Bloerg Blog

I use git-annex to distribute and synchronize fairly large and mostly static files across different machines.

Matthias Beyer published two tips which according to him “are very critical when talking about speed when using vim”.

Vim’s builtin tag integration is an incredibly easy way to jump from one source location to the definition of a function or class using Ctrl+]1 and Ctrl+t.

A lot has been written about Keybase.io, a public directory of public encryption keys associated with usernames and additional “verification proofs”.

To analyze the run-time behaviour of an application, a common technique is to record traces of code execution by inserting statements like these: start_trace ("foo"); do_foo (); end_trace ("foo"); This is an effective way to analyze concurrent applicatio…

Literate programming is a programming paradigm that intermingles natural language comments with short snippets of source code from which then both compiled code and documentation can be generated.

As a follow-up to my cherry pick UI post, here’s a quick tutorial how you can extend Git with new sub-commands.

Compiling software in a restricted environment requires changing essential environment variables and finding a place where to install the final product.

I had to give many talks, both to internal and external audiences.

Jekyll, the static site compiler powering this blog, comes with a nice draft feature for some time now.

One of Git’s killer features is interactive rebase.

No, not only because it’s “social coding” done right.

CMake, the software build system, describes itself as: Welcome to CMake, the cross-platform, open-source build system.

Today was the last day of a workshop organized by the KSETA grad school.

If you are running a Linux system, you probably install your TeX Live distribution from you Linux distribution’s package manager.

Update: Ryan Lue pointed me to his little_red_flag daemon which triggers mbsync synchronization if changes happen both locally and remotely.

More than a year has passed since I wrote about updates of my Vim configuration.

Aeons ago, I wrote a small Vim plugin for folding TeX sources.

Since the inception of this blog, I hesitated to add comments because I didn’t want to clutter it with unnecessary JavaScript and rely on a third-party service such as Disqus.

One of my students showed me a cool Sublime Text feature that made editing a bit more efficient than Vim: Instead of moving lines by deleting them with dd, jumping to the desired location and pasting them, he just had to press a key combination.

Today, I had to scratch an itch that concerned calling pkg-config from within Python.

Recently, I purchased a Canon 40mm f/2.8 STM lens for my trusty Canon 550D.

Today at SIGGRAPH ’13, Khronos released a provisional specification specification of OpenCL 2.0.

Implementing open standards such as OpenCL seems to be a daunting and error prone task.

In the light of recent events, I decided to take a little bit more care of my privacy.

Compiling TeX documents by hand is tedious1 and with all the output a pain to watch at.

Last weekend a friend and I attended this years HacKAthon organized by nerd-zone.

I stated before, that you have to release all OpenCL resources to prevent leaking buffer memory and eventually crashing the application.

I was happy to see that Jekyll 1.0 was released today and of course I was eager to move on.

From time to time I encounter a problem with LaTeX or Beamer that costs twice as much time to solve than what I save by using LaTeX.

Lately, I’ve been merging more and more commits between branches using git cherry-pick instead of a regular merge.

I already wrote about how I took notes in Markdown, render them with Pandoc and keep them in sync with my server via Bitpocket.

We all know that good programmers are lazy.

Writing Python in a “Pythonic” way means adhering to conventions1 and using the language in the most general way possible2.

Update: I fixed a problem with the decorator, that leads to problems when calling a decorated function several times or in a nested way.

Apart from that incident, PyCon US 2013 featured a vast amount of high quality talks.

Update January 23rd, 2015: Paul Robert Lloyd improved the converter with his Pypedown plugin.

I babbled about improving the typography of LaTeX output with some simple adjustments.

The Internet Systems Consortium, or ISC for short, is well known for developing and publishing Internet system software such as BIND and DHCP.

Last year I wrote a GTK+ widget to show and modify the properties of any GObject.

When I started doing my current job, I was well aware of the benefits of writing “good” code with clearly defined interfaces and small units of code (at any level such as translation units, classes or functions) that doesn’t repeat itself over and over ag…

For some time now, I was thinking about a redesign of the bloerg website.

Last year, a blog entry by Joël “from the Internet” caught my attention on HN.

It is common sense that for a long-running system, it’s of utmost importance that no piece of code is leaking memory or other resources.

GObject comes with a well-thought introspection mechanism that helps building language bindings by adhering to certain conventions.

In a previous post, I described some basic ideas how to make the PDF output of LaTeX a little bit prettier.

Markdown is a success!

Y’all know it: TeX and LaTeX are godsends brought to you by two CS icons and an innumerable amount of kind people.

Imagine you are writing a nice C library, together with some nice Python bindings and build this with CMake.

I am an avid reader, reading everything from stupid comments on heise.de to classics of western literature and recent papers on GPGPU.