Wenn man unter Ubuntu größere Files löscht wie z.B. ein runtergeladenes ISO-Image dann werden diese standardmäßig in den Papierkorb verschoben, wo sie weiterhin Festplattenplatz verbrauchen. Um Files dauerhaft zu löschen gibt es die Tastenkombination Shift-Entf. Leider vergesse ich diese Kombination immer und im Kontextmenü gibt es dafür keinen Eintrag. Das lässt sich jedoch ändern.

If you want to do routing in your application (the kind of routing that involves streets, crossings, etc.) you can use for example Googles Direction API. Its quality is unmatched and it is usually a very good solution for a lot of requirements. But there are some downsides. Google allows only a limited amount of requests. It is a WebService, so there is some overhead for all the network stuff going on. And last but not least if you have to send personal information like the addresses of your customers you might be violating the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU. So it might be good to have an alternative. One of those alternatives is GraphHopper. This software and its usage is the subject of this post.

Nowadays with frameworks like JAX-RS it is simple to develop clients for REST APIs. The framework takes care of everything for you: Binding from object to JSON, validating and even doing the actual HTTP request. This is very comfortable to implement. Unfortunately it is difficult to test. Does the JSON really meet my expectations? You can not test this kind of code with a traditional unit test. You need a server for this! What if the server is developed by another team and is not available yet? All you got is the spec? And what if it is a third party service and we do not have an instance for testing? Continuous testing against a production environment? Not a good idea. WireMock is here to help you with this kind of scenarios.

In my post about My Journey To A Paperless Life I wrote about how I digitalize all my documents. The initial intention of this was to have a copy of every important document outside our house. The blog post ends with the sentence “And of course the most important thing: Backing up these documents in the cloud is now a no-brainer.” But is it really a no-brainer? Yes and no…

I really like the map style “OSM Bright”. It is very clean and concentrates on the important stuff in a map. It is not overloaded with a lot of POIs. But unfortunately it lacks one feature which is very important for me: house numbers.

Ever startet a long running process on a remote server when logged in via ssh? Ever lost the SSH connection while this process is runnig? Ever lost data because of this? Then ‘screen’ might be something for you.

Recently I had the requirement to search a CSV file like it was a single database table. Up to now I had used CSV for data import and stuff where the data in the file is read or written line by line. I never had to search for a specific entry in these kind of files.

One thing I always wanted to build was an extreme feedback device. It is a device that shows the status of your builds on a continuous integration server (CI server). It is so much in your face that you just can not ignore it.

I have tons of old letters, invoices and other stuff printed on good old paper. The stuff piles up and can be found everywhere around our house. Of course some of this stuff is more or less obsolete. On the other hand some of these papers are really, really important like insurance policies. A while ago I started thinking about which of them are so important that they even have to survive the house burning down. As I tried to figure this out I realized: