Niels’ Homepage

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.

The smart observer may have noticed a very small change in this website. All permanent links do no longer link to anchors in the monthly archives, but to the individually archived entries themselves.

Now you could ask yourself: Why? Just wait and see :).

As mentioned in a previous post I started creating RUP templates in the DocBook format. The template for the Vision document is finally in a usable state and can be downloaded here. The contents are still a bit rough around the edges, but should be self-explanatory.

I hope they are as useful to you as they are to me. If there are any questions or remarks then please contact me.

I use this weblog as a brain dump. Not only to be able to remember long forgotten stuff, to make sure knowledge is not forgotten but also to share knowledge with others.

If you do a lot of C++ programming it is almost unavoidable to use the STL and at some point you probably will end up defining your own templates. This is not a bad thing since you then make use of the strengths of the C++ language.

The problem starts when you make a programming error using a (STL) template. The error messages from the compiler are cluttered with so much noise that it is often very hard to spot where the error has been made. Fortunately someone has written a filter (STLFilt) to parse these cryptic messages and make them more readable. It works with most compilers although support for GCC is a bit behind. Support for version 3.4.x and up is worked on. My experience, however, is that it is still very usable for GCC version 3.4.x and up.

You can find a distribution of STLFilt for your compiler here.

After seeing that NanoBlogger 3.3 RC5 came out I started to upgrade to this version. But instead of using my own upgrade notes I took a shortcut and used a simple DirDiff session with ViM to find all the necessary differences. Boy did this cause some problems. NanoBlogger refused to index other years than the current one.

Ofter a small email exchange with Kevin I tried starting NanoBlogger from scratch and then putting in changes one-by-one. After copying my local plug-ins directory ($BLOG_DIR/plugins) I all of a sudden had my problem again. My first thought: o no, I have to debug one of my plug-ins. So I removed all local plugins and started adding my own plug-ins to the local directory. This time everything went well. Now the difference between the current set-up and the previous one is that I had a full repository of plug-ins in $BLOG_DIR/plugins, i.e. all NanoBlogger plug-ins were copied there as well. But the new NanoBlogger provides a standard mechanism to have a local repository of plug-ins. My conclusion therefore is that the duplicate NanoBlogger plug-ins were causing the problems.

Thanks Kevin for taking the time to answer my e-mail and my apologies for taking a shortcut despite the experience I already had with upgrading.

While I was busy re-creating the site I took the opportunity to make some changes:

1. I started using the nb_default stylesheet. I think it is nicer looking than nb_spring on which my previous style was based.
2. The styles for the Gallery plug-in and the Code plug-in were put into their own stylesheets and links to these stylesheets were added to the templates in $BLOG_DIR/templates

A link to the AScopy web site has been added to the links menu.

New releases of the code and gallery plug-ins for NanoBlogger. The code plug-in now no longer causes two blank line to be sent to stdout. The gallery plug-in now handles different versions of NanoBlogger better, i.e. the version check to determine which version of NanoBlogger is running does not cause an error anymore. It also delays the cleanup of meta files on Apple Mac OS X so I hope this is handles better now.

• The new gallery plug-in can be downloaded here.
• The new code plug-in can be downloaded here.

Enjoy and if there are any questions or problems contact me.