Last monday we went to Hamburg (in the north of Germany) to attend the Eclipse DemoCamp, kindly hosted by Gentleware, a company devoted to Model Driven Software Development (MSDS) and producing impressive UML tools.

Recently I had to migrate two drupal instances running on different servers into one drupal instance with exactly one MySQL database as backend. I started both installations without databse prefix (see your site’s settings.php for details). Now I had to change this. The first site should get the prefix ‘www_’, the second site ‘o4e_’.

Now it’s done: We at PartMaster just published the first release of our Obfuscation feature for the Eclipse IDE: obfuscate4e, located at obfuscate4e.partmaster.de

You might ask: What’s an obfuscator? In Java a obfuscator is used to prevent program code from reverse engineering. It removes unneccesary debugger information, shrinks variable and method names (means: makes them senseless). Modern obfuscators additionally remove code that would be obfuscated but is never called from somwhere.

I just found a website called the Internet Archive and it’s WayBackMachine. You can enter a website URL and it brings you a table of the dates it has snapshots of this website. So I entered my former homepage URL and was in the unexpected situation that I could see the page as it looked like in 2002 (look at the screenshot below).

At the end of the nineties (mean about ten years ago ;-)) I had a lot of information sources. Google was unknown at this time, MetaGer (a german meta search engine that queries several search engines for information) was state of the art and a query took about ten times as long as it takes now.

Today I stumbled on a website that claims to be "an open source network that connects people through the software they create and use": Ohloh, the open source network

Founded by two former Microsoft employees it collects information about open source software and creates a lot of metrics, e.g.