e” is an excellent time saver. Whenever you need to extract zip archives in linux, or [...]

I have written a language definition file for GtkSourceView to get a nice syntax highlighting for Erlang with applications that use this component, e.g. Gnome’s standard editor gedit.
The highlighting looks like this:

Here is how to get this to work:

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmartin.ankerl.com%2F2007%2F05%2F06%2Ferlang-syntax-highlighting%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Erlang+Syntax+Highlighting’;
addthis_pub [...]

This is a very condensed excerpt of the excellent article How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu.
Search, install, remove available packages (preferred method)
sudo aptitude search ABC
sudo aptitude install ABC
sudo aptitude remove ABC
.deb (you have to take care of dependencies on your own)
sudo dpkg -i ABC.deb
.rpm (requires sudo aptitude install alien)
sudo alien -i *.rpm
.tar.gz (requires sudo aptitude [...]

I have updated the code for the Math.pow() approximation, now it is 11 times faster on my Pentium IV. Read Optimized Exponential Functions for Java for more information. Now I can also give you some benchmarks:

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmartin.ankerl.com%2F2007%2F02%2F12%2Fexponential-functions-benchmarks-11-times-faster-mathpow%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Exponential+Functions%3A+Benchmarks%2C+8+Times+Faster+Math.pow%28%29′;
addthis_pub [...]

Usually microoptimization is only done in C or C++, but it works quite well in Java too. For a project I needed very fast log() and exp() calculations, and Java’s Math.log() and Math.exp() just doesn’t cut it. After a bit of research I have found the following approximations that are good enough for me:

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