I have been using Ubuntu for quite a while now, but one thing I really dislike is that all the themes are huge space wasters compared to Windows XP. This finally got me angry enough to create a customized version of the Clearlooks theme that tries to be very compact but still maintain its beautiful look. I like the result quite a lot, I have been using this theme for more than two weeks now and it works great. It is especially nice for intense applications like Eclipse.
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XDCC-Fetch is a nice little application written in Ruby that is able to download from XDCC bots on IRC. I have updated it to work with fox 1.6, so this should work with the recent Ruby version.
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In Ubuntu 7.10 the boot hard disk is checked every 20 boots. I have to boot my laptop quite often, so about once a week booting takes more than 10 minutes. This clearly sucks. Fortunately, there is an easy way to fix this. With tune2fs it is possible to change the interval from mount-times to timed interval:
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I have already written about approximations of e^x, log(x) and pow(a, b) in my post Optimized Exponential Functions for Java. Now I have more In particular, the pow() function is now even faster, simpler, and more accurate. Without further ado, I proudly give you the brand new approximation:
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I just came home from a fabulous Klettersteig (I don’t know an English name for this, maybe “fixed rope route”), namely the Donnerkogel. This was a fabulous day, excellent weather, and we had a lot of fun. Here are some impressions:
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Linux has an abundance of excellent terminal applications. Interestingly, I could not find any decent comparison of their text display performance. Since I use the command line a lot, I want text output that is as fast as possible. When you compile a large project, you don’t want the console output to be the limiting factor.
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Thanks to Google Co-op I have just created a new search engine that searches the JDK documentation. It is quite convenient because you can use the labels to choose which version you like to see:
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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.
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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.
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RFind is a little application that indexes the filenames of a given directory, and allows to quickly search this index with regular expressions.
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I have just found out that somebody has translated my textanalyzer from Ruby into Python. It also contains some improvements like stopwords. The core algorithm is still the same. Get it at kelpheavyweaponry.com.
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:
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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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