Friday, August 21, 2009

Office and filenames

Did you know that Microsoft Office 2007 will not open two files with the same name but different file paths concurrently? So if you open example.doc in your Document folder and then example.doc from an email, Office will tell you that it cannot do that until you close the other Office window that already displays a file named example.doc. Very smart...

Monday, August 17, 2009

Low budget

This is probably caused by the economic crisis and people easily talking about Billions of Euro: German news magazine "Der Spiegel" reviews the movie "District 9" (German only) and calls it a low budget movie - with a budget of only 20 Million Dollars. And they have the nerves to compare it to other (real) low budget films like The Blair Witch Project (way below 1 Million Dollars).

Please, 20 Million Dollars is certainly not a low budget, even if today's blockbusters easily cost ten times more (which is just insane). And unless inflation is picking up fast speed, this will not be a low budget for a long time.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Zeitrechnung

Nach meiner persönlichen Zeitrechnung ist die dritte von vier Packungen Gummibärchen angebrochen (ich halte mich gut, oder?).
Die Zeit vergeht echt schnell, nur noch 4 Wochen und schon ist mein Praktikum rum und ich darf in den wohlverdienten Urlaub.

C# versus Java

The Syntax of C# look very familiar if you know Java. In fact, it was rather easy for me to start programming in C# as I already knew Java a bit. But there are slight differences under the hood that can cost you a lot of time while debugging.

For once, while Java is a portable language, C# clearly is not - and not only because Microsoft only supports the .Net platform on Windows. While in Java everything uses big endian, C# uses whatever the underlying architecture supports. This means, e.g., little endian on x86 and big endian on PowerPC. So if you are doing bit manipulation in integers, you better know what you are doing - and do not assume, as I did, that C# behaves just like Java only because it looks like Java.