Jakob's personal thoughts

  • 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…

  • SystemProcess - Execute system commands with ease

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

    A current project of mine demanded me to invoke a lot of different programms on the commandline. Some calls were simple executions of a command followed by one or two arguments. Others were more complex with the need to define special environment variables or custom file descriptors. Some of them even needed me to asyncronously run the programs to be able to read their output during execution or run multiple commands at once. Because nobody, includind me, really likes the proc_* family of functions like proc_open in php, I decided to write a simple and yet powerful object oriented wrapper around all this functionality. The wrapper is fully unit tested and licensed under LGPLv3 for you to use in your projects. For more informations and documentation please refer the the blog entry. Read more…

  • First steps with Blender

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

    After creating and rendering some really basic 3D scenes with proprietary windows software before changing to Linux a long time ago, I never used a 3D modeling tool again. I thought it is time to take a look at the really powerful opensource 3D suite Blender. Read more…

  • Creating a transparently encrypted root filesystem

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

    This article provides all the neccessary explanations to create a fully transparent filesystem encryption for your system root. After you followed the steps of this tutorial all your data will be stored encrypted on your hard drive during your normal days work. This is especially interesting for laptops which might be stolen with important or even secret information on it. Read more…

  • Half Life BSP Entity Tool

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

    A friend of mine was in need of a tool to read an write entity tables from a Half Life level file. In the time Half Life was bleeding edge there existed such a tool. Unfortunately I was unable to find it on the net. Therefore I hacked some lines of c to do exactly this. Read more…