• Compact Subversion Backups

    Posted on May 31, 2006

    If you have a large Subversion repository and want to back it up using as few space as possible, use this command (replace repo with your actual repository path): [Read More]

  • Particle Swarm Optimization

    Posted on May 1, 2006

    For the company I work with I have implemented a Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO). You can think of a PSO like a flock of birds that are flying around and searching for food. Each bird is talking to its friends, like “hey, I have found lots of food where I am right now!”. Other birds think to themselves: “Cool. I might check it out”. [Read More]

  • New Domain!

    Posted on April 23, 2006

    I have just moved to a new host, and if you are reading this you have already found it. Congratulations!

  • Copy Protection

    Posted on March 26, 2006

    The developers of the fine game Galatic Civilizations really got it what a copy protection system is supposed to do. This is what lead designer Brad Wardell has to say (quoted from here): [Read More]

  • Tracer Bullet Development versus Extreme Programming

    Posted on March 3, 2006

    I have just read the excellent book Ship It!, which has an article about Tracer Bullet Development. Beeing an XP and Test Driven Development enthusiast, I am not really sure what to make of this development technique. I will try to contrast XP with TBD: [Read More]

  • KDE Style Window Dragging for XP / Win2k

    Posted on February 16, 2006

    Thanks to the very cool but rather unknown AutoHotkey application, I have wrapped an already available KDE style script into a small executable plus a KDE icon. The only problem is that you can get so used to it that you can’t use a computer without it any more. [Read More]

  • Software Design Principles

    Posted on January 25, 2006

    I have tried to collect the most important principles of software development. At least I consider them extremely important, I am sure that other people think otherwise. Good software designs should follow these principles as much as possible. Follow the links to learn more about the principles: [Read More]

  • Subversion Guideline

    Posted on January 24, 2006

    Some time ago I have written a Subversion Guideline. Contrary to the usual subversion information found on the web, I have tried to describe the subversion policies used in a project I work in as compact as possible. The result is now a 1 page description that can be nicely printed and pinned right next to the monitor. [Read More]

  • My First Research Project

    Posted on January 23, 2006

    I have recently met a really old friend of mine, with whom I have done quite a lot crazy things like building a professional bow and then hunting rabbits, abseiling from a bridge, diving, building remote controlled bombs, etc. (yes we were young and stupid, but it was great and I do not miss a second of this :smiley: [Read More]

  • Google Ads

    Posted on January 21, 2006

    I have just added Google ads to try to compensate a bit of my hosting costs. I have tried to make it as unobstrusive as possible, so it should not annoy. In case it does annoy you, you might want to give Adblock and the automatic Adblock Filterset.G Updater a try. [Read More]

  • How to Find Research Papers Efficiently

    Posted on January 18, 2006

    Google has a very nice search engine for scientific papers, namely scholar.google.com. The only problem is that a lot of search results contain links to services that are not free. I believe information should be available for free, so this is what I do against this problem: Search for something, e.g. multi-agent systems. [Read More]

  • Google Videos

    Posted on January 11, 2006

    I believe Google has a new killer product, namely the videos. I do not have a TV, and am really looking forward to beeing able to watch the series I want to, whenever I want; and I even don’t mind paying a litte fee for that. [Read More]

  • Google Books Search Hack

    Posted on December 6, 2005

    Googles book search does not allow browsing all the pages of books. My first try to go around this was to search a book for words like and which should be available on most pages. Google does not allow this, but have a look at the following funny search term: [Read More]

  • How to Design Large Erlang Systems

    Posted on December 4, 2005

    Once upon a time I wanted to give the programming language Erlang a try because it seems to have a lot of features that are required for making a good Multi-agent system. So I asked at the mailing list how to design large systems using erlang, because it obviously needed a different approach from the usual object oriented decomposition. Luckily, I got a very interesting response to my question from the inventor of Erlang himself. Here is what he has to say (I added html syntax): [Read More]

  • How to Teach Programming

    Posted on December 4, 2005

    Over at Lambda the Ultimate there is a short article about how to teach programming. It links to a very interesting presentation that talks about why students shoult be taught one semester of functional programming, and then OOP. This seems to make a lot of sense, and makes me want to learn one of the very cool functional languages like OCaml or Erlang.