Stefan Arentz

Our stuff is already on it’s way to Toronto! By boat. Hope my books don’t get seasick.

I’ve decided to spend my time on more useful things than learning historic programming languages like Lisp. (Although that was a lot of fun and it definitely changed my thinking and coding style in a positive way!)
My goal for the coming months is to master Open Solaris. What I want to learn is a good […]

I found an interesting quote about SOAP API usage for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service:

We are continuing to support our existing SOAP APIs. That said, given that SOAP requests currently make up < 1% of our request volume in the US, we made the pragmatic decision to not extend the SOAP APIs as part of […]

Spring 2.5 has some great improvements that make configuration much simpler. One that I very much like is the auto detection of components in the classpath. The Spring 2.5 documentation on this subject is worth reading. It also gives a nice and simple example.
For the 2.0 branch of the Polar Rose Web Service Foundation I […]

I’ve created a 2.0 branch in the polarrose-wsf project where I want to try out some new ideas.
Some things on the list:

Merge the wsf and wsf-examples into one maven project as modules (already done)
Merge the projects on Google code
Add the wsf-client module to the project
Depend on Spring 2.5 for auto detection of action handlers. Just […]

This is rather serious. Consider this:

% dd if=/dev/zero of=data bs=1 count=2679
% sha256sum data
a25f4ccc56ddf88a4fb3e11baec5838c5181a496f376cdd569f8fc782f8fdcdf data

A file of 2679 zeros and its SHA-256 hash. Nothing special.
Well, not exactly .. now look at the equivalent Python code:

$ python
Python 2.4.3 (#2, Oct 6 2006, 07:49:22)
[GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more […]

Now that SimpleDB is out of it’s secret stealth beta I thought it was a good idea to make my Amazon Python modules available on Google Code.
I’ve written these for Polar Rose but as usual they are happy to release things like this under an open source license.
What the package contains is two things:

Command […]

There is an excellent article on the Mathematic blog by Stephen Wolfram, who is still, after 21 years, the main architect of the Mathematica core.

If one does a good job at finding the primitives, then one can build a very broad system that gives one not just the functionality one was first thinking about, but […]

I just discovered flyspell-prog-mode. It works on comments and string constants in your code.

You can enable this mode automatically by doing something like:
(add-hook ‘c-mode-common-hook ‘(lambda () (flyspell-prog-mode)))
Note for OS X users. It uses ispell, which does not come with OS X. Fortunately that is easily solved by using the MacPorts.