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Showing posts from September, 2008

How to increment build number in Ant

The corresponding magic all-answering Ant man page tells that you can increment the build number using the <buildnumber/> directive. If you insert this directive directly after the opening project tag of your build.xml file, the build number will be increased , every time any of the targets in build.xml are executed . In this way you can increment e.g. the minor version of your build and have not to write a custom extra task. You can also specify a custom "build.number" file with <buildnumber file="my.build.number"/> You can also limit the scope of the buildnumber directive by putting it only into a specific target.

The difference between mathematics and computer science, and complexity&formalism

Mathematics is about solving traffic problems and computer science is about translating these problem solutions for machines . (These machines have not necessarily to be only digital computers but may be also mechanical machines!) The problems mathematicians and computer scientists are dealing with are of formal nature. Understanding web evolvement is a complex problem. Solutions for problems that come along with web evolvement, have to be of formal nature as they must be understandable for computers . But to find formal solutions for complex problems , you have to be rather a complexity expert than a formalism expert .

Ron Paul: You should allow the bankruptcy; you have to get rid of the mistakes! (subprime crisis)

The U.S. government support of bankrupt financial institutions like Freddi Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG will cost the tax payer billions of USD (overall cost of one trillion USD). After the financial support was announced the global markets realized the highest one-day growth since years. As far as I know, this is biggest financial intervention of the government in the U.S. history. The short-term and mid-term effect of this gigantic money injection will becalm the markets and will prevent the really big stock market crunch from happening. But the long-term effect on the market is much more fatal as this support remains an intervention of the government in the market proceedings and as such it is also a disruption of the natural structure and procedures of the market ecosystem. And this ecosystem as every other (also natural) ecosystem is dominated by the principles of evolution . One of this principles is: Inefficient or unadjusted concepts and entities have to vanish in favor of the

How to permanently deactivate caps lock in Linux

Many people hate the caps lock key as the accidental activation of the "caps lock" mode disrupts regularly the workflow. Entering setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps in the console will deactivate the "caps lock" key for the respective user and session. If your want to permanently ban this devil's handiwork from your keyboard layout you should reconfigure xserver-xorg dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and when you are at the point where your can enter the " Keyboard options ", you should enter ctrl:nocaps

How to remove the navigation bar from any Blogger.com blog

Also if it cannot be recognized at first glance, this blog is hosted by Google's Blogger blog platform. But where is the Blogger-typical navigation bar and its favicon? To remove the navigation bar you have to edit your Blooger template and add this magic line <style type='text/css'>#navbar-iframe { display: none; }</style> as the very first tag directly after the opening "body" tag . To inject this hack , you have to choose " Edit HTML " in the " Layout " tab of your Blogger administration panel. This line simply tells the browser not to display the HTML element with the ID "navbar-iframe" wich is actually the HTML tag ID of the iframe containing Blooger's navigation bar . As now you cannot login using the link on your blog's navbar, you have to sign in using the Blogger's secure login site . To change the default Blogger favicon , you have to add this line <link href='http://www.loxal.net/static/favic

How to fix: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu

Building Chromium, the raw version of Googles state of the art browser Chrome under Linux x64/x86_64 the following error occurred /usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.2.4/libstdc++.so when searching for -lstdc++ /usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.2.4/libstdc++.a when searching for -lstdc++ /usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.2.4/libstdc++.so when searching for -lstdc++ /usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.2.4/libstdc++.a when searching for -lstdc++ /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lstdc++ collect2: ld returned 1 exit status scons: *** [obj/release/mksnapshot] Error 1 scons: *** [/home/alex/Documents/dev/prj/chromium/src/v8/obj/release/mksnapshot] Error 2 scons: building terminated because of errors. as there were no x86 libraries . Installing these libraries solved the problem for me: aptitude install g++-multilib g++-4.2-multilib

How to fix: xargs: xargs.c:443: main: Assertion `bc_ctl.arg_max <= (131072-2048)' failed.

This is a known bug in Ubuntu/Hardy that have caused many nasty error messages during several operations. The defective package responsible for this bug is findutils . As there is still no fixed findutils package in Hardy, I took the package from the upcoming Ubuntu release Intrepid. To do so, you have to do the follwing steps: vim /etc/apt/sources.list and tell Vim to replace all occurrences of the "hardy" string by "intrepid": :%s/hardy/intrepid/g :wq Now you should have the sources.list of Intrepid. aptitude update aptitude install findutils ... installs the fixed Intrepid findutils package . Change the sources.list back to the Hardy revision: vim /etc/apt/sources.list :%s/intrepid/hardy/g :wq Now you should have the fixed version of the xargs command, which can be used in one-liners like: find ~/Desktop | xargs grep -H -I -i -n "Name\[ru\]" which showed me the following information: /home/alex/Desktop/.directory:58:Name[ru]=Рабочий стол So I have se

Abstraction-layer-driven software evolution

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Many technology enthusiasts think that with Chrome Google sound the bell for a new era of applications. In fact the popularity momentum of this bleeding edge technology using browser is just amazing. On the other hand many other tech enthusiasts think that this is just another hype nobody needs. One of these skeptics have wrote an article with three really nice models describing the difference between software of yesterday and the software of tomorrow . Inspired by these impressive models, I have remembered an article, I wrote one year ago . This article described the evolution of software on the basis of LVM . Hereby LVM was characterized as just a further abstraction layer that offers capabilities to manage complex file system setups and which can -- in certain circumstances (but not necessarily!) -- simplify the management of complex data storage facilities: Such technologies enable to manage the progressive complexity which is a ( positive correlating ) predicate of evolution

Google's WebKit&V8 based Chrome browser and Mozilla's future

What is Mozilla going to do as all bigger companies like Nokia ( WebKit embedded in Qt ), Google, and Apple are going to use WebKit and Javascript engines like V8 and Squirrelfish related to this rendering engine. Also Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome are really strong Firefox competitors. Would it make sense for Mozilla to switch to WebKit? In fact Firefox is basically its rendering engine Gecko . And if you replace Gecko by WebKit, just the ugly Firefox GUI remains which looks like a rusty nail in a crystal carafe if you use Firefox with KDE 4 . I doubt if there is a bright future for Mozilla's Firefox. At least their market share will follow the current stock market: Downstairs.

How to check OS with Ant using an if-switch

As there is no built-in native if clause in Ant , you have to use this workaround. This "if" statement hack can be used to check for the operating system running on the respective machine. Unfortunately you cannot include a property file like <property file="unix.properties" /> into the respective "if" section which would affect the global scope of the Ant script. Instead this property file inclusion affects the local scope of the respective "if" path only . <project name="OS-check-with-if-switch" default="chkOS"> <!-- affects global scope --> <property file="build.global.properties" /> <target name="chkOS" description="if switch to set OS specivic settings"> <condition property=" isUnix "> <os family="unix" /> </condition> <condition property="isWindows"> <os family="windows" /> &