Mathias Bank

Today, Microsoft has released the first candidate release for its PowerShell. It should enable the user to do things which are no problem under linux with bash. Unlike bash, you can handle objects in PowerShell and use the fully complexity of .Net 2.0.

I have already installed PowerShell and it’s a great improve. No I don’t need any more the old stupid “Eingabeauffordernung”. Really nice!

These days, i’m learning for my exams in artificial intelligence. Because I haven’t understand constrained satisfaction problems (a speciel search problem in ai), I looked at wikipedia. There was not much help. But therefore, there was a link to another CSP: The Combat Simulator Project. It is an open source flight simulator. I was interested, so I searched a little bit. There were to other interesting links:

• True Combat: A full ego shooter
• StarWars: free starWars games

Ok, back to artificial intelligence: Of course, there is a good information source: Wolfgang Runte has written a good degree dissertation: “YACS: Ein hybrides Framework für Constraint-Solver zur Unterstützung wissensbasierter Konfigurierung“. Specially chapter 5 helped me: “Klassische Constraint Satisfaction Probleme“.

For a long time, I used lexware buchhalter for bookkeeping. It was quite easy to make the job. But I was annoyed about the update politics of lexware: so you have to buy every year a new version. That’s not cheap, so I cannot afford this every year.

In Germany, you have to do your sales tax summary reports (Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung) online since 2005, there is a software called Elster. To use this software out of my bookkeeping software, I have bought the new version of lexware buchhalter last year. In the new version, I can nearly only see a better markup. The handling was as bad as in the old version (the same problems, nothing has changed).

But today, ne new version doesn’t work any longer with Elster: Assistent für ELSTER-Übertragung schmeißt mich ohne Fehlermeldung raus. Lexware doesn’t want to give an update for my version (which is only one year old!).

This is surely the last software of lexware I have bought. I can agree about buying new software every 2 or 3 years. But - if I cannot afford a new version - I want to get updates for my software at least for 2 years. Lexware: you have lost one customer. I hope, this text will open your eyes!

Perun has written a nice text about which layout you should use in the www: it’s a really good text, I think. So - if you plan to design a new page - the most important rule is:

First content, than layout

So, the conclusion of the text is to use the layout that match to your content.

Yesterday, my laptop (hp nx9105) made a lot of trouble. Therefore I decided to reinstall it and to use Microsoft Windows 64 because I have an Athlon 64. Until now, I wasn’t able to understand, why HP gives me a Win32 for this laptop: now I know it.

The installation was quite good and windows was running. But then, it started. I needed nearly 2 hours to find the necessary drivers for sound and video. Of course these drivers cannot be found at the page of HP (but of course you can make marketing with this nice number 64!). But well, we know google.

After the installation of the drivers, I wanted to install an antivirus program (I use bitdefender). And what can I see? This program will not work on Win64 (but of course, this is not explicitly written at the page of bitdefender). Also Zone Alarm cannot be used with Win64, my eclipse doesn’t want the 64bit version of Java and so on…

Today I have started to reinstall Windows with 32bit. Surly this was the last laptop of hp!