Westhoffswelt - Welcome to the real world

Jakob's personal thoughts

• Sony Vaio X - An Ubuntu installation experience

  by Jakob Westhoff on Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:24:07 +0100

  Recently DPD had an express delivery for me. They delivered the Sony Vaio X I pre-ordered the day it became available. Vaio X is Sonys newest development in the ultra portable market. Even though it has an Intel Atom processor and therefore seems to belong into the netbook category of products it is much more. It is bleeding edge technology in an ultra slim and nearly weightless carbon shell. I bloody love this thing. Unfortunately it came preinstalled with Microsofts new Windows 7 operating system, which is an absolute no go for me ;). One of the first things I did was installing Ubuntu Karmic Koala on it. Read this article for a detailed installation log. Read more…

• Calculate a convex hull - The QuickHull algorithm

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:35:15 +0200

  In need of a fast and efficient way of calculating the convex hull of a point set, I stumbled across the QuickHull algorithm, after doing some research. This algorithm is a divide and conquer approach to solve the given problem, which is quite efficient in the average case. The following article gives an introduction into convex hulls and the QuickHull algorithm itself. Furthermore a implementation of it in PHP is presented for download. Read more…

• js-test-driver Phing task

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:34:10 +0200

  In my need of a cross-browser javascript unit-testing framework, which can be run from the commandline I discovered js-test-driver. I soon realized to be able to productively use this framework I needed to integrate the test run into the used build process. As Phing is used for building I needed a simple Phing task to run js-test-driver tests. Read more…

• FrOSCon Talk: jQuery Plugin Development (Resources)

  by Jakob Westhoff on Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:44:20 +0200

  I just gave my talk about "jQuery Plugin Development" at this years FrOSCon. I had much fun giving this talk as the audience was great. You can get the slides and example code here. Read more…

• FrOSCon Talk: jQuery Plugin Development

  by Jakob Westhoff on Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:14:07 +0200

  This years FrOSCon I will not only be one of the organizers of the PHP-Room, I will furthermore give a talk in the FrOSCon main track about Plugin development with jQuery. Read more…

• Select HTML elements with more than one css class using XPath

  by Jakob Westhoff on Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:26:57 +0200

  Using XPath it is easily possible to select all HTML nodes with a certain class argument. If you want to take into account nodes, which provide multiple classes the expression might not be intuitive. This article presents two XPath expressions for this purpose. One of them is compatible with XPath 1.0, while the other one uses new features only available in XPath 2.0. Read more…

• 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…