Westhoffswelt - Welcome to the real world

Programming stuff that does not fit any other category

• 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…

• 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…