info.michael-simons.eu – Just another nerd blog

Since late 2025 I had the feeling that I am losing my shit. While I did publish “Kann KI verschlafen werden” (Can AI be slept away) in September, the people of the church of AI got louder by the day. And at some point, that leaves marks. I don’t doubt...

Introduction
Sir Antony Hoare[1] introduced the concept of Null-references or a Null pointer[2] back in 1965 with the release of ALGOL W. In 2009 he spoke about it as his “Billion Dollar Mistake”[3]. Dereferencing a Null pointer will address an invalid memory region...

Things used to work, things had been quite nice for a while even. I usually felt being the owner and in charge of my electronic devices for the better part of my life. There’s been a lot of stuff that used to just worked.
One such feature was the fact that my first iPod classic I ever owned, a 3rd generation one, black&white backlight illuminated display, with red illuminated buttons, did keep track of when I did play which track, updated its play count and synched...

Update: The plugin is now hosted on Mojohaus, has a new artefact id and thus is automatically available in Maven without to having to supply the group id. I updated the snippets below. The latest version displays also the versions of the plugins being...