Westhoffswelt - Welcome to the real world

Jakob's personal thoughts

• MossoFS - A first development snapshot released

  by Jakob Westhoff on Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:50:06 +0200

  Some time ago I heard about a cloud storage service from Rackspace called Mosso Cloud Files. You can store arbitrary files at this service and retrieve them at any time. To ease the the handling of the service, but mainly because I always wanted to write a FUSE module, I decided to create one called mossofs. Mossofs is currently in pre-alpha phase. It is capable of mapping mosso's directory structure as well as retrieving arbitrary stored files from the service at the moment. Take a look to get further information about this project. Read more…

• IE6Update - My Activebar2 in action

  by Jakob Westhoff on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:55:59 +0200

  As the initiative "Let IE6 Die" was started by a Norwegian company some time ago. I decided to create a rewrite of my Activebar using more modern approaches and libraries like jquery. Activebar2, the name of the rewrite, was mainly intended to mimic the look and feel of the browser information bars known from the Internet Explorer. Its purpose was to show the users that a new version of their current browser is available for download, to motivate them to finally lay IE6 to rest. The guys from IE6Update.com took my Activebar2 and made some minor additions to it, to integrate it into current web projects even more easily. Read more…

• Subversion enhancements for your commandline

  by Jakob Westhoff on Sun, 15 Mar 2009 03:56:18 +0100

  I am mainly using subversion to manage nearly all of my development projects as well as a lot of other stuff which benefits from revisioning. Because I mainly use vim for all my editing needs, I am working on the commandline a lot. This includes the commandline client "svn". I integrated some little bash helper functions, to make the svn output even more readable and useful, into my workflow over the time. These functions are described in detail in this blog entry. Read more…

• Let IE6 die - Use Activebar2 to encourage your users

  by Jakob Westhoff on Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:46:55 +0100

  After I read a Golem article about an initiative started by the Norwegian company finn.no to finally let the IE6 die. I decided to revive a project I wrote about two and a half years ago. I am talking about Activebar, a crossbrowser information bar, which mimics the look and feel of the natively used bars by all modern web browsers. It provides an easy and unobtrusive way to finally tell your users to exchange their old and rusty IE6 with something shiny and new. Activebar2 is a complete rewrite of my old project using all the glamor and glitter that is available with current javascript toolkits. Take a further look at this article if you are interested in having the IE6 finally taking its last breath. Read more…

• XPath explained

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:00:07 +0100

  Tobias and me had to write an article about XPath for university lately. We decided to publish it, because it provides a nice introduction to XPath. It covers the basics as well as its more complex features like axes and functions. Read more…

• Evolving vectorization

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:44:26 +0100

  In December I stumbled about a page on the net lately which used some javascript trying to approximate a small Mona Lisa picture by about 50 semi transparent polygons. The calculations done in javascript took forever, which inspired me to write a faster implementation of this idea in c using the Cairo library. Simulated annealing is used to enhance the creation process a little bit. Read more…

• Periodic - A PHP based cron utility

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:44:26 +0100

  Periodic is a fully unit tested PHP based task runner. It is supposed to deliver a basic implementation for managing all kinds of recurring tasks and events inside your web application. It has been designed with having all kinds of different web hosting environments in mind. It is capable of running on most shared hosting systems as well as root servers. Read more…

• Finally! I finished my new design.

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:44:26 +0100

  After having created zillions of different designs for my website I finally managed to chose one for productive use. It is done, the design is online and I am still happy with it :). Read more…

• Seven things - Tagged by kore and mapi

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:54:20 +0100

  As the current seven things hype continues I have been tagged by Kore Nordmann and Manuel Pichler. Read this article to get to known seven facts about me. As well as to take a look at who I have tagged in the process. Read more…

• Quassel - The new chat experience

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:44:26 +0100

  Quassel is the perfect alternative for everyone using a combination of irc proxy and client like irssi proxy and xchat. It calls itself a distributed irc client. It consists of a server and an arbitrary amount of clients. The great thing about quassel is you get access to the complete backlog of any channel you are in, anywhere, anytime. Read more…