jasper.es

Unit testing with boost::test -- without the pain of bjam

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:03:44 +0200

This post contains a skeleton showing how to implement a simple
unittest using the great boost unit test library, without going all
the way, i.e. having to use bjam or writing your own testrunner.

This use case doesn't seem to be documented (clearly) anywhere in the
great docs of boost::test, so here it is, for everyone who - like me - couldn't find a recipe for this.

Continue reading "Unit testing with boost::test -- without the pain of bjam"

sockmonster begone!

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:31:39 +0200

Heb je er ook zo'n pesthekel aan als je de was gedaan hebt en je sokken niet meer te sorteren zijn? Dan is er nu een fantastische uitvinding! Wat kan je er allemaal mee doen? Je kan ze decoratief op de grond leggen, zoals op de volgende foto:

Maar je kan deze handige stukjes onbreekbaar plastic nog veel nuttiger inzetten! Echt waar! Net als iedereen trek je 's avonds voor het slapen gaan je sokken uit, tenzij het natuurlijk heel koud is, maar we hebben een fijne nazomer, dus ze kunnen gewoon uit. Als je vervolgens je sokken wast en ze daarna van de waslijn haalt, dan zijn ze meestal niet meer als stelletjes terug te vinden. Natuurkundigen hebben een moeilijk woord hiervoor, entropie. Waar kan je nou deze plastic vriendjes voor inzetten? Heel simpel! Je klemt de bek om een paar sokken heen, et voilà, ze kunnen niet meer uit elkaar:

Dit plastic is helemaal fantastisch. En wasbaar. En het eet je voorraad pindakaas niet op! En zorgt er dus voor dat het sokkenmonster niet meer z'n ding kan doen! Bestel dus snel op http://www.cyclopssockclip.com/. Tenzij je de hele dag op slippers of sandalen loopt.

pylab trick of the day

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:32:20 +0200

If you want to suppress the generation of legend lines for certain elements in your graphs while using pylab, use the following trick:

pylab.plot(y, z, '-k', alpha=0.4, zorder=1, label='_nolegend_')

Elements with label '_nolegend_' will not show up in the legend!

(Note that only one underscore is required around nolegend ; serendipity seems to mangle this stuff even after inputting html )

goedkoopste artikel bij conrad

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:00:25 +0200

Soms is het handig om een goedkoop artikeltje bij je bestelling van conrad.nl toe te voegen; dit kan bijvoorbeeld het geval zijn als je 2 artikelen van 9.99 in het snotje hebt, en nog even de 20 euro vol wil maken. Met dank aan 'hing903: een artikel van 3 eurocent: http://www.conrad.nl/goto.php?artikel=500421

Weet je een nog goedkoper artikel (2 cent is ook nog nuttig): laat het me weten.

skipping lines when reading files in fortran

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:31:39 +0100

First of all, a happy new year, gentle reader.
Here's a tiny snippet of code that shows how to skip a line in a formatted data file in Fortran:

    CHARACTER :: dummy

    OPEN(UNIT=fileunit, FILE=filename)
    ! bogus read call to skip the first input line
    READ(unit=fileunit, FMT='(A1)') dummy

It might save you some grunting...

dotfiles osx tar wraaah frustration!!!!111!

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:44:55 +0100

OS X is great, except for when you want to tar up a directory and not get tons of crappy metadata files inside your archive. man does not help, and google neither. This is the environment variable to set:

$ strings /usr/bin/tar | grep COPY
COPYFILE_DISABLE

(Of course, this is Leopard only, and Tiger is different. I wish apple would not apply its slogan to software)

Beats per Minute using Python

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:19:36 +0200

Inspired by the recent news that Stayin' Alive has the perfect BPM count for reanimating people, I set out to write a small Python script to determine the BPM of my music collection.

Did you know that Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bros' "When will I be famous" have the same speed? And that PJ Harvey's Kamikaze is really mindbogglingly quick at 170 BPM? It's even quicker than stupid gabber house! (My taste for music is great, isn't it?)

Anyways, if you wan't to measure this yourself, use the following program:

Continue reading "Beats per Minute using Python"

emacs live wordcount

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:54:03 +0200

Just a quicky: to get a word count estimate while working on a text in Emacs, use the emacs word-count package. You can find it at http://taiyaki.org/elisp/word-count/src/word-count.el. Beware, as it slows down working on you Emacs when it is active while editing.

It contains built-in support for working with HTML and LaTeX docments though, so your %comments and <tags> are not counted. It does inflate the word count though, as for example the line

\begin{figue}[hbf]

is counted as 3 words, whereas it outputs none.

Forcing Carbon Emacs to use MacPorts aspell

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:02:48 +0200

If you want Carbon Emacs and aspell from MacPorts to cooperate, you'll have to jump through some hoops. This is because Carbon Emacs tries to be way too smart, by including options to automatically download extra dictionaries. However, it doesn't supply that for my own language, Dutch. Luckily, MacPorts contains a package providing that dictionary, but accessing that was somewhat cumbersome.

Continue reading "Forcing Carbon Emacs to use MacPorts aspell"

disintermediation ftw!

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:32:35 +0200

As the tap in my kitchen water heater is leaking I set out to find some new parts for that thing. First try: last weekend, I went to a high-profile plumbing store (that shall not be named), and they were not able to help me as I hadn't brought the old parts, and they had no knowledge of my particular water heater. A more general parts store nearby also did not have my parts.

So, this morning, I disassembled my tap (after stocking some water), and set out to buy the wanted parts. The parts store did not have anything in stock, however, after showing my old tap to the plumber he went through some drawers and found a complete tap - costing €27.50. I was needing two, so that would have set me back €55. That's a ridiculous amount of money for solving a problem that can be solved by replacing two pieces of rubber.

Continue reading "disintermediation ftw!"

my first open source grok app, TempThing

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:04:44 +0200

I decided to write a small application using Grok today, to manage the random stuff I drop onto my personal site every now and then. The goal was to make a simple application which allows you to upload files, and set an expiry date, after which the data should disappear from the public internet again.

This was quite easily done, and adding an index view and some management view also was a piece of cake. Enjoy the result at http://jasper.es/temp/ , and you can find the source in my personal subversion repository at http://secure.jasper.es/svn/tempthing/trunk/

Even though it's a really trivial app, I like it, as it shows you how easy it is to make nice forms with cool widgets using megrok.form, and also how to use the associated blob storage thing.

Did you know that I spent most of my time on drawing a nice header image using Gimp?

finding links on images using mechanize

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:39:10 +0200

For keeping code quality high, at work we make extensive use of unit and functional testing. Today a small problem arose, as it seemed somewhat difficult to find links on icons. Luckily we have alt-tags on those icons, so in the end it was as simple as doing

 >>> b.find_link(text='Commit[IMG]')

Link(base_url='http://localhost:8085/cobes/@@index', ...)

Great isn't it?

nagios and swraid

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:00:31 +0200

I like nagios and software raid on my Linux boxes to make sure I don't lose any data, but I was unhappy with the script I used to monitor it. Attached is a new one that is shorter and works better, as it leaves all the work to the mdadm tool instead of trying to parse /proc/mdstat.

 
Continue reading "nagios and swraid"

mail.app finally usable

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:43:28 +0100

Finally, Mail.app has become usable for me, thanks to the following tip:

http://jonathan.tron.name/articles/2006/11/05/multiple-identities-in-one-account-with-apple-mail-app

(WorksForMe™)

s/Adsense/Adbard/

nospam@example.com (Jasper Spaans) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:19:53 +0100

For several years, I have been using google adsense to recover the costs of running lkml.org, and to earn a tiny bit of beer money. However, per click revenue has dropped:

Earnings per click of lkml.org in Euros (gray) and Dollars (purple)

I've now found a nice alternative: adbard

As they are offering 40% of $2 per click, I'm hoping this number will rise.