Blog

  • O’Reilly Media book: XSLT Cookbook

    Update 2011-03-05:

    Happily acquired the PDF e-book.
    Lots of nice XPath examples … – now: practice, practice, practice!

  • your Google Contacts address book as XML

    Today I came across a rather interesting thread on the googlecl-discuss mailing list, it’s subject was “Backing up contacts“, and it thrilled me instantly. With this command line, you get your address book dumped as completely, as it currently can get:

    $ google contacts list –title=” –fields=xml

    Of course you must have an up-to-date gdata-python-client and googlecl installation. But you do have that anyway, don’t you? I updated mine today.

    Yes, the XML misses an enclosing top-level element – but you can add that easily.

    I would also love to see the groupMembershipInfo in a rather “accessible” way, but I guess, that will also come sooner or later.

    This lists alls groups (and not in XML for currently trivial reasons), but I am not able to relate the groups to the (group) URIs mentioned in the contacts XML:

    $ google contacts list-groups –title=” –fields=xml –verbose “.*”

    My FRITZ!Box call monitor software will make use of the XML Google Contacts rather soon. That way I can skip all the current JRuby CSV and m17n problems. Its also more comfortable to download, because I can do that on the command line. And if it’s more comfortable, you do it more often. Backing up your address book frequently isn’t a bad idea either, right?!

    Update 2011-03-28:
    Task accomplished for my FRITZ!Box call monitor software, also if executed through jruby-1.6.0.

  • Fink FAQ: installing a few “unstable” packages from “fink”

    Fink FAQ: installing a few “unstable” packages from “fink”

    I don’t exactly remember, when I configured fink to also install “unstable” packages, but now I think, that created a terrible mess on my computer. I ran “fink configure” today, and disabled the installation of “unstable” packages there. I hope, fink will work much smoother from now on. No more md5sum mismatches …

  • No Gnus v0.13 is released

    No Gnus v0.13 is released

    It seems to depend on EIEIO (“Enhanced Implementation of Emacs Interpreted Objects“), a new CLOS implementation; apparently EIEIO must get installed manually.
    EIEIO in turn is part of CEDET (“Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools“).

  • movie: Unknown (2011) – IMDb

    Unknown (2011) – IMDb

    The location of the thriller is Berlin; the main characters are played by Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger.

    The way from the Adlon hotel to the Tegel airport does not go through Oberbaumbrücke, where the car dumps into the rive – but then: who minds this?

  • RVM: Ruby Version Manager

    http://rvm.io (!!! worth having a look there for the most up-to-date installation procedure !!!)

    Allows you to work very well with more than one ruby installation, just like App::perlbrew for perl.

    The rvm command is implemented through a lot of bash functions.

    The PragProg ruby3 and the jruby book both talk about rvm, and it looks, as if rvm is really quite helpful, if  you deal with more than one ruby interpreter.

    I installed rvm locally on an openSUSE-11.3 system and also remotely (git-based), and also on Mac OS X 10.6.6 (not git-based (yet)).

    Update 2011-02-22:
    Output from my $HOME/.bashrc disturbed the smooth execution of rvm, I had to remove that output (although I really liked that).

    Update 2011-07-15 – how to upgrade:
    $ rvm get stable
    $ rvm reload
    $ rvm list known
    $ rvm list
    $ rvm install jruby-1.6.99999
    $ rvm install ruby-1.9.99999
    rvm all do gem install xml-simple
    $ …

    Update 2012-01-… – trouble with “get head”!!!

    $ rvm get head # looks broken, avoid it for the time being!
    This really caused me a lot of grief and fear.

    $ rvm get stable # better for me


    Update 2013-09-30
    (Nowadays) before running rvm, you need to run some initialisation code:
    source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm
  • installing Chromium snapshots

    Execute the provided $CHROMIUM_INSTALL_DIR/chrome-wrapper instead of the binary executable, it will create necessary symlinks to system libraries.

    After unpacking the zipped snapshot file on my openSUSE Linux system, privileges were wrong:
    files and directories were only readable, writable, and executable for the owner, which was root;

    As a very quick solution I made “myself” the owner :
    $ chown -R myself $CHROMIUM_INSTALL_DIR

    Of course there are better solutions than this, e.g. like this one:
    $ cd $CHROMIUM_INSTALL_DIR
    $ chmod -R a+r .
    $ find . | while read f; do ! test -L “$f” && test -x “$f” && chmod –changes a+x “$f”; done