Some new tricks
Teaching the blog some new tricks
Year, I know. This blog is not really used as often as I hoped I would. I have
quite some material on my hard drive and in my brain that I'd like to dump
here: Example scripts for science, some django stuff and so on. But for now,
at least one new post: I've taught the blog some new tricks. Let's go through
them one by one.
1 Restructured Text
The first thing was that I changed away from markdown syntax for my entries
to RestructuredText. The reason for this is pretty simple: I prefer the
syntax (it is much easier to read in text form) and it offers more
flexibility. What kind of flexibility? Read one.
2 Support for code snippets
Following along the lines of Josh VanderLinden's excellent post I
implemented syntax highlighting using pygments. This allows me to show code
snippets in various languages, like for example python:
k = "hello world"
print k.title()
Or for example LaTex:
I like it a lot, this will make posting programming stuff a lot easier.
3 Latex support
The last new trick I want to rant about is LaTeX support. For example, the
above formula looks like this in the blog:
$$$e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0$$$Those three changes all together will make it a lot easier to post about
scientific stuff in the future. Let's see if I do it this time.
Me@26c3
26c3 in Berlin
As usually, I am at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin between the
years together with huega. We are a quite reduced number of people this year
for various reasons: The first one is that most of our direct friends
chickened out and stayed at home. The second reason is that the CCC did put a
hard limit on tickets sold this year. This is sad, because not everybody that
came to Berlin could attend, but this is also good because the congress is not
totally overcrowded: You have a chance to attend the talks you are interested in
and occasionally you get a place to sit down and hack for a bit.
I did various things on the congress already:
- I invested some time in lua and learned how to embed it into C/C++.
- I continued my work on fbuild (link to new GitHub page) and wrote a cython builder for it. It
still sucks, that's why you can't find it yet on the internet. Eric was
so nice to implement some features which made my life much easier.
- I made a MiniPov V3 and learned how to use the AVR toolchain. This is
quite impressive: The processor has more potential then the PICs I
currently use for my projects and the tool chain is easier to use. To get
acquainted with it, I wrote a software PWM that made the LEDs on the
MiniPov fade in and out. This took less than 30 minutes. Impressive!
- I finally took some time to pimp my blog. See previous post. Hopefully
this will push me to more often post some content here.
Okay, enough chit-chat. Next talk is coming up.
Oh, here is a picture of me happily hacking away taken by huega. And another
of me waving my brand new MiniPOV.
