Author Archives: Patrick Plattes

Q2: Which programming language is it?

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Today it’s getting slightly harder. Since it is a full program you can check your answer by using the right compiler/interpreter: Q2

Please send your answers to: patrick.plattes@googlemail.com

All user with the right ’till 14pm answer will get the points, but the first one will get +5.

Type: full program

import std.stdio;
void main()
{
    writefln("Hello World!");
}

Hint: The ancestor of this language has literaly the same name as this language when you execute the statement.

Points for this challange: 10

Q1: Which programming language is it?

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As I mentioned in the post from Thursday, today I will present the first real Question: Q1

Please send your answers to: patrick.plattes@googlemail.com

All user with the right ’till 14pm answer will get get the points, but the first one will get +5. This has changed from the original post.

colours = ['red','green','blue']
for colour in colours:
    print colour

Hint: This language is famous for a detail you can also see in this little program.

Points for this challange: 5

Which programming language is it?

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Hey collegues from all Reply Units 🙂 I Would love to do a small challange the next 10 + x days {x | x ∈ N_0}. And the question is always: “Which programming language is it?” I hope you have fun and I hope to see a lot of other developers here in the company.

I will create a best of list. The first answer will be counted and the given Points will be added to your “account”. A full program, a typical statement, a compiler/interpreter output or an output of a well known programm written in this language will be presented. Sometimes the answer is _not_ unambiguous, but as log the answer correct and typical for the language you are the winner for today. The callenge will be published each day at 11am (CEST/UTC+0200). Please answer on TamTamy Please send your (nick)name and answer to: patrick.plattes@googlemail.com

Let’s start with the first one, which is simply a test.

Type: full program

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}

Hint: This program was published by Brian W. Kerninghan and Dennis Ritchie 1974

Points for this challenge: 0

Cup of coffee

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Last weekend me and my girlfriend was playing around with the camera and had a nice coffee. This is the outcome:

Git 1.9 released

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Version 1.9 of the Git distributed revision control system was released a few days ago and can be downloaded from the website

Git 1.9 begins aligning planned changes for Git 2.0., there’s several new Git sub-commands and options, performance improvements, and many fixes over Git 1.8.x.

Various bugfixes have been implemented to remote-bzr and remote-hg, the build procedure is now aware of MirBSD, and a number of “git p4,” “git svn,” and “gitk” updates have been added.

Also, two-level configuration variable names in “branch.*” and “remote.*” hierarchies, whose variables are predominantly three-level, are now working properly.

Looks like the command git fetch –tags is acting a bit different now, but I need time to have a closer look.

SAP is going open source on GitHub

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1

For a lot of developers SAP is a strange company. We are used to get all information we need online, getting development docs, samples or systems. A lot of companies are successful because of their open source software. Sure, there are services out there we use eg. Jira, GitHub, … But when it comes to development we develop against open source software.

SAP GitHub Page

SAP changed a bit in the last month. Of course we don’t get the NetWeaver Platform for free, but SAP – or the employees – of SAP putted a lot of Software on GitHub . One of the mayor projects is OpenUI5 (with GitHub repository). The way how SAP structured the projects is a bit unusual, but in my opinion they are going into the right direction.

An other project are the RubyGem MaxDB JDBC driver and MaxDB ActiveRecord Adapter. With these wo you can use Ruby on Rails with the SAP MaxDB. Some of the code is very SAP specific and pretty useless for people outside SAP, but it is a very good starting for the company and maybe it changes the way how they are doing their business in the next years.

Maybe it is a good idea for SAP to hire a community manager with experience in open source communities. We will see what the future brings.

Next Weekend: Second Git Training

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inspectocatDo you want to have a training?

I’ve studied Version Control Systems for many years. They are quiet interesting in terms of how to store efficiently multiple version of files, compare them, merge them and track the merges. I’ve started with CVS, switched to Subversion and now i’m using also Git.

A friend of mine asked me to bring Git into their company, so I prepared a two hour Git training for 40 people. That was December last year. Next weekend we will have the second training date, which is more like a Q&A session. I’m really happy about the request for this session, because it came from the developers, which means they are really starting to use it.

As I have prepared all the slides and stuff my question is: Do you want to learn the basics about Git? We could have a live screencast with a twitter channel for questions or use WebEx or somethink like this. Please drop me a line if you want to have a basic walk through or more. In case of questions: ask 🙂

Largest IT congress in Europe: 30C3

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40284Some people call it hacker congress, some people call it security congress and some people call it nerd congress, but in facts it’s simply the largest IT congress in Europe. Each year the hacker community meets from the 27th to the 30th. With 9000 visitors (2013) it’s the largest event for computer experts. It is designed as a low budget congress, to support younger people (students, pupil, …). It is completely driven by volunteers.

The lectures on this congress are part of one of these eight tracks:

  • Art & Beauy
  • Security & Safety
  • Ethics, Society & Politics
  • Hardware & Making
  • Science & Engineering
  • CCC (public, but more internal)
  • Deutschlandfunk (public service broadcasting statutory corporation)
  • Others (small talks)

11636510083_5e6dd6196b_cThe talk about ATMs (bank cash machines) was a more or less typical talk in the track Safety & Security: “Most automated teller machines (ATMs) run regular Windows systems and can be controlled like any other computer. The first public demonstration of an ATM hack was given in 2010 – but how bad is this threat really? It turns out there is a multi-million dollar business behind ATM hacks. This talk reveals how these criminal gangs operate by disclosing information obtained through forensic analysis of a real compromise.” The speakers tw and sb showed in detail how to hack an ATM.

In the category Hardware & Making you will find talks like “Rock’ em Graphic Cards”. It’s all about how to use the power of graphic cards for computing: “In my talk, I will introduce data- and task-based parallelism on multi cores as a basis. The well-known standards mentioned here will be OpenMP and OpenMPI. And then I will show you the hardware-close programming languages CUDA and OpenCL. I will also mention OpenACC and C++AMP as one possible way towards more abstraction and better code maintainability.”

11647897105_1edb032771_cAfter 12 o’clock in the evening they had fun events at the congress like the Fnord News Show or Hacker Jeopardy. The Hacker Jeopardy is an adaptation of the famous TV show. It’s fun for all participants, so that the main room with around 6000 seats was filled very quickly before this event had started!

Many thanks to all of the volunteers (so called angles), supporters (host europe,  juniper, kpn, babiel, …) and to the chaos computer club for this event. See you at 31C3!

Smart Direct Digital Amplifiers

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As I’m not only a geek when it comes to programming languages, but also when it comes to hi-fi systems I’m very happy about all this new “direct digital” D-Class amplifiers out there. They are smart, small, beautiful and green, an they compatible to the girlfriend you might have 😉

How do they look like compared to the old hi-fi amplifiers? There is a small gallery:

My favourite is the NAD D 7050, but I will come late to this device. The reason why they are so small is the market. Ten years before a hi-fi rack must be huge and full and heavy: “Real man equipment!” Nowadays the younger people relay on there headphones, smartphones and tablet pc. Streaming becomes more important than turn tables, a cd-player or traditional radio. That means the source of music has changed – it’s now a smartphone or a media server (Notebook?).

So let’s remove all these systems we no longer need from the hi-fi rack and we will only see an integrated amplifier there.

In the old days we used analog input signals. The most people also did it with the cd-player too. But what usually happens inside of an amplifier? The analog signal will be converted to a digital signal, than the signal will changed by the volume control, equalizer or some sound improvement DSPs and converted back to an analog signal which will be amplified. Of course, we need an analog signal at our loudspeakers, but with (highly efficient) D-Class amplifiers we can simply use the digital signal to drive the amplifier. This helps reduce noise and distortions to a minimum.

On the input side: should we really convert our digital signals from the smartphone to an analog signal to convert it back to a digital signal as soon as it lefts the (chinch) cable? So what direct digital means is taking an digital input signal (bluetooth, music stream, music files,… ) without any converting to an analog signal, using the integrated DSPs for volume control and so on, and using it as an input signal for the D-Class amplifier. The very last step is to convert it back to an analog signal for the loud speakers.

This results in a clear, warm and crispy sound with high dynamic and absolutely no noise except from the breath of the singer into the microphone.

While I was writing this post I heard Katie Meluas beautiful song “Moonshine” . 😀