Xplanet on OSX

Installation

Installation of Xplanet on OSX is rather simple, while the configuration is simple as well, if it would only be documented for simple usage. Xplanet is extremly powerful and has a lot of possibilites, please check its homepage. But the simple display of the classical blue marble background with day and night limits plus clouds is easily achieved.

Screensharing of iPhone on OSX

Working on remote development projects you will most likely get to the point, where you will need to share the content of your iPhone screen using Zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams … While mobile developers will have some commercial software for this, I am more an occasional user and need simply a cheap solution.

Again a new public holiday

Once more a german state (Bundesland) added another date to be a public holiday. This time it is Thüringen. In 2019 they declared the Children’s Day (Weltkindertag) to be a public holiday. So September 20th is now a free day there.

Global path variables on OSX

On OSX, setting the PATH variable in .profile, .zshrc or .bashrc defines the search path for all console commands, but, unfortunately, it does not have any effect for UI programs (apps), typically stored in /Applications.

Yet another update of FEIERTAGE

On the radio, just yesterday morning, I heard that VE-Day will be a public holiday just in 2020 in Berlin only. So I had to add this to the library feiertage.

DSL Debugging

Recently, somehow prepping for the Corona apocalypse, I ordered an upgrade of my DSL line. From 50/10 mbit/s (downstream/upstream) VDSL to 100/40 mbit/s VDSL Vectoring. It costs me additional 5€ per month so I thought it might be worth it. I did not really expect that just a few weeks later the both of us would find ourselves working completely remote from our home.

Update of my library FEIERTAGE

I did two updates on my personal favourite side project, the library and command-line tool feiertage.

Migrating an old blog to Jekyll

Finally I migrated my old blog posts to a new Jekyll based Gihub Pages project. Though these posts probably aren’t of any interest for nobody and definetly never read I always wanted to do that. I like the idea of simply pushing some Markdown files. I merged the blog post with content from other sites I (more-or-less) maintained. So there are quite some pages now.

Releasing MULE

Today I released mule. It is intended for use with Google Go. In Go it is a common pattern that your project compiles into a single binary without any external dependencies. But often you need some external resources as images for example. These remain external and may need to be updated separately on any change

Got a free OpenSource license by JetBrains

Just a few days ago I was granted a free license of IntelliJ Ultimate (and by that means for all their IDEs) by JetBains for the development of my small, but somehow used open-source libraries. See projects for a list of libraries.

Release of TEMPLIFY

I released a new tool called templify. It intended for use with Google Go. In Go it is a common pattern that your project compiles into a single binary without any external dependencies. Go offers a pretty comprehensive template page. One can define templates as simple strings (as with Printf) or as external template files, that are read at runtime from disk. Both ways have problems:

New library (and cmd tool) FEIERTAGE

Actually I don’t why, but I implemented a new Go library to calculate a huge number of holidays. Propably simply because I can. Holiday in the sense of public holiday oder memorial days etc. The library offers these special days as an extension to Go’s time object, so that all standard methods will work on them.

SitemapMS

I did a rework of my archery club’s homepage and decided to use a content management system called CMS Made Simple or, shorter, CmsMS. It did not generate a google sitemap automatically. Yet another plugin just did not seem to work.

Reader Macros in Common Lisp

Reader macros are perhaps not as famous as ordinary macros. While macros are a great way to create your own DSL, reader macros provide even greater flexibility by allowing you to create entirely new syntax on top of Lisp.

How to install Oracle Java 7 on Ubuntu

Due to some license change done by Oracle on the Java Packages, the Debian project decided, not to include any of the former *sun*java* Packages in their new releases/repositories. Thus recent Ubuntus are missing the standard JDKs for Java 6 and 7, instead the OpenJDK is included.

RaspberryPI as Squeezebox player

Linux is installed (first Arch (boots really quickly), but then Debian, as I am simply used to it).

My Raspberry PI

Returning from vacation I found my #raspberrypi in my postbox today!

Create a git repo with a central repository server

Git was planned as a completely distributed revision control system, but nowaday it is mostly used with systems as Github, Bitbucket etc. Using one of those products one can work with several coworkers using a central server repository. Usually Github and Co. offer only public projects on their free plan. If you need a private repository then you can simply use a standard server with SSH access. Git needs to be installed.

How to connect a Squeezebox to a MyBookLive

I live in a place with very bad radio reception. Therefore I recently bought a Logitech Squeezebox Radio, to receive some radio stations through the internet connection without having a PC in the kitchen, just with a small commodity device. Btw. the Squeezebox Radio works flawlessly, good sound, easy to use.

CL-Marshal released

Today I gave my really old encode/decode package to the public domain. As far as I remember, I developed the very first version of the library during my thesis at the university. That was back in 1995 I needed a simple way to communicate between processes, regardless if they were on the same or on a remote machine. I simply used objects that were sent via a kind of channels from one process to the other. Channels could be tcp/ip connections or a shared memory object with the same interface. encode/decode was a way to (de)serialize standard CLOS objects.

Revisiting lisp

There is a lot of hype around Clojure and after a long time not really taking notice of it I recently decided to take a look at it. I have to admit that I am an old Lisp guy. I did work with Lisp for quite some years and even got paid for it. And I really liked it. I keep telling people, that Lisp is my “native programming tongue”. So I thought that would be a good idea and it should’nt be to difficult to get a grasp in Clozure.