Thursday, June 30, 2011

PostgreSQL: the function date_trunc is conceptually similar to the trunc function for numbers

PostgreSQL: Documentation: Manuals: PostgreSQL 9.0: Date/Time Functions and Operators

JasperReports: how to reduce the size of a Group band?

Change the Band height within the Group Header.

It maybe hard a little to find the Band height. You may want to Add Band for the Group Header first, otherwise that property (resp. set of properties) is simply not there.

Background:
I had a query with "GROUP BY country, current_month". I let each country Start on a new page. Each current_month had just one element, so I expected them to get displayed in a compact manner, but the default Band height of each group made them display with rather huge gaps.

Torvalds calls userspace filesystems "toys" - The H Open Source: News and Features

Torvalds calls userspace filesystems "toys" - The H Open Source: News and Features

The rise and fall and rise of HTML - The H Open Source: News and Features

The rise and fall and rise of HTML - The H Open Source: News and Features

emacs: how to omit OS X resource fork files in dired-omit-mode?

Extended the regexp in dired-omit-files.
EmacsWiki entry.

profile / CV maintenance at various sites

  • xing.com
  • LinkedIn.com
  • gulp.de
  • (xmlresume)

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

GoldenOrb offers open source variant of Google's Pregel - The H Open Source: News and Features

GoldenOrb offers open source variant of Google's Pregel - The H Open Source: News and Features

GitHub's Linguist open sourced - The H Open Source: News and Features

GitHub's Linguist open sourced - The H Open Source: News and Features

Yahoo! creates independent Hadoop company - The H Open Source: News and Features

Yahoo! creates independent Hadoop company - The H Open Source: News and Features

Facebook blocked KDE photo applications - The H Security: News and Features

Facebook blocked KDE photo applications - The H Security: News and Features

Cross platform IM client InstantBird goes 1.0 - The H Open Source: News and Features

Cross platform IM client InstantBird goes 1.0 - The H Open Source: News and Features

competition for Adium on OS X?
and for Pidgin of course

Attack of the computer mouse - The H Security: News and Features

Attack of the computer mouse - The H Security: News and Features

online in a public transport bus in Berlin with a router in my pocket

I am amazed! No USB device sticking into the computer …

4G-Systems XSBoxGO – UMTS WIFI router, battery driven

product page at 4G-Systems

My new "away from home office" Internet access equipment. Certainly a lot more lightweight than an AVM FRITZ!Box 7390 or 7270, but it may do its job.
The specific requirement was "battery driven". Outside (e.g. on a bus (yes!!!), in a customer's office, in a friend's living or sleeping room – wherever I feel tempted to do something over the Internet), I don't want to deal with a UMTS USB stick attached to the notebook on my lap, instead I want to have the device anywhere in my bag or a pocket of my clothes, helping me without attracting other people's attraction to a fancy or huge device.

It's so tiny, you can easily put it "somewhere" and forget, where you left it. For the time being I will keep it in my tiny iPod cloth pocket, so that it doesn't catch a lot of scratches. Of course, I won't necessarily use them together.

Update 2011-07-01
  • Wearing it in operating in a pocket is not a good idea, it needs fresh air.
  • Restarting through pressing a button does not always work, removing the battery always works.
Update 2011-08-04
I tried to connect to it via WIFI again, and the SSID did not appear.
I dug into it, and I found, that WIFI was disabled. After enabling it again, all was fine.
I have no idea, how WIFI got disabled. That makes no sense to me.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

HTML "accesskey" vs. web browsers vs. platforms

  • Firefox on Mac OS X: the ctrl key
  • Chrome and Chromium on Mac OS X: the ctrl key and the alt key together (and set the mouse-pointer into the right pane!)
  • Chrome and Chromium on Windows: the alt key

emacs: "output coding" - line endings

Output Coding - GNU Emacs Manual

I had an accounting file with DOS line endings, and I needed it with just 0xa (ASCII line feed).

I found this function for converting the line endings in GNU Emacs:

set-buffer-file-coding-system, used like this:

C-x RET f unix RET

Monday, June 27, 2011

Learning SQL, Second Edition - O'Reilly Media

Learning SQL, Second Edition - O'Reilly Media

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Sixth Edition - O'Reilly Media

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Sixth Edition - O'Reilly Media

Rosenstrasse [Berlin] (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rosenstrasse (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

O, how interesting, this is where I joint a project last week.

O'Reilly Media book: MySQL in a Nutshell, Second Edition

MySQL in a Nutshell, Second Edition - O'Reilly Media

The Relational Database Dictionary - O'Reilly Media

The Relational Database Dictionary - O'Reilly Media

SQL Cookbook - O'Reilly Media

SQL Cookbook - O'Reilly Media

Sunday, June 26, 2011

O'Reilly Media book: SQL in a Nutshell, Third Edition

SQL in a Nutshell, Third Edition - O'Reilly Media

Update 2011-07-01:
Ordered a used copy at Amazon.de for about € 10 (with Amazon Prime service, i.e. delivery tomorrow). Could have had that idea earlier. Better late than never. (I assume, I had ordered the e-book for USD 5 (for o'Reilly (community) "members"), when it got released.) But it's always nice to have a hard copy, isn't it? Esp. for € 10.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

backpack / wheeled bag: Eagle Creek Twist 65L

Eagle Creek Twist 65L
KaDeWe sells it for EUR 240, but you can get it for little less than EUR 200.
suppliers:
in German: "Kofferrucksack"

First saw it at KaDeWe on 2011-06-22. It's the most expensive amongst the combined backpack wheeled bags, that I saw today, but also the most attractive one. The other products were around EUR 100. Of course the samsonite one has at least reasonable wheels.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Hey Jude - Paul McCartney



The pain is not yet gone, I wonder whether it will take 10 days like the usual cold.

Friday, June 17, 2011

JasperReports Library Ultimate Guide (the official manual)

JasperReports Library Ultimate Guide

Ultimate Guides from Jaspersoft

Jaspersoft Documentation - Ultimate Guides

Their major problems:

  • no PDF TOC
  • no PDF index
But then …: there is simply no way around them.

iReport Designer Ultimate Guide (the official manual)

iReport Designer Ultimate Guide

JasperReports Release 4.0.2 (2011-04-19)

JasperReports Release 4.0.2

iReport Release 4.0.2 (2011-04-19)

iReport Release 4.0.2

Wer wenn nicht wir (2011)

Wer wenn nicht wir (2011)

Maybe my Friday night open air movie.

Got canceled as well. (Too often by the same person, so that person now got canceled herself.)
I didn't really want to see that movie, so I don't mind.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

removing the antenna from a WIFI access point or a mobile phone

I am actually rather sure about this issue, but just to double-check, because I don't have a safe source for this:
If you remove the wifi antenna from a wifi AP or router (or the mobile phone antenna, in case it's a pluggable / turnable one), that's not good for your health, because the device improperly attempts to broadcast anyway.
Is that correct?

I saw friends' devices, whose antenna's had gotten removed, and I was rather astonished and frightened and recommended to place the antenna again, resp. to switch wifi (power) off on the device entirely.

Will somebody pls shed some light on this?

AVM - FRITZ!Fon C3

AVM - FRITZ!Fon C3

  • It uses the FRITZ!Box phone book, that's great.
  • It plays Internet radio, that's also great.
  • It has standard AAA size rechargeable batteries, that's really great.
  • It does not have a plug for an ear-phone or loudspeaker, I miss that.
  • It needs the cradle to stand upright, and the sound for playing music is best, if it lies face-down or it stands upright.

AVM - FRITZ!Fon MT-F

AVM - FRITZ!Fon MT-F

  • It uses the FRITZ!Box phone book, that's great.
  • It plays Internet radio, that's also great.
  • It has a dedicated rechargeable battery.
  • It has a plug for an ear-phone or loudspeaker.
  • It can stand upright by itself.

cautious automatic updating of my address book from my Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, … contacts

If I really have time enough one day (i.e. also the money to afford that time), I would love to use those APIs to collect phone numbers etc. from there and update my address book with these details. I would really like to have that. But I already see problems like this:

  • some "friends" never update their details, so the details I already have are always more uptodate, then the ones they publish in the social media profiles,
    so maybe I am able to integrate those details with custom labels (to signal, where they stem from), but I would not be able to automatically update my smartphone address book from that

Friday, June 10, 2011

Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da

Desmond had a barrow in the market place,
Molly is the singer in a band,
Desmond says to Molly,
girl I like your face
and Molly says this, as she takes him by the hand.
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on bra.
La la how the life goes on.

In a couple of yours they have built a home sweet home with a couple of kis running in the yard of Desmond and Molly Jones.
Memories from a time, not as much packed with personal history and experiences as today.
From a life, when we allowed ourselves, to have dreams.
Life was a lot, lot easier then.
We didn't know how to spell "burden" and "duties" then.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

text2pdf

how to print a PDF document together with its filename in its upper left corner?

This is only a very special case of "how to add text given on the command line to a PDF file?"

If I don't find a nice and read utility to do this,
  • I will create an image file from the PDF file,
  • I will create another image file from that text string (ImageMagick, GraphicsMagic?!?),
  • and I will finally overlay them (ImageMagick, GraphicsMagic?!?).
PDF Hacks' Hack# 90 describes how to "Superimpose PDF Pages"; there is also a one-liner with pdftk for that:
$ pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.marked.pdf background watermark.pdf

I need to print like 200 rather similar (1-page) files, which look rather, rather similar, and I don't want to guess the filename from the contents of the page, so I prefer to print the filename on the same page as the actual contents.

Update 2011-07-04:
I am using text2pdf (a rather, rather simple tool) for this task (regard this as one logical line):

$ echo "text to be printed into the upper left corner" | /usr/local/text2pdf/text2pdf -A4 -s10 -v12 | pdftk original_file output file_with_sth_in_its_upper_left_corner background -

Pdftk - The PDF Toolkit

Pdftk - The PDF Toolkit


Superimpose Pages with pdftk

pdftk packs iText’s power into a standalone program. Apply a single PDF page to the background of an entire document like so:
pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.marked.pdf background watermark.pdf
pdftk will use the first page of watermark.pdf, if it has more than one page. You can combine this background option with additional input operations (such as assembling PDFs [Hack#51]) and other output options (such as encryption [Hack #52]).

movie: Winter's Bone (2010)

Winter's Bone (2010)
My last night's movie at Intimes Kino Berlin.
Actually the plan was to see "Biutiful", but my date tried hard to convince me, that this would be the movie, we wanted to see right now. I wasn't convinced, but I agreed.

The movie is really, really sad, but honestly it also has its charms.
If you don't want to risk your super-good mood for your date under any circumstances, don't watch it!

DNS and BIND on IPv6 - O'Reilly Media

DNS and BIND on IPv6 - O'Reilly Media

Webian Shell brings full screen browsing

Webian Shell brings full screen browsing - The H Open Source: News and Features