Older articles (2/15)

1. Updating python3 to 3.6

   This article document how I updated python3 from version 3.5 to 3.6 on FreeBSD.

2. Chrome versus Firefox

   After trying google chrome (technicaly “chromium”) for about half a year, I switched back to mozilla firefox.

3. Adding text or graphics to a PDF file

   Using Acrobat Reader’s ability to add text et cetera has proven unreliable for me. On multiple occasions I have lost all the text added to a PDF file. When your filling in 20-plus pages worth of permit forms this is a huge waste of time and extremely annoying.

   So I set out to find another way using the free and open-source tools I have available.

4. Thermen museum, Heerlen

   On 2016-08-12 I visited the Thermenmuseum in Heerlen.

   This museum is built around the remains of a Roman bath in what was then called the vicus of Coriovallum, which is situated at the intersection of two Roman roads, the Via Belgica and the road between Aquae Granni (Aachen) and Colonia Ulpia Trajana (Xanten).

5. 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 ...

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.