Niels’ Homepage

And it is with at least a bit of pride to announce this release. There are two major updates in this release:

1. The decision has been made to drop the DocBook based documentation in favor of a regular man page. Man pages are still the standard and enough converters are freely available to convert the documentation to any possible format.
2. AScopy now recognizes when a file is new but a copy of a file already present or when a file has been moved. A move of a file will look like a copy of a known file and then the removal of that file, but at least the file can be handled locally on the remote site and does not have to be transported over the network.

The new version can be downloaded here.

For the next version I will probably add the possibility to use different transportation mechanisms like FTP and WebDAV.

It has been a while since the last time a post has been added to this site. Apart from the fact that I have been very busy lately, I also started a new project. Because it seems that one of the most popular items on this side is the Vision Document template for the Rational Unified Process in DocBook format.

So I decided to make a DocBook formatted template for all RUP documents and give the RUP Template Project its own section on this site.

So far only 7 out of the 44(!) templates have been done, but I will try to add one each day (on average). Because of my enthusiasm I decided to release early and often, which means that both the section of the site and the contents of the templates might be a bit ‘rough around the edges’. For now the templates will have to be downloaded individually, but I will provide a gzipped tarball soon.

You can find the RUP Template Project here.

It always takes longer than you think. In the FAQ list for the AScopy home page I stated that for a version 1.0.0 to arrive AScopy should be (among other things) be able to exclude files and directories. This means that I can safely update a site for which I still have files open, e.g. using ViM.

Normally that would cause AScopy to detect the ViM swap-files as new files, but now they can be excluded in the .ascopyrc file like this:

exclude .*.swp

And that is all there is to it. The new version can be downloaded here.

There is a new release of the NanoBlogger Gallery plugin. The previous version had a problem when run in Bash versions below 3.1. There are some differences when initializing arrays from a ‘string’ using $IFS.

In Bash 3.1 you can do this:

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#!/bin/bash
 
a="1.2.3"
IFS='.'
declare -a arr=( $a )
echo "${#arr[@]}"
 
# Outputs 3 in version 3.1 and 1 in version 3.0

But if you instead do this then it works in both versions:

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#!/bin/bash
 
a="1.2.3"
IFS='.'
declare -a arr
eval "arr=( $a )"
echo "${#arr[@]}"
 
# Outputs 3 in version 3.1 and 3.0

So hopefully the Gallery plug-in is better prepared for the real world :). Thanks to Chris Gratham for helping me out with this.

The new version can be downloaded here.

A new version of AScopy has been released: 0.9.2. This is a major bug fix release as the previous version did not remove directories in the correct order, i.e. deleting them before they were empty.

You can download the new version here.

Version 0.5.0 of the NanoBlogger Gallery plug-in has just been released. It does not offer any extra features and is just a bug fix release to make the plug-in work with all versions of NanoBlogger from 3.0 and up.

It has been tested on the for the following releases:

• 3.0
• 3.1
• 3.2
• 3.2.3
• 3.3 RC5

The major problem that needed to be fixed is that the plug-in uses standard NanoBlogger calls as often as possible. This means that the standard entry format can be used and even that (from version 3.3) the format field can be used to put markup into the entry.

Unfortunately the NanoBlogger API has changed a bit between versions. The call to read_metadata does not fill the same return variable in the versions mentioned above:

• $NB_Metadata for version 3.0 and 3.1
• $META_DATA for versions 3.2 and 3.2.3
• $METADATA for version 3.3

There was already a function in the plug-in to determine for two given version numbers which was the newer one because the parameters to read_metadata also needed to have $METADATA_CLOSETAG specified from version 3.3 and up if the entry’s body is requested. So the plug-in already had to choose between two different calls based on the NanoBlogger version.

But everything seems to be fixed for now. The new plug-in can be downloaded here.

NanoBlogger is a minimalistic approach to blogging as vi (or ViM) is a minimalistic approach to editing. Okay, not as minimalistic as ed or ex, but you get the idea.

Using ViM as the default editor for NanoBlogger is as simple as setting the variable $EDITOR in .bashrc, $BLOG_DIR/blog.conf or, if you want control of NanoBlogger settings for each machine that you work on, $HOME/.nb.conf.

But the default settings for editing entries or articles are not particularly nice. Fortunately ViM can have settings on a per-file basis using modelines (if you don’t know what they are just type :h auto-setting on the ViM command line). To make editing with ViM a bit nicer, just edit the following files:

• $BLOG_DIR/templates/entry.metadata
• $BLOG_DIR/templates/file.metadata

and add the following line at the end of the file:

vim: set ts=4 sw=4 ff=unix fo+=t et:

This should provide you with some decent ViM settings across all machines that you are working on.

WARNING:
NanoBlogger versions <=3.3-RC5 have a bug that will overwrite the template files with the default template files and undo your modeline setting. This can be fixed by either using a later version (not available at the time of this writing), using the CVS version or editing the file lib/tools.sh in the same directory where your NanoBlogger binary is. Search for a line that has the following:

$NB_TEMPLATE_DI/

and change that to:

$NB_TEMPLATE_DIR/

In several blog entries I made references to sites I found useful, interesting or funny. I also have the habit of archiving links to interesting, funny and useful sites in my inbox. No more. From now on the articles section will have a page with categorized links.

If you think anything is missing please let me know.

It is official the 0.9.1 release of AScopy. This site and its project site itself has been maintained with it for the last few weeks and everything goes so well that I am confident that this release can be publicly used.

If you ever want to set up an open source project like this then be prepared to put a lot of time in the initial set up. Stuff like getting SourceForge and FreshMeat working correctly for your project is a lot of work.

Yesterday was a busy day and a fun one as well. Being 35 years old and living in or near Rotterdam for the last nine years I never ever have been a tourist there. But that all changed yesterday when we went to a couple of major attractions in this city: the Euromast and taking a tour with the Spido.

It was very nice to see the city from a tourists point of view. Especially from +180 meters up. And viewing the harbor from the water is a lot more spectacular than driving by it on the motorway.

In the afternoon a couple of friends picked me up and we went to a Japanese tea ceremony. It never occurred to me that you could do such a thing in the Netherlands so it was quite a surprise. The hostess made us feel very welcome and I really enjoyed the experience. Thanks Tibor.