Welcome

This is my home in the virtual world, where I write about things that I want to share. The freely available software that I've written as well as some of the photographs I've taken over the years can also be found here. Please use the navigation links on the right if you are looking for something.

Recent articles

1. Installing asymptote 2.38 in TeXLive 2016

   Since the previous article [1, 2] I’ve updated TexLive to 2016. This comes with asymptote 2.38, but not with a FreeBSD binary for it.

   My TeXLive is not installed from the FreeBSD ports tree, so I cannot use the asymptote port since it depends on the TeXLive port ...

2. In programming, small and simple is beautiful

   If you would look over my github repositories, you’ll see that most of my programs are pretty small. And in general they are command-line applications. And that is good, because small is beautiful and simplicity is a virtue.

3. Parallel execution with Python

   With Python it is relatively easy to make programs go faster by running things in parallel on multiple cores. This article shows you how.

   We sill concentrate on a type of problem that is easy to parallelize.

4. Replacing openssl with libressl for ports

   Since its inception in 2014, I’ve been following the LibreSSL project.

   The OpenSSL codebase turns out to have severe problems. See the presentation, and especially sheet 7.

   The version in the FreeBSD base system is old, but the version used by the ports I can control. It took a while, but now was the time for me to switch.

5. Reading xlsx files with Python

   This article is a write-up of what I learned trying to extract information from ms-office xlsx files using Python.

6. Finding your own files, fast

   Inspired by this blog post by Julia Evans, I set up a quick way to find files in my home directory. This howto is based on FreeBSD, but should work (with some tweaking maybe) on Linux and OS-X as well.

7. Adding scale markers to a scanned image

   in a previous article we saw how a desktop scanner can be used for macro photography. Often it would be handy to include a visual reference of the scale of such pictures. In this howto I’m using asymptote to add accurate scales next to the picture.

8. Switching to the vim editor

   After having been an emacs user for a long time, I was starting to grow disenchanted with it around version 24. My main problem is that it was starting to get really slow. Not just in starting up, but also in daily use, specially it you kept an instance open ...

9. Using a scanner for macro photography

   Although you wouldn’t guess it from the contents of this blog, my day job involves the design and production of products from fiber reinforced composites. A lot of my projects fall under non-disclosure agreements, so I cannot discuss them here.

   What I can do is share some of the methods I’ve developed over the years. One of those is using a desktop scanner to make close-ups.

10. Installing asymptote 2.35 in TeXLive 2015

    Since the previous article, I’ve updated my workstation to FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE. Compiling asymptot 2.23 no longer works because it uses deprecated C++ features. So I thought I’d try and compile version 2.35. Since my TeXLive is not installed from the FreeBSD ports tree, I ...