Category Archives: Software

Who is this guy?

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The guy that:

  • is really interested in solving the problems and finding how things work
  • you can bounce ideas about technical stuff
  • points out the things you had overlooked when proposing that new concept or architecture
  • thinks: “Humm.. what would happen if I would do this?” and finds a new problem
  • comes in on Saturday to do stuff that needs doing
  • skips lunch because he is so immersed in a problem
  • understands better than everyone else the programming language your team is using

15 Great Web Apps

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Here are 15 great web apps both me and @aaires liked, followed by the technology they were built with:

– Delicious – mod_perl, HTML::Mason, and MySQL
– Twitter – rails+joyent
– Monster Jobs – Java
– WordPress – PHP
– Dokuwiki – PHP
– Flickr PHP+MySQL+Perl+Java+Apache+Shards+Memcached+Squid+Smarty+etc
– Youtube – Python+Apache+Linux+MySQL+psico+lighttpd
– Fireftp – C++ + Javascript
– 280atlas.com – Javascript (Cappuccino + Ojective-J)
– gmail, greader, maps, calendar, etc. – Python+Java+C+++Javascript
– piclens – C++ + Actionscript 3
– Amazon – C++ + Perl + Mason + Java
– Picnik – Actionscript 3
– Pandora – Actionscript 3
– Aviary Phoenix – Actionscript 3

It seems that a great web app doesn’t depend on the technology because everyone is using something different. Is this a fallacy?

Javascript is used by almost all of them but together with at least one other language.

I can hear you ask: What criteria did you use?

* Slick UI and look and feel (Aviary, etc)
* Great content and usefulness (youtube, delicious)
* Usefulness (flickr, monster)
* Modularity and capacity to extend (WordPress)
* Great concept (Twitter)
* ..

Next week I’m going to be in Portugal for a week. If anyone wants to get together drop me an e-mail or call. I’ll be arriving on Sunday and staying in Portimão until Wednesday, and then in Lisbon until the following Sunday.

pediapress

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A very nice startup based nearby us in Mainz (half-hour from Darmstadt), was just covered on Techcrunch here:

http://twurl.nl/8tic32

They do custom books from content taken out of Wikipedia. They started supporting only the German Wikipedia but now they have extended that support to Dutch, French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and English.

http://pediapress.com/

Very cool I think!

The wonders of popen()

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It’s funny, I didn’t realize (or had forgotten) how easy it is to execute a command and grab its output.


#include

main()
{
FILE *fpipe;
char *command="ls -l";
char line[256];

if ( !(fpipe = (FILE*)popen(command,"r")) )
{ // If fpipe is NULL
perror("Problems with pipe");
exit(1);
}

while ( fgets( line, sizeof line, fpipe))
{
printf("%s", line);
}
pclose(fpipe);
}

from http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/ForkExecProcesses.html