Westhoffswelt - Welcome to the real world

Programming stuff that does not fit any other category

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• My first application for the Openmoko Neo Freerunner

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

  A little story about what I experienced during the first steps towards writing an application for the Freerunner by myself. You will find a download link and a demonstration video inside. Read more…

• My Openmoko Neo Freeruner has arrived

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

  Finally I got the Openmoko Neo Freerunner in my hands Read more…

• Using Vim Unicode macros to create math formulas at ease

  by Jakob Westhoff on Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:54:20 +0100

  Did you ever want to note a math formula inside a vim document without using something like latex? It is just as simple as typing "pi" to get the Greek letter pi with a little script I wrote. Take a look you won't be disappointed Read more…