February 9, 2009 – 9:45 pm
Software is like sex, it’s better when it’s free – Linus Torvalds
But hey, I’ve found another analogy between software and something more physical (yeah, I really should stop those kinda jokes 
). As I baked a cake a little while ago (and there surely was for a good reason for that), I found that little analogy …
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In order to bake a cake, one needs several ingredients. Those ingredients can be seen like the libraries required by a program. The libraries are referenced from a program using include statements and recipies reference their ingredients explicitly. |
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Once you got your ingredients ready you need some tools to handle them. It’s basically the same on the software side. You need several tools to compile your sourcecode (aka recipee) and libraries to the finished product. |
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That finished product is either the finished cake itself or the executable. All in all the process was pretty much the same: Use a sort of recipee (source code), put together all your ingredients (libraries) and use some tools to glue everything together |
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Despite all those simillarities, there are a few more. So for example one could think of closed source cake (the stuff you can buy in the bakery) as well as open source cake (like the recipees one can find using google). And as that wasn’t enough, cake does indeed have some hackable potential. So one could make a cake that serves a special purpose besides tasting good, like providing you with the perfect nutrition for a day …
Alright I know this does not completely work out but it’s still fun though 
The cake icons came from snmsnl and the kitchen icons from atomnett
February 7, 2009 – 9:14 pm
Being inspiered by QuickSilver (totaly awesome software, basically a Mac without it is pretty much useless), I wrote a small plugin for Eclipse providing similiar functionality. For those who don’t know QuickSilver, it allows you to start applications or trigger commands using nothing but your keyboard. So why would I want this within my Eclipse, you may ask. Simply to save the time it would take you to grab your mouse and use the menu. FastSilver basically takes all the commands available within Eclipse and makes them available using one single keystroke which is Cmd-6 per default. This binding can be changed in the settings.
Again the code is available thru SVN, or if you’re solely interested in the binaries, here is the update site. For both (Update Site and SVN) the username and password are guest. Screenshots and eye-candy will follow as soon as my WordPress installation works fine again.
Update: my upload works again, so here are the screenshots. The first one shows FastSilver in action:
The second one below shows the preferences dialog where you can change the keybindings to trigger FastSilver:
February 7, 2009 – 9:02 pm
As you might have noticed my blog has got a new design. I wanted to do this for quite a while now and finally found time and motivation to do this. And I updated by WordPress installation to 2.7 in this process. So if something does not work as well as it used to, please be lenient.
But hey, now there is a cool tag cloud and it became easier to navigate thru the posts.
February 1, 2009 – 4:45 pm
After having uLISP in a sort of working state (despite the quite enormous memory leakage problem), I started to port uLISP to the TI92+ calculater (having it become tiLISP in the process). The code is in the TI92+ branch of the uLISP SVN (remember, username and password is: guest).
Below is a screenshot just showing it running (I know, not that spectacular )
Be aware that this code is pretty much unstable (I had to reset my TI about 10 times today), but it’s a nice prove of concept anyway.
