I’m us­ing Git as the ver­sion con­trol sys­tem for my pro­jects for some time now. Since the graph­ical user in­ter­faces are not very ma­ture yet and I like hav­ing full con­trol over everything, I’m us­ing Git on the com­mand line (i.e. Bash). In or­der to avoid en­ter­ing the same com­mands all over again, I wrote some Bash ali­ases and func­tions which ease the use of Git.

Lift already provides some mech­an­isms to pub­lish a web­site in dif­fer­ent lan­guages. If Lift is used within an OSGi en­vir­on­ment, a little work­around is needed in or­der to make it find the Re­source Bundles con­tain­ing lan­guage-de­pend­ent strings (usu­ally provided as prop­erty files).

PDE Build is the stand­ard build tool from Ec­lipse. It is used to ex­port OSGi bundles, plu­gins, fea­tures or products. Run­ning in head­less mode, PDE Build can be used for auto­matic builds without a GUI. The Scala IDE does not sup­port PDE Build yet. In or­der to com­pile Scala pro­jects you have to do some manual work.

Scala does not have an of­fi­cial style guide yet. Be­cause of this, Daniel Spiewak pos­ted such a doc­u­ment in Novem­ber 2009 on the Scala mail­ing list. As can be read there, even Mar­tin Oder­sky, the in­ventor of Scala, likes that idea and thinks about pub­lish­ing the doc­u­ment on the of­fi­cial Scala web­site.

The iPhone is very use­ful for forum ad­min­is­trat­ors who are of­ten on the road and like to an­swer posts on the train, for ex­ample. Un­for­tu­nately, the de­fault theme of phpBB is hardly us­able on the iPhone (or the iPod Touch). Apart from that, the font size of most dis­cus­sion boards is so small that you con­stantly have to zoom.

phpBB ist als Foren-Soft­ware mit of­fenem Quellcode sehr be­liebt und weit ver­breitet. Aus diesem Grund ist es aber auch häufig das Ziel von Spam­mern. In der Ver­sion 3.0 wurde de­shalb unter an­derem ein besseres Captcha einge­führt. Leider haben sich die Spam­mer in­zwis­chen auf die neue Ver­sion einges­tellt und Bots ges­chrieben, die das Captcha auto­mat­isch über­winden und Beiträge ab­set­zen können. Im Fol­genden wer­den de­shalb fünf Anti-Spam-Maß­nah­men bes­chrieben, die sich in jeder phpBB-3.0-In­stall­a­tion ein­set­zen lassen und sehr ef­fektiv sind. Ziel ist es dabei, mög­lichst viele Spam-Beiträge zu block­ieren ohne den nor­malen Be­trieb des For­ums zu bee­in­trächti­gen.