News that is not new anymore

March 28^th 2005: A feature that seems to be missing in Oracle SQL seems to be the concatenation of strings within a group by-group. However, with Oracle 10g, the desired result can be achieved with the collect aggregate function.

March 25^th 2005: An ORA-00942 indicates that it was tried to select from a view or table that doesn't exist. Unfortunatly, this error does not say which table that was. Setting diagnostic events can be used to reveal the offending select statement.

March 17^th 2005: Frederic Barachant comments on Precedence of the modulus (reminder) and the ++ (incrementing) operator in Java and C++.

January 22^nd 2005: A type library contains a binary description of an interface exposed by a COM-component. Such type libraries can be read using the ITypeLib and ITypeInfo interfaces. Here's a a quickly hacked program to read such a type library.

January 17^th 2005: ming is a C library to create flash movies. It comes with sort of a C++ layer with which I am not very happy. So, I have written a C++ ming wrapper myself. Here are some examples that demonstrate how to use this ming wrapper.

January 11^th 2005: Tracer is a simple C++ class that allows to create trace files and write debugging information into them. When I wrote this class, I wanted to have the output of called functions more indented than the output of calling functions. Here's its page.

January 8^th 2005: I have finally found some time to update the SQLite Wrapper page. Specifically, the test programs for it. It was overdue!

December 29^th 2004: Joel on Software is a popular online forum where bright and not so bright minds discuss various subjects of IT related stuff. Although I like this forum very much, I think it has has two drawbacks. In order to address these drawbacks, I have written a Joel on Software reader.

December 5^th 2004: Is Firefox on the rise?

December 2^nd 2004: Basic operations with Subversion (such as creating a repository, a project, checking out and commiting and merging).

December 1^st 2004: I'd say that more than 90% of the folks who have ever compiled an open source program, have followed this simple recipe steps:

1. Download
   
2. unzip/untar
   
3. ./configure
   
4. make
   
5. make install

I'd also say, that less than 10% of these people know how to assemble a package so that it can be compiled and installed with this recipe. Well, I certainly didn't, so I investigated what is known as the GNU build system.

November 23^rd 2004: Ask a Java and a C++ programmer what a's value is after these two lines of code:
int a=5;
a=(a++)%7;
Their answer is most likely different.

November 15^th 2004: Sending files across TCP/IP with Java.

November 6^th 2004: Recursively searching for strings in files, mathematical operations with Dos and then some: Unknown dos box features.

November 3^rd 2004: I wanted to setup a CVS repository. However, searching the net, I was not able to find a tutorial that explained in easy steps how to do that. So, I decided to write one myself: Creating a CVS repository (on Windows with cvsnt).

October 24^th 2004: Building JGenerator and some examples.

October 22^nd 2004: Macromedia Flash internally uses the Macromedia Flash Font Format (=FFT) to store how a font looks like. If one wants to dynamically (for example with Ming or JGenerator) create a Flash movie with embedded text, (s)he must have the font in the FFT format. There is a ttf2fft.exe to convert true type fonts into ffts. Unfortunatly, at least on my Laptop, it cannot be executed. Luckily, I found a TTF2FFT class within the Laszlo Framework which I modified so that it can be run without the Laszlo Framework.

October 18^th 2004: I am fascinated by Laszlo. On October 12^th, I have already written on how to build Laszlo from sources. But I got also interested in the internal working of the framework because I want to use the framework with a standalone application, that is not as a web application.

October 14^th 2004: Word and Excel can be automated, that is, their rich functionality is exposed through a COM interface and can be accessed from any other language that speaks COM. I have already written about this: C++ and MS Word, Perl and MS Word, Excel and MS Word and PL/SQL and MS Word. J-Integra promises to make it possible to make COM interfaces accessible for Java as well. Here's how to automate Word with Java and J-Integra.

October 13^th 2004: Developing a simple Web Application and deploying it on Tomcat.

October 12^th 2004: Laszlo Systems, Inc has recently released Laszlo under an Open Source License. Laszlo creates Flash Applications out of XML (more exactly: LXZ) files. This is reason enough to take a look at Laszlo.

October 11^th 2004: Ant, properties, precedence and a surprise.

October 9^th 2004: I am working on a new laptop. The first thing I need to have installed is MinGW, Perl and vim: Installing MinGW, compiling Perl and vim.

October 8^th 2004: I use my laptop at home as well as at various offices. At home, I have a fixed IP address while in the offices where I work, there are usually DHCP servers that assign an IP address to me. NETSH is a command line tool (that comes preinstalled with Windows) that allows to change the IP address with a configuration script. Here are the two configuration scripts.

October 6^th 2004: SQLite understands bind variables. I have written a small program (in C) that shows how the SQLite API can be used for bind variables.

October 4^th 2004: I got mail commenting on and improving my C++ class to read configuration files.

October 4^th 2004: Regular expressions can be used to Split lines on Oracle 10g. This article that shows how.

September 28^th 2004: On the Oracle features that allow High Availabilty.

September 25^th 2004: I needed regular expressions in a c program. I found that Perl Compatible Regular Expressions perfectly fitted my needs although they were a bit complicated to compile on windows.

September 23^rd 2004: A trick to circumvent registration for New York Times.

June 29^th 2004: Office Web Components or OWC for short allow to embed excel grids and excel charts on a HTML page (if the HTML is rendered in internet explorer). I find this usable and have made two pages to demonstrate this: Embedding Excel and Embedding an Excel Chart

June 16^th 2004: It's amazing how easy it is to generate MS Word documents with a perl script (using Win32::OLE, that is). I have a small perl script to demonstrate exactly that.

May 6^th 2004: I have finally scanned and put online some of the pictures taken in pindo deli. Pindo Deli was a project in Indonesia where I programmed a database for a paper mill.

March 4^th 2004: Added a A list of tools I think might be useful. As far as I can see, those are all freeware.

Febraury 8^th 2004: I have been experimenting with SQLite and I have written a small sample program that shows how to create a table, insert data into it and select from it with the SQLite API.

January 19^th 2004: I have put together some c++ classes that allow to embed HTML in a window. It is based on MSHTML. AT the moment, this is somewhat experimental, but I do hope that I can improve the code as well as the (mostly inexistant) documentation.

January 16^th 2004: Updated my C++ Web Server. It is now able to handle forms and different URLs.
You can download it with the sources.

November 22^nd 2003: I have been playing with OCI recently which resulted in an highly experimental OCI library: adpoci. It allows to connect to a database, create a table, insert into this table and select from this table.

November 20^th 2003: Wrote a very basic webserver in Perl.

October 7^th 2003: I am gathering news about Oracle 10G and try to summarize it centrally: (incomplete) summary of 10g features.
Update of November 21th 2003: Tamel Poder sent me a presentation of new features of 10g which I was allowed to weave into the page.

October 6^th 2003: I am currently working on the database for the swiss telephone book (which is accessible through www.directories.ch/weisseseiten/ for private entries and www.directories.ch/gelbeseiten for business entries). I was interested in getting to know the most most common names, firstnames and streets to be found in the telephone book. Here's the result. (As this might be of interest to swiss people, the page is in german.)

August 24^th 2003: Updated poor man's text index. This article shows how SQL statements in the form of select x from y where z like '%something%' can be transformed in something that returns faster because it is cleverly indexed.

August 12^th 2003: Illy Dially sends me a mail refering the Windows socket class:

Of course, I have updated the class with his changes. It always makes me happy if someone improves things I have put on my website.

July 27^th 2003: Somehow, I managed to destroy an NTFS drive so that I couldn't boot Windows anymore. Thanks to Trinux, I was able to recover all data on the Harddisk.

July 26^th 2003: Reinhard Ueberschär points out an error in Preventing ORU-10028 and sends me a better solution which I gladly publish.

July 26^th 2003: Corrected some errors in the C++ webserver