Westhoffswelt - Welcome to the real world

Geeky stuff of interest

• Currying functions in JavaScript - A generic approach

  by Jakob Westhoff on Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:49:34 +0200

  While preparing some slides for my jQuery workshop at this years WebTech Conference I was in need of different closure example. As I thought about complex ones currying came to my mind. Even though I actually never used this concept in JavaScript I quickly hacked a short function as a generic approach to introduce this feature to the language. Read more…

• Another PHP Unconference is over - A wrap up

  by Jakob Westhoff on Tue, 28 Sep 2010 03:26:23 +0200

  This years PHPUnconference is over. As every year before, it has been a fantastic event. The Unconference in Hamburg is one of the meet-ups, which I am happily looking forward to each year. Read more…

• ineedmoretime.org - A HTML5 analog clock experiment

  by Jakob Westhoff on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:08:06 +0200

  During an unofficial phpugdo hackathon with a lot of nice guys last weekend, I came up with the idea to write an analog clock using some of HTML5s new features. Completely without Flash. I had done this before using CSS3-Rotation (CSSClock), but this time I wanted something with nice graphics and even nicer animations. 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…