Westhoffswelt - Welcome to the real world

Jakob's personal thoughts

• PHPBarcamp.at - A wrap up

  by Jakob Westhoff on Tue, 04 May 2010 20:25:24 +0200

  Last weekend I attended the first PHP Barcamp in austria. It was a really nice event I had been looking forward to for quite some time. This article is a wrap up of the event itself as well as place to download the slides of the talks I gave. Read more…

• Auto generate sprites using the Web-Sprite-Generator

  by Jakob Westhoff on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:14:28 +0200

  The usage of so called sprites is a well known technique among web developers to enhance the loading speed of webpages. With google now starting to measure loading speeds to integrate them into their ranking this gets even more important. Creating sprite images by hand can be a painful job. The Web-Sprite-Generator does automate this process for you. Furthermore it supports complex layout techniques of the final sprite image. One of these is a color matching algorithm, which allows to save up even more space in the final image. Read more…

• From Revelation security to Android password managers using a PHP based transformer

  by Jakob Westhoff on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:26:31 +0200

  After having bought a Motorola Milestone some time ago, I still missed something on it. I am using the Revelation password manager to store and manage all my passwords on my desktop and laptop. What always bothered me is the fact that I could not access these from my phone. This post describes in detail how I changed this circumstance by writing a PHP based conversion utility for Revelation password files. Read more…

• Getting Sony Vaio X WWAN to work under Ubuntu Linux

  by Jakob Westhoff on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:40:09 +0100

  Three month ago I bought a Sony Vaio X netbook. The Windows 7 which was preinstalled on the system was no option for me. I installed Ubuntu on it and got mostly all of the hardware working. Read my Ubuntu Installation experience article for more details. One piece of hardware did however refuse to work: The WWAN modem. Finally the offline times are over. The modem is now working like a charm. Read more…

• Pdf Presenter Console 1.1 released

  by Jakob Westhoff on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:22:43 +0100

  After a lot of feedback, bugfixes and minor improvements it is time to release version 1.1 of the Pdf Presenter Console. Furthermore I migrated the project over to github. Read more…

• Building Vala projects with CMake

  by Jakob Westhoff on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:27:46 +0100

  Recently I wrote an application in Vala. Vala is a great language positioned around the GObject system, which is used a lot in the GTK/Gnome world. Vala is a very feature rich object-oriented high-level language, which incorporates modern language concepts known from C# or current versions of Java. In contrast to Java and C# Vala programs do not need any memory consuming runtime to be executed. They are compiled to plain C code, which is then compiled using your favorite compiler chain into good old machine code. Most likely this will be GCC. To be able to build my Vala project I wanted to use CMake, which I like much better than the autotools. This blogpost gives a practical demonstration on how to integrate Vala with CMake to build your Vala based projects. Read more…

• Pdf Presenter Console 1.0 released

  by Jakob Westhoff on Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:10:59 +0100

  During this years IPC I really liked the Keynote presenter consoles I saw on different occasions on the Mac users screens. I like the fact that one can see the slide coming up next as well as useful meta information during the talk on the notebook screen, while sending a clear image to the beamer. I do not own a Mac and currently do not intend to buy one. Therefore I searched for alternatives running on my Linux system. The Sun presenter console came to my attention, but disqualified itself by only supporting Impress, which I replaced by Latex Beamer some time ago. Because there was no viable solution using plain PDF files as input out there I decided to write my own. Read more…

• 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…