Older articles (4/26)

1. Examining an OpenSSH ECDSA public key

   Intrigued by this question, I investigated the structure of an OpenSSH ECDSA public key.

2. Python & standard output redirection on ms-windows

   Redirecting standard output of the Python script on ms-windows can cause strange crashes because of encoding differences.

3. Profiling Python scripts (5): ent_without_numpy

   This is the fifth in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts. The program ent_without_numpy.py is a lot slower than the version that uses numpy. The performance of ent_without_numpy.py is the topic of this article.

4. Profiling Python scripts (4): vecops.indexate

   This is the fourth in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts. The performance of stl2ps is the topic of this article.

5. Profiling Python scripts (3): stl2ps

   This is the third in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts. The performance of stl2ps is the topic of this article.

6. Profiling Python scripts (2): stlinfo

   This is the second in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts. In this second article the performance of stlinfo is looked at.

7. Profiling Python scripts (1): stl2pov

   This is the first in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts.

8. Simple setup.py for python scripts

   Installing Python scripts (as opposed to modules) is a too involved using distutils/setuptools. Those do not take into account zipped archives and scripts using a GUI toolkit. The latter is a problem on ms-windows.

   So I wrote my own setup scripts to do things differently;

   • A simple setup script that works on single-file scripts.
   • A setup script that can wrap applications plus their custom module up in a zip-file and install it as a single self-contained file.
   • They should work on POSIX and ms-windows without root/administrator privileges.
   • And they should not require anything outside the python standard library.

   These scripts are now available on github as setup-py-script.

9. Merging local git repositories

   For a long time, I’ve had a directory ~/templates to store template files for several programs.

   For historical reasons, my LaTeX templates have been stored under ~/latex/templates.

   Both have been under git revision control since 2006; before that I used rcs.

   I want to merge both local repositories under ~/templates. This articla documents how that was done.

10. Simple viewer for STEP files on UNIX

    The STEP format is probably the most used accurate 3D geometry exchange format. (It can contain a lot more than just geometry!)

    STL files (most often used in 3D printers) are based on triangles, which are basically only an approximation of the real geometry.

    A lot of available STEP-file viewer are windows-only. I’ve been looking for a simple STEP-file viewer for UNIX-like operating systems, so that I can see the parts that I’m making using cadquery (see also: cadquery documentation).

    I’m not a fan of IDE’s like cq-editor or IDE’s in general. In particular, cq-editor pulls in the whole of spyder (a Python IDE) just to get syntax highlighting in its built-in editor.