Foreign function calls can mess with your status or even worse abort the transaction or report. There are a lot of function calls the use MESSAGE to inform/warn the user or use it without the optional RAISING in combination with an Abort or Error message type, which causes your nice transaction to abort. Well there is hope. ABAP knows the special error_messages exception which changes the way MESSAGEs are handled.

Yesterday I submitted a patch to the pygments bugtracker with a functioning lexer for ABAP. I hope that it'll be included in the next release.

A little example and the first public piece of ABAP code that has been highlighted with pygments.

REPORT z_hello_world.

PARAMETERS: gv_name TYPE text50.

WRITE: 'Hello', gv_name.

The lexer currently has one little problem. If you define a variable with the same name as an ABAP keyword, it'll also highlight that variable. Maybe I'll get around to fixing that, but that'll be quite a task since that means parsing every ABAP statement and not just highlighting the keywords.

A quick tip when working with ALV-Grids or transactions that use ALV-Grids and don't display changes to data structures.

A couple of days ago I found Forklift a Finder replacment. The main thing that caught my attention is the dual pane interface that I was missing from my Total Commander days. Yes I'm a switcher.

In the last few weeks when booting my MacBookPro I've had it display a folder icon with a question mark in it. Now I don't know what that means, but it got me on my toes about getting a proper backup solution up and running. This is especially important as the MBP is my one and only work computer. Since I recently bought myself a QNAP TS-409Pro and have it running with 4 750GB hard disc in a RAID 5, I thought that'd be the perfect place for my backup. It's where the backup was before but I had to remeber to copy it there via the Finder. I knew the QNAP has rsync support. While googling for a rsync backup script or HOWTO, I stumbled upon rdiff-backup. A quick check in the ipkg package list turned up rdiff-backup and a MacPorts version is available as well.

So here is the install guide to get you going.

A couple of month ago the german linux magazin asked known guru's of a few different programming languages to solve a little programming task in their preferred language. In the article readers were encouraged to contribute their solution of the task and the redaktion would look them over, pick a few subjective winners and publish an article on the results.

I decided to have a shot at it using my language of choice, Python. Needless to say I didn't get a pick for the article.

I've just released my first open source application RDIViewer. Well actually I made the code available online under the GPLv2, the first build will follow. It's not web based and doesn't do anything cool. It's there to help me get my work done without going mad. It's an application to view RDI spool files from SAP systems.

Across his face the scar streched tight, and for a moment it felt as
though his head would burst with rage.

from "A strom of swords" by Geroge R. R. Martin

Now it your turn:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Saw this via Eric Florenzano's Blog.

Other Book Memes: James Tauber, Greg Newman, Justin Lilly and Brian Rosner.

took a while but comments are now available. next on the list is rss feeds.

oh and maybe some content would be good as well. :)

got some time on the train to update the site. added blog functionality and link posting. link posting still needs to be fully integrated and comments are on the way.

since I'll get some more time on the train on tuesday I hope to get more stuff finished.

I am using PuTTY as my ssh client (which is probably what most people use) and ascii line drawing has never worked. Some time ago I had enough of it and one search and 10 minutes later I found the solution.