Niels’ Homepage

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.

I had some frustrating experience with sitecopy. A tool I used to maintain this and other web sites. After some investigation is seemed to have a blocking read in one of its functions. Now I could have tried to fix this or contacted the developers about it, but it had to be solved the difficult way: I wrote a similar application myself in Bash :).

Why Bash? Sitecopy had two disadvantages:

1. It is written in C and had to be compiled for every platform I use. This made it hard to take an executable copy with me on, for example, a USB-stick.
2. Since it makes use of standard SSH-tools it it also possible to do site maintenance from behind a firewall using connect (although that has to be compiled).

And of course writing the thing, documenting it and packaging it was fun as well :).

Rest to say that I still like sitecopy, it is a very useful tool but in this case I prefer to eat my own dog food.

The new site maintenance utility can be found here.

Just a short entry to indicate that I am still alive. We have been on a holiday to France. The south of France to be precise although a French colleague said we are supposed to view this area as the South-West of France (I could swear it was the South-East, but I will let you decide when I am done writing a weblog about it).

So what have I been up to all this time:

• Writing a time registration system for my new employer. Since I have little time and we have a new colleague on board that is far more experienced with PHP than I am, maybe only the framework that has been created so far will ever see the light of day. Because I am really satisfied with that :).
• Re-writing a significant portion of an application for a customer in such a way that it will be ready for a future when I have moved on to another customer.
• Started creating templates of RUP documentation in the DocBook format. These templates are already available as MS-Word templates from the RUP Toolkit, but I:
  1. Do not have MS Word at home any longer. We are only running Linux here.
  2. I really like open formats. Especially when they are really easy to put in a Version Control System.

  I already made these templates in the Open Document Format (ODF) but thought it would also be nice to have them in the DocBook format. As soon as they are ready they will be published on this weblog.

• Finally started on the TAFKADR (The Application Formally Known as DocRaider). But will be called GD-Press from now on, which is short for General Document Press. This will be a system to design, create and manage automated documents like reports, invoices etc.

In the following weblog I will tell a bit more on the holiday in France.

P.S.: Kelley Law if you are reading this, I haven’t forgotten about the Gallery plug-in, so expect a log and a message on this soon as well.

A new release (0.3.0) of the Gallery Plugin for NanoBlogger to avoid problems with meta files on Mac OS X. These are files starting with ._ and contain data on files not stored on the native file system HFS.

This release will test if the plugin is running on Mac OS X and delete all picture files (*.jpg and *.png) starting with ._ in the current gallery directory.

The new version can be downloaded here.

Just downloaded, compiled and installed ViM 7.0c Beta and I must say it rocks! I still have to get used to a lot of things, but the following items really are good add-ons to ViM in my book:

• Built-in spelling checker. I had to create the directory $HOME/.vim/spell before it worked, but when it works it works perfectly.
• Editing files through a network connection (FTP/SCP/RSYNC/etc./).
• The very fast internal grep.

There are also some things that sound good, but to which I probably am not used yet:

• Omni completion. I only tried it with PHP, but it did not bring me any joy. It suggested the possible function names to me without any problem, but it did not show the signatures for these functions (parameter lists and return values). But not all possible settings have been explored. It even locked up ViM.
• Tabbed pages. I find the MiniBufExplorer more convenient. The graphical tabs look awful and the text based ones look to cramped i.e. file names are truncated if there is not enough space and if there are many file than not all file names are shown.

But considering the fact that ViM still has a very small footprint (under 7MB of sources, compare that to that other editor :) ) I must say that this version is really a step forward.

If I find anything new I will put that in a new weblog. But the next couple of days I will probably be busy testing the Code Plugin with the new ViM.