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2021-05-02
In The Clean Coder, Chapter 7 (Acceptance Tests), Robert C. Martin writes (p. 109):
But the real reason these tests aren’t redundant is that their primary function is not testing. The fact that they are tests is incidental. […] The fact that they automatically verify the design, structure, and behaviour that they specify is wildly useful, but …
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2020-09-26
I’ve been using Arch Linux since 2016. I got to understand the system better since then, and installing Arch nowadays is rather a strain on my fingers than on my brain. I automated my personal setup procedure to some extent with a couple of shell scripts, which I’m adjusting as time goes and hardware changes. I collect those scripts and …
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2020-09-20
I have a roughly ten year old Brother HL-5370DW printer on the shelf next to me. This printer is mostly used by my wife to print sewing patterns. When I was studying computer science, I sometimes printed documents I’ve written for proofreading. I often was able to find typos that I didn’t see on the screen even after proofreading the …
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2020-09-16
I’ve been using the Swiss keyboard layout for most of my life. Things changed when I first had to work on a Mac Book. If the Swiss keyboard layout is not great for programming on a usual keyboard, because it requires combinations with Alt-Gr to type in braces and brackets, I consider the Mac version of it outright horrible, because braces and …
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2020-09-12
A week ago, I’ve installed OpenBSD on my Thinkpad. I’ve been using it now and then, and already have changed a couple of things in respect to the original setup described in the article. I also installed OpenBSD on the Dell Optiplex on which I previously installed FreeBSD a month before. This means that I’m no longer using FreeBSD …
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2020-09-05
Let’s install OpenBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad X270. I used this computer for my computer science studies. It has both Arch Linux and Windows 10 installed as dual boot. Now that I’m no longer required to run Windows, I can ditch the dual boot and install an operating system of my choice.
Preparation First, I grab my work Thinkpad running …
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2020-08-11
I’m a happy user of Arch Linux both on my private computers and on my work laptop. I even managed to get through four years of university with my setup, and only had to bring a Windows machine on some rare occasions, even though some professors are openly hostile towards a Linux setup. (It doesn’t run Microsoft Project and the real …
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2020-08-05
In my last article, I outlined the purpose of a stock program: a non-trivial coding exercise to be done in every new programming language somebody is learning. I also stated that «Four in a Row» is becoming my personal stock program, and that I’d like to implement it in Haskell.
The main challenge in Haskell is the functional programming …
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2020-08-03
In a recent interview, Brian W. Kernighan said that he always re-implements the same program when he’s learning a new programming language. In his case, it’s a programm to process a text file containing a variable number of lines. In this task, his programming language AWK (Kernighan is the «K» in «AWK») shines, for it was designed for …
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2020-08-01
I’d like to dig deeper into system administration tasks. At work, I have to manage a fleet of Linux servers with Puppet. And in my spare time, I’d like to manage the servers I run with Ansible or Puppet in the future.
Virtual Machines are easily obtained nowadays. Cloud providers such as Digital Ocean or Exoscale offer virtual machines …