Before the rise of git, I used rcs as my version control system.
Because I want to standardize on git, I am slowly converting old repositories.
In this article, as an example, I’ll be converting my old perl scripts in
~/src/perl.
As of TeXLive 2015 there is no TeXLive binary for FreeBSD included anymore. So I’m building my own, using …
As an engineer I do a lot of calculations. These can be done with pen and paper and a calculator, in an IPython notebook or in a throwaway spreadsheet. All of these methods have shortcomings, though.
Pen and paper is hard to share and (in my case) hard for others to read. In IPython you can assign the results of calculations to a variable, but you have to perform a separate action to display them. And spreadsheets in general show you the results but not the calculations.
So I wrote a simple function in Python to help me with that. Using this function I can print both simple assignments and relatively complex calculations. And it shows both the calculation and the result.
With leading white space governing the indentation level and so the grouping of statements, Python code already looks relatively clean.
Yet there are additional tools that will help you improve your code.
Sometimes I miss the C’s plain old struct in Python.
Of course Python has dictionaries, but I prefer to write a.b over a['b'].
Here are several ways of doing something akin to a struct in Python.
State machines can be relatively easy defined as a data structure.
After the 2017-05-12 mesa port consolidation, there were packages left with missing dependencies. This is how to fix them
Clone the repository from https://github.com/jbaiter/gphoto2-cffi.
> cd ~/github
> git clone https://github.com/jbaiter/gphoto2-cffi
By accident I checked 60-odd full-size photographs into the git history of my
website. I shrunk them in a next commit, but the history was still there
leading to a bloated .git directory. This took a lot of time when making
backups. This documents how I cleaned up this mess.