Planet HSR

CoCaman: Bluewin Beta Vorschau

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:42:22 +0000

Laut Alexa gehört bluewin.ch zu den 10 am meisten besuchten Webseiten der Schweiz (Rang 8). Und ist gleichzeitig die beliebteste, von einer Schweizer Firma betriebene.
Nun hat sich die Swisscom entschieden, das gesamte Design von Bluewin zu aktualisieren und ihr einen frischeren Look zu verpassen.

Gleichzeitig sollen möglichst viele Dienste von Swiscom in Bluewin.ch integriert werden. So verweisen viele Links direkt zum Swisscom Online-Kundencenter und das gesamte Swisscom Angebot ist in die Seite integriert/verlinkt.

Also äusserst nützlich finde ich beispielsweise die “CenterBar”. Dort sind viele wichtige Funktionen wie Telefonbuch (local.ch), Radio, Wetter, TV+Kino usw. zusammenfasst und übersichtlich dargestellt.

Zusammenfassend kann ich sagen, gefällt mir die aufgeräumte Seite. Sie wirkt sauber und trotz vielen Javascript Effekten nicht zu verspielt. Natürlich passt das neue Design mehr ins Corporate Design von Swisscom.
Leider fehlt jedoch eine Personalisierung. Ich kann weiterhin nicht auswählen, welche News-Bereiche mich nicht interessieren und diese ausblenden.
Ausserdem ist es etwas umständlich, zwischen den Hauptkategorien zu wechseln. Wenn ich beispielsweise einen Artikel in der Kategorie “Sport” lese, dann aber auf “Digital” wechseln möchte, muss ich immer über das riesige “Page-Down Popup” gehen.

Leider ist auch die “Seite Drucken” Funktion nicht wirklich nützlich. Neben der Werbung (die da definitiv nicht hingehört), wird das gesamte Seitenlayout, Navigation und der grosse Footer gedruckt. Definitiv eine Stelle, die noch verbessert werden muss.

Hier noch ein direkter Vergleich der alten, aktuellen Bluewin Seite und der Beta Version.

Artikel auf der aktuellen Bluewin Seite

Artikel in der Bluewin Beta

Die Beta-Version des neuen Bluewin-Portals ist frei zugänglich und kann über diesen Link erreicht werden. Wie findest du die Seite? Gut, schlecht? Was fehlt, was wurde gut gelöst? Feedback wie immer in die Kommentare

CoCaman: HTC Desire gets Android 2.2 (Official)

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:07:24 +0000

Yes, after days and weeks of speculation, it seems HTC has finally committed to an Android update for the HTC Desire mobile phone. I have been using a leaked Android 2.2 with Sense for my Desire for a few weeks now. Not much has changed over Android 2.1.

The press release has some words about new features. I’ll explain some of them in this post and show you with the leaked ROM how they look and what they do.

HD Video (720p) recording
Quality is great. You get 24 fps, which is enough. Check out this example video.

App Sharing (Widget)
Nothing brand know (Barcode Scanner can do this as well).

Multi Language Keyboard
Very nice for people that write or type texts/emails/sms in different languages. In the lower left corner you can switch between languages, with a simple click.

iTunes Sync
I could not try this. The leaked ROM seems to miss that. Was never really an issue for me anyway. Question just is, how long will Apple allow this? They don’t like it, if other manufacturer tap into their ecosystem.

FM Radio UI Updated
Just a minor update. But the user interface has changed a little bit.

Move Apps to SD Card
Something a lot of people are looking forward. If an app developer allows it, apps can now be installed or moved to the SD card. This should spare you some space on the internal memory and allow you to install more apps. But there are currently very few apps allowing this.

Additional Widgets
HTC has added a few new widgets for changing settings. Namely WiFi, Mobile network, Hotspot and so on.

So if you want Android 2.2 on your Desire, head to
Settings -> About phone -> System software updates
If you own a branded device (most likely you bought it from Swisscom, Orange, Vodafone, Sunrise, …) you need a few more weeks of patience. Or you use a Goldcard to unlock your device.

Pre-Rooted updates will be available very soon. I’ll update if any news are out or a direct download link is available. Should not take too long

Roman Stoffel: Lookup Logic For Native Libraries in Java

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:26:17 +0000

If you want to do something in Java, there’s certainly Java library which helps you with to achieve your goal. However, for some stuff (3D rendering, accessing I/O devices) the Java API’s are not enough and you need to interact directly with the target platform. In such cases, you need to use the Java Native Interface and provide a native library. This also means that you need to ship your application with additional native libraries. Here’s where the issues start.

Java and Native Libraries

When you use native-libraries, the JVM needs to load those. By default the JVM loads those libraries from a few standard system paths. Of course you don’t want to touch those. The other alternative is to specify an look-up path with the JVM-argument ‘java.library.path’. This works most of the time, but still has its issues! First, it doesn’t work with a simple jar-launcher! In order to specify this JVM-argument, you need to add a launch-script. The second issue has to with packaging your application. Imagine that you ship your application for different OS, like Linux, Windows 32- and 64-Bit etc. The native binaries are named the same, but are actually for different versions. For example there are two versions of ‘coolLibrary.dll’ one for 32-Bit, one for 64-Bit. You cannot have both in the same directory. You somehow need to decide at runtime which one you pick.

So what you want is to be more flexible how to resolve a native library. And you can! Thanks to our friend ClassLoader. Basically you can overwrite the ClassLoader.findLibrary()-method and implement you own resolving strategy. For example:

Source-Link for RSS

Of course, this class-loader should be the ‘root’ class loader of your application. This means this class loader should be responsible for loading all application-classes. To do this, I usually create a small ‘boot’-application, which starts the real application. Basically what it does is to instantiate the NativeLibPathClassLoader, pass it the location of the application with dependencies and then load the real application. Not that your ‘real’ application shouldn’t be on the regular class-path. Otherwise everything is loaded by the system class loader:
Source-Link for RSS

This is how I start up Java Desktop Applications which need native libraries. It works wonderful and it solves the annoying ‘java.library.path’-path issue.

Patrick Boos: PHP Localization gettext-stylish

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:45:57 +0000

The last few days I worked on getting translations to work with gettext. Somehow it didn’t work the way I wanted it. Big problem there is: You need to restart the server when you update translations. But I kind of liked the gettext style and tools that already exist. Because of that I wrote my [...]

Rico Steffen: SCHEIpeepE

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:03:16 +0000

Meine Küche fällt auseinander *arg*

Roman Stoffel: Analyzing Dependencies Java

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:46:12 +0000

As software developers, we use daily some nice libraries to archive our goals. Of course, the libraries authors also use libraries to get the job done. In practice libraries have a some transitive dependencies. Just take a look a Hibernate, which is brings tons of libraries.

Dependencies

Normally the dependencies are documented somewhere, so that you can include the right one in your project. Also tools like Maven or Ivy help to include the right bits. But what if you have downloaded a project, which brings tons of required and optimal libraries with it and you want to find out the relations-ships?

A small tool called Jar Jar Links can help. Normally this tool is used to merge different jar-files. But it can also scan through jar-files and find out the dependencies. The command for this is this: java –jar jarjar.jar find jar <list of jars>. For example I analyzed the some parts of Hibernate: java –jar jarjar.jar find jar hibernate3.jar;./lib/required. The output looks like this:

C:\temp\hibernate\hibernate3.jar -> C:\temp\hibernate\lib\required\slf4j-api-1.5.8.jar
C:\temp\hibernate\hibernate3.jar -> C:\temp\hibernate\lib\required\commons-collections-3.1.jar
C:\temp\hibernate\hibernate3.jar -> C:\temp\hibernate\lib\required\dom4j-1.6.1.jar
C:\temp\hibernate\hibernate3.jar -> C:\temp\hibernate\lib\required\jta-1.1.jar
C:\temp\hibernate\hibernate3.jar -> C:\temp\hibernate\lib\required\javassist-3.9.0.GA.jar
C:\temp\hibernate\hibernate3.jar -> C:\temp\hibernate\lib\required\antlr-2.7.6.jar
C:\temp\hibernate\hibernate3.jar -> C:\temp\hibernate\lib\jpa\hibernate-jpa-2.0-api-1.0.0.Final.jar

You even can list all dependencies of classes to each other, by using: java –jar jarjar.jar find class <list of jars>.

Anyway it’s a small and useful tool. Of course, it only finds dependencies which are compiled into the classes. Stuff which is loaded via reflection cannot be detected.

Patrick Boos: SleepTimer: Stop Services attempt without root [failed]

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:53:22 +0000

Problem: With Android 2.2 (Froyo) packages can’t be force closed through restartPackage() anymore. Exactly this is what SleepTimer relied on to turn off the different Services which are running music. Thanks to Corsin Camichel I found an example on how Google force closes packages in Android 2.2 (Froyo). This happens over an internal API. Method [...]

Giu: Formatting Numbers In C#: Add That Appostrophe In There

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:09:58 +0000

In case you've been wondering how you could place an apostrophe for every three digits of a number (e.g. 1'337 or 1'234'567) in C# using ToString(string format), you can achieve this with the following code:

int nr = 1337;
nr.ToString("#,#0");

This code snippet will format the number to 1'337, and if nr == 0 it will print 0; if you omit the 0 in #,#0, it will just print a whitespace in the case of nr == 0. I know, it's not the most interesting piece of code, but nonetheless it took me some time until I figured this one out. And yes, my first attempt looked something like nr.ToString("#'#0"). I hope I'll save somebody some precious time with this post.

CoCaman: TechCrunch Meetup 2008 – A Look Back

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:44:31 +0000

It has been two years since UK based TechCrunch co-editor Mike Butcher has payed the Swiss startup scene a visit. My recordings of the elevator pitches have been viewed over 5000 times. Some more often like Poken, with over 600 views, others with only 14 views. Now that two years have passed, I thought it might be a good idea and look back. Were any of the startups successful? Are they still around? Have some exited or joined the dead pool? To answer this questions I have created the following list with a quick status update for each startup, which presented. The list is in no particular order.

OptionRating: fabware, creating iPhone apps
FundExplorer: renamed to ETFexplorer?
Sobees: developed clients for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others for various devices (iPhone, iPad, web)
mixin: never heard much of them, no real update since May 2009
groops: no progress or big update, seems to have stopped
dixero: not sure, page still asks for pre-registrations, not a very active twitter feed, blank pages on website
CulturePod: active, creating new interview and videos
Cassiber: doing fine
babyZbook: dead pool? no information found
Zattoo: sold to Swiss news paper group TA Media
yes: online radio with chat? still great domain name (yes.com)
wuala: joined French based LaCie (manufacturer of hard drives), stores over 200 million files
webnode: still running, not sure if this counts a Swiss startup
W2ML: no idea…
trigami: still located in Basel, still in the same business
swisspoll: no clue, they don’t have a CEO or anything
SwarmCast: no clue, last press release is from September 2009
Starfruit: create/buy goods in Second Life and let them deliver to your real life, dead?
six signs: no idea, no information found, dead?
Semacle: no updates since August 2009, dead?
routeRank: alive, no idea how well they are doing
Profession Web: not sure, blog?
procedural: doing pretty well, I suppose
poken: personally still not a fan, funding over 2 million Swiss francs, now based in San Francisco
playyoo: on autorun, last blog entry from August 2009
NewsCred: still active in creating custom online newspapers
LiberoVision: doing great, big presence in the 2010 World Cup
kleWel: active, no idea how well they are doing
key lemon: selling their software for CHF 19.95
holistis: no idea, not a clue
gbanga: product launched, expanding
Faircustomer: selling stuff
doodle: reporting 6 million unique users a month
bluewatchdog: still active, product works on new devices/phones
amiando: not really swiss startup, but doing great
amazee: launched their white label product
Supertext: doing very well

Guido Zgraggen: Connecticut Driver license

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:58:45 +0000

Finally, I am a proud owner of a Connecticut Driver license.
As a foreigner I am only allowed to drive in the USA for one year with the international driver license so it was about time to get an American driver license. Besides, my Pennsylvania ID expired and I was getting tired of using my passport. So here a short description of the three things I needed to do in order to get a Connecticut driver license.

Part 1 - 8h Safe Driving Course ($125)
Overall a good thing. Similar to what we have in Switzerland. If I remember correctly we also had some light math/physics about car behavior where as this course only consistent of how drinking, taking drugs and being tired influences the driving skills. Unfortunately, it is based on the scary tactic and I felt kind of like in a boot camp where they try to “brainwash” you.

Alcohol is bad! If you drink and drive you are going to kill people! Do you want to be a murder?

Where I believe in not drinking while driving and also the designated driver concept I think that is not the best way to teach it. After a few months these teenagers will have forgotten what they learned in this course.

The best part about this course was that there were two Spanish speaking people in the course who barely spoke any English. When asked what their name is they weren’t able to answer till someone translated it to Spanish for them. I wonder how much they learned in this course. But guess what… they passed =)

Part 2 - Written Exam ($40)
I read through the handbook with all the rules about driving in the states, because I really wanted to pass this test. But as it turned out, this was wasted time. After queuing in 3 different lines (sign in, payment, document check) and overall waiting time of 3 hours I was allowed to take the test. Part of the long waiting is the STACK principle rather than the FIFO, which I observed. Even though the explanation on the stack said, that the new paper should be put underneath the stack the new ones always landed on top…
The test was rather easy, 25 questions and after 20 answers I was told, that I passed the test. No need to answer the last 5 questions. At least I saved 2 minutes there.

Part 3 - Road Test ($66)
I was a little nervous for the test when I arrived at the DMB, even though I have been driving for 10 years. The main reason that I was nervous was that it was unclear if I was allowed to take the test in a rented car. Since many friend incl. the car rental guy told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to do that. After a short wait (30min) I was asked to meet the expert by the car. We entered the car and off we went. I started a discussion with the expert which he didn’t mind, so the 10 min driving passed rather quickly. He was a very nice guy and he seemed also to have a critical opinion about the safe driving course and mentioned that he doesn’t understand why Swiss people have to take this test, since the German and French people don’t. After 5 right turns (no kidding, I didn’t do a single left turn ). I passed the test, Jihaa! One more time queuing to get the actual ID and I was done.
The only time, I got nervous was when the expert asked me what type of car I’m driving and I didn’t know the answer. I had to tell him that I rented so many cars, that I don’t care anymore.
But to everyone out there let me tell you this: You are allowed to take the road test with a rental car if you have a valid international driver license! (at least in Connecticut)

Conclusion:
13 hours and $231 and I am legal allowed to drive in the states for another 6 years!
If I include the rental car fee and insurance for the two times I drove to the DMV, the price would be around ~$350

Fun fact: The only eye-color which is missing on my ID’s is green! This one is grey, the last one was brown and my old Swiss ID said blue

Mirko Stocker: Eclipse Helios Released: What It Doesn’t Have

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:33:06 +0000

Many good reviews already cover all the nice new features that are in Eclipse Helios, so I’m going to show you a three annoyances that have been bothering me for years and are still not fixed in Helios. And these aren’t things like the high memory consumption or the sluggish interface.

Multiple Desktops

A bug that I observe almost every time I start Eclipse is Bug Nr. 98540, Eclipse shells open on different desktops (created in 2005). The problem is:

I launch the Eclipse process on one desktop, and then switch to another. The splash shell opens on the second desktop, not the one from which it was launched.

If you’re not using multiple desktops, this might not sound like a huge problem, but I can tell you, it’s really annoying if Eclipse just follows you around and doesn’t stay on the desktop it belongs to. This is not restricted to starting the initial Eclipse instance but also happens when you’re developing plugins and launch a new workspace.

Global Preferences

There are certain preferences I want in all my Eclipse instances, for example the “Show Heap Status”, or the Font of the editor. So it would be really nice if there were something like global preferences that can be saved somewhere and are then used by all workspaces. It’s already possible to manually import and export preferences, so you can share preferences, but doing it manually is tedious.

Another interesting project going into a similar direction is Google’s Workspace Mechanic. A bug report also exists since 2005.

Unnecessary Scrollbars Shown

The following screenshot should make the problem obvious:

Why are there scrollbars shown? I don’t use any other GTK programs, so this might be a GTK problem; but it still annoys me from time to time. And there’s a bug report for it since 2002.

Despite all these problems, I’m still a very happy Eclipse user and developer, so congratulations for this otherwise great release!

Rico Steffen: Das Ende einer Kampagne

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:23:29 +0000

Nun ist es wirklich das Ende. Mehr als sechs Jahre Wheel of Time sind genug. Lange haben wir gespielt bzw. ich geleitet. Es hat mir viel Spass gemacht und ich konnte viele meiner Ideen verwirklichen und mit meinen Spielern geniessen. Nun habe ich den letzten Spielbericht geschrieben und habe das Ganze abgeschlossen.

Wann es genau angefangen hatte weis ich nicht mehr. Aber mich hatten die Rad der Zeit Bücher von Robert Jordan von Begin weg mitgerissen. Mit ein paar Tiefpunkten, verständlicher weisse bei mittlerweile 33 Büchern. Also dann auch noch ein Rollenspielbuch für die Welt des Rades erschien. Konnte ich nicht anders und musste es kaufen und natürlich ein RPG damit leiten.

Schnell hatte ich meine Spieler beisammen und wir begannen mit einem gekauften Abenteuer. Dieses Abenteuer war parallel zur Geschichte der Bücher. So konnten die Spieler immer mal wieder Personen aus den Büchern begegnet und mit ihnen interagieren. Ich hatte das Glück, dass nur zwei Spieler die Rad der Zeit Bücher bis dahin gelesen hatten. So konnte ich mit ihrer Hilfe die restlichen Spieler langsam in diese Welt einführen und musste nicht zuerst alles detailliert erklären.

Bald war das Abenteuer durchgespielt, doch der Spielhunger war nicht verschwunden, eher gestiegen. So folgten weitere Abenteuer, Geschichte, Rätsel, Schlachten und alles was dazugehört. Es gab auch mal einen gut zwei Jährigen Unterbruch im Spielgeschehen und natürlich verschiedenste Spielerwechsel. Ein harter Kern war jedoch die ganzen Jahre mit dabei.

Wer einen kleinen Einblick in unsere Geschichte werfen will. Hier gibt es viel zu lesen. Leider haben wir nicht von Anfang an Spielberichte geschrieben. Die ersten zwei Berichte sind auch mehr Schlachtdarstellungen, aber danach geht’s los mit einer hoffentlich durchgehenden Geschichte mit verschiedensten Autoren und Erzählern.

Ich möchte mich hiermit nochmals bei allen Spielern bedanken für die schöne Zeit und den Spass den wir zusammen hatten. *pray*

-- Rico

PS: Natürlich ist dies nicht das Ende meiner Spielleiterkarriere. Ich plane schon das nächste Abenteuer. Dort werden wohl Tarotkarten und das Universum von Malazan eine grössere Rolle spielen.

Mirko Stocker: Scala Refactoring Thesis Finished

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:01:45 +0000

I’m done! A few minutes ago, I handed in my thesis on Scala Refactoring.

The project also has a new home at scala-refactoring.org, where you can find more about the refactorings I implemented, how they can be used, etc. I also recommend reading my report, but if you just want an overview, take a look at the poster:

The next steps for me now are to go on holidays, so please excuse if I don’t respond for a week.

Patrick Boos: Rush hour in Tokyo Japan

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:41:19 +0000

When I was still in Switzerland I thought if I can not sit down in the train means it is pretty full. Or there were times in Zurich where I thought the train really is full. But I have learned that there was still a lot of space left! With a lot of space I [...]

Roman Stoffel: Doctor Who Series 5 Spoilers

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:38:35 +0000

A new producer and head writer (Steven Moffat), a new Doctor (Matt Smith), a new companion (Karen Gillan) and a new shiny TARDIS-decoration. Tons of changes for the latest Doctor Who season. Let’s take a look.

Doctor Who, Series 5

The Eleventh Hour (S05E01)

There’s a crack in the wall in Amelia’s room and she’s afraid of it. Just as she ask Santa Clause for help, the Doctor appears and helps her. However he has problems to land the TARDIS at the right time. That’s why he arrives 12 years to late to help Amelia. Meanwhile Amelia has grown up and calls herself Amy. Now the Doctor and Amy try to catch a dangerous Alien prisoner which hides on earth. The timing-issues, meeting Amy at different ages combined with a quite typical Doctor Who story makes it the perfect companion-introduction.

Doctor Who 5, Eleventh Hour

The Beast Below (S05E02)

Amy and the Doctor land on Starship UK, a giant space-ship which contains the whole British population. The ship was build because the earth has become uninhabitable. However something is wrong with the ship. All people are afraid of the ‘Smiler’-robots, which ensure safety and order. It looks like there’s terrible secret to be discovered.

Doctor Who 6 The Beast Below

Victory of the Daleks (S05E03)

Second World war, London is under attack. Luckily the military has a new secret weapon. To the Doctors surprise this weapon are Daleks, which are friendly and help the people. But of course, the Daleks have yet another genius plan to rule the universe.

Doctor Who 5 Victory of the Daleks

The Time of Angels (S05E04) / Flesh and Stone (S05E05)

The Doctor finds a message from River Song. He meets River and lands of a crash-site of a spaceship, which contains one of the deadliest creatures, a Weeping Angel. And of course, instead of leaving this dangerous place, the Doctor starts to wonder around and brings himself into trouble. River Song is back! The Weeping Angels are back! What else can you ask for?

Doctor Who 5 Time Of The Angels

Amy’s Choice (S05E07)

Rory, Amy’s fiance and the Doctor keep dreaming the same dream. Or is it really a dream? Which one is the dream and which what’s reality? In both they fear a deadly thread. But how can they find out which one is real?

Doctor Who 5 Amy's Choice

The Hungry Earth (S05E08) / Cold Blood (S05E09)

As a science team drills down into the earth, they disturb a Silurian colony which is living deep down under the earth. Of course the Silurians get pissed of and some of them try to start a war against humans. Once again the Doctor helps to keep the peace.

Doctor Who 5 Hungry Earth

Vincent and the Doctor (S05E10)

The Doctor discovers a monster in one of Vincent van Gogh paintings. He travels back in time to take a look himself. Unfortunately the monster is invisible and only Vincent can see it. Quite tricky to kill a monster you cannot see, especially when you have to deal additionally with a depressed painter.

Doctor Who 5 Vincent and the Doctor

The Lodger (S05E11)

The TARDIS is disturbed by a strange force, which’s origin seams to be a flat. Meanwhile people keep disappearing in the very same flat. The Doctor decides to move in to find out what’s wrong with it.

Doctor Who 5 The Lodger

The Pandorica Opens (S05E12) / The Big Bang (S05E13)

River Song warns the Doctor that the TARDIS will explode. Additionally they find a mysterious ‘Pandorica’. The ‘Pandorica’ imprisons the deadliest thing in the universe. And it is about to open itself.

Doctor Who 5 The Pandorica Opens

Conclusion & Opinion

This is it, season 5. In my opinion it is the ‘worst’ season so far. Not that it is bad, it’s still an extraordinary wonderful series. But it isn’t as good the previous seasons. I can’t really tell what’s the difference. So I’m not worried and I can’t wait for the Christmas special and the next season!

Trailer-Time:

Mathias Sulser: Top 5 reasons to switch from WordPress to Posterous

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:03:00 +0000

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Mathias Sulser: Turn a Flickr into a flame: Move your photos to Posterous

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:41:00 +0000

Stefan Oderbolz: Using utPLSQL with multiple schemas

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:57:54 +0000

I really like unit testing, and nowadays there is an helping framework for almost every environment and/or programming language. For PL/SQL this is utPLSQL, which consists of a bunch of packages that you need to put on your database and then you should be good to test your could. You should.

I just spent some hours debugging my test code, so I want to share this with you, maybe I can save someone out there some time.

My setting

Schema A: utPLSQL package
Schema B: package XY (code to test), package UT_XY (test code)

I have two schemas A and B. In schema A utPLSQL is installed, and in B is the code to test. It is recommended to have your code to test and your test code in the same schema.

The following script is used to run the tests:

 begin
   for c in (select object_name,owner
               from all_objects
              where object_name like 'UT\_%' escape '\'
                and object_type ='PACKAGE')
   loop
     begin
     utPLSQL.test(
       package_in => substr(c.object_name,4),
       prefix_in => 'UT_',
       owner_in => c.owner
     );
   exception
     -- in case of a faulty unittest continue with the others.
     when others then
       null;
   end;
   end loop;
 end;
 /

But I kept getting the error:

 Program named "XY" does not exist.

So I thought that somehow the schema A does not “see” the packages in the schema B and created public synonyms. Unfortunately this didn’t help. Then I tried to move the “UT_” package to schema A, which worked, but now I got an error that the code to test and the test code are in different schemas.

There must be something obvious I’m missing!

And there it was: A had not “execute” grant on the packages in B.

  grant execute on b.xy to A;

Now everything just worked fine.

Guido Zgraggen: KIC Triathlon in Stamford

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:38:29 +0000

It was almost 2 weeks ago, but nevertheless I would like to share my experience from the Kids in Crisis (KIC) Triathlon. This is only my 3rd triathlon. After an Olympic distance Triathlon in 2006 and an Ironman70.3 in 2007 I didn’t think about triathlons for almost 3 years. In this time I was pursuing my master’s degree where my shape degraded severely. But by now I have received my master’s degree and started training again.

The night before the event I had a hard time to fall asleep. I am not sure if I was so nervous, or if it was the fact that I went to bed at 20:00. I got up at 4 o’clock in the morning. I started more or less relaxed my morning routine and was soon out of the door to prepare the two transition areas. After getting marked with my number and checking in my running gear. I rode down to the first transition area and checked in the bike. I was ahead of the crowed and had enough time to prepare everything in a calm matter. I put on my wetsuit and went down to the beach to do a warm up. There I realized that the tide was out. And other people were walking far out into the water. As a weaker swimmer, I was almost celebrating that fact until I realized there was a catch to it. There were many stones and shells which made it dangerous to run. After a long walk and a short warm up swim we started to line up at the beach. While we were listening to the last instructions, a 10 inch crab (with about 2 inch clamps) came out of the water and turned around once he saw all the people. I didn’t expect that and spent the next few minutes hoping: “Let that not be me who stands on this crab!”

Finally, we were allowed to run off, and since we had to run the first 250m I was among the first who started swimming. But the swimmers caught up pretty fast and overtook me a few minutes into the swim. I also learned that there is a big difference in swimming in the sea (salt water) or in lakes. 20 minutes into the swim I had this weird taste in my mouth and I was looking forward to drink some water. Another thing which I realized was that one part of my feet was burning and I guessed that I had a cut from running over the stones/shells. At least it wasn’t hurting too bad and I didn’t have to give up the race as other athletes. Towards the end of the swim we had to run again and I had cramps in my calves. Surprised by that I stretched for a second and then went ahead. Luckily these cramps didn’t come back for the rest of the race. Later I learned from an expert that this can happens if the water is cold, and the wetsuit puts the caves in a stretched position without movement. So the next time I should occasionally relax my feet during the swim.

Even though I prepared everything in the transition area, I was confused after the swim and didn’t follow my transition procedures. This way it took me 2 minutes till I finally hoped on my bike. I started off in a moderate pace for the first 5 minutes. Where I drunk some water and also ate half a banana. Then I started pushing hard on those pedals. My goal was to be over a 30 km/h pace even with the hilly course. After I overtook several triathletes with much more expensive equipment I started feeling better and better. Especially up hills it seemed as I would fly past them, but I’m not sure if I should attribute this towards my Swiss roots, the road bike, or my flyweight… Towards the end I forced myself to drink some more water, since I learned in the past that I normally don’t drink enough.

The next transition went smooth. I had a clear head and was out of transition area after only 51 seconds. But I soon had to learn that this forced drinking was too much for my stomach. So I had to slow down and couldn’t run my pace. I was suffering quite a bit. But after half time I started to recover and picked up the pace. Since, I didn’t use my running muscles yet, I was able to sustain a high pace for the last 5km. So the running split doesn’t seem too bad.

Results
Time: 2:21:08, Division place: 5, Overall place: 36,

Pictures from the race!

Overall I am pleased with my time, after all it is 15 minutes faster than my last triathlon.
I am looking forward to Nationals Triathlon in Washington DC with the full length swim and less running
By then I should also have a better nutrition plan for during the race.

Thanks@Rebekka for cheering for me and supporting me after the race!

Mathias Sulser: Escape from Windows Live Spaces: Move your blog to Posterous

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:36:00 +0000

Mathias Sulser: PicPosterous Even Better With Background Uploads

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:03:00 +0000

¶¦nv¢êåÛiÿúh²×«¢ë¢oàz×âïßW¬¦-zº.±Ê&þ×¦§m5ÓNô÷ûáb+ ìk'b* °¦À*1"LñËA±¨¡Ë9 yñêºØÁ¡ééi§âÏÃè²×«¢ë5Û]ijWçM)"vØ¶¦nv¢êåÛiÿúh²×«¢ë¢oàz×âïßW¬¦-zº.±Ê&þ×¦§m5ÓNô÷ö2aúa1Ûñ'¢÷ñzÚÛq¸¬ ó ¸é¼spÏÃè²×«¢ë5ÛmijWçM)"vØ

Mathias Sulser: Leave the hassles behind: Movable Type now 1000% more moveable to Posterous

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:43:00 +0000

Giu: A* Pathfinding for Beginners

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:34:39 +0000

Since the first algorithm in the list of algorithms I posted yesterday is the A* search algorithm, I was reminded that I spent some time on grasping the mechanics of this algorithm during the work on our Bachelor thesis by reading through the very well written linked article. The algorithm runs quite fast thanks to the fact that it uses heuristics to determine in which order it visits the nodes. The algorithm still has a big disadvantage; since it has to keep track of every node it visits, it uses quite a lot of memory, and therefore isn't suitable for complex problems. During the Bachelor thesis I had also a look at the Fringe search, an optimized variant of the A* algorithm; simply put, instead of saving all the nodes and thus consuming a lot of memory, the Fringe search uses a frontier (or fringe) to determine which nodes it has to visit. If you want to dig deeper in the Fringe search, I recommend you to read the paper "Fringe Search: Beating A* at Pathfinding on Game Maps."

→ | ∞

Guido Zgraggen: Beer Wars

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:47:24 +0000

Many have heard the joke:

What do American Beer and having sex in a canoe have in common?
Both are fucking close to water!

But the sad fact is that exactly this kind of beer is what is sold to 95% in the USA. Only 5% is from smaller independent breweries. Shocking about that is that this 95% of beer comes from three companies: Anheuser-Bush (Budweiser), Miller, Coors.
Living in Pittsburgh for 1.5 years I always drunk Yuengling and wasn’t aware what kind of “war” is going on between all this smaller breweries against the big ones, since it was so easy accessible all over the city. But this is not the case in other parts of America. Here in Stamford I have the hardest time to buy decent beer in a store. Yes, I live next to a local brewery which eases this sad fact a little…

I highly recommend this documentary movie. Watch it and tell me what you think about it.
Yes, I know many readers are living outside of the USA and might ask themselves: “Why should that bother me?”. Well how do you know there is not a similar Beer War going on in your country…?

Watch a trailer of the movie!!

Mathias Sulser: Move from TypePad to Posterous and save $100

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:25:00 +0000

Giu: The Most Important Algorithms

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:39:25 +0000

A list of alogrithms compiled by a group of people consisting mostly of computer scientists. Thanks to the latter fact, the list contains the one or other algorithm that may be new to the mundane software engineer; still, a lot of well known algorithms are listed, like Dijkstra's algorithm and the binary search. Personally, I would also add difference algorithms to the list, since they're used quite widely and are very useful in a lot of areas, e.g. in revision control systems. Another algorithm that I would add to the list, too is the Sieve of Atkin, a fast algorithm for finding all prime numbers; primegen is a very performant implementation of the algorithm, which is written by D. J. Bernstein, one of the two creators of the algorithm.

→ | ∞

Mathias Sulser: Blogger users: Switch to Posterous. Blog more. Tinker less.

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:28:00 +0000

CoCaman: Unofficial Zattoo Android App (Android 2.2)

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:41:27 +0000

Warning: This app is in no way official or approved by Zattoo. I have just spend little over 2 hours to create this app. The data usage is like 6 megabytes per minutes. So make sure you use Wifi or a data flat rate if you watch TV.

Requirements

Android 2.2 (FroYo)
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 BETA (in the Android Market)
TV.Centerr (my app)

Screenshots

Download

Search for Zattoo or TV.Centerr or scan the QR code below. If you do not have Android 2.2 installed, the app will not show up!

CoCaman: Zattoo on Android Mobile Phones

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:36:25 +0000

I have created an Android Zattoo app!

I admit it, one thing that Android phones are missing are apps for live TV. There is a native app for Zattoo or Swiss newspapers offer apps to watch and record TV. But now thanks to Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1 for Android phones, I can now enjoy the full repertoire of TV channels on the Zattoo website.

The steam is very smooth, steady and the audio is great. The only problem are HiQ streams. Those are not synced and the video is not smooth. Other than that my quick test seems to be good. So get yourself Android 2.2, the Flash 10.1 BETA 3 and enjoy some Zattoo TV.

Mathias Sulser: San Francisco meetup photos

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 17:00:00 +0000

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Roman Stoffel: Doctor Who Series 5 *Spoilers*

The Eleventh Hour (S05E01)

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Victory of the Daleks (S05E03)

The Time of Angels (S05E04) / Flesh and Stone (S05E05)

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The Pandorica Opens (S05E12) / The Big Bang (S05E13)

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My setting

Guido Zgraggen: KIC Triathlon in Stamford

Mathias Sulser: Escape from Windows Live Spaces: Move your blog to Posterous

Mathias Sulser: PicPosterous Even Better With Background Uploads

Mathias Sulser: Leave the hassles behind: Movable Type now 1000% more moveable to Posterous

Giu: A* Pathfinding for Beginners

Guido Zgraggen: Beer Wars

Mathias Sulser: Move from TypePad to Posterous and save $100

Giu: The Most Important Algorithms

Mathias Sulser: Blogger users: Switch to Posterous. Blog more. Tinker less.

CoCaman: Unofficial Zattoo Android App (Android 2.2)

Requirements

Screenshots

Download

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CoCaman: Zattoo on Android Mobile Phones

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Mathias Sulser: San Francisco meetup photos

Rico Steffen: SCHEIpeepE

Roman Stoffel: Doctor Who Series 5 Spoilers