Lately I needed to export an Azure DevOps wiki as one PDF. There is a plugin that claims, that it can do this and of course you can export each page in the browser and concat them with tools like pdftk. Unfortunately, the plugin is in a very early stage and I did not have any control over the Azure DevOps instance. The latter felt like loosing…
Hence, I searched for a “computer scientist”-solution. So I downloaded the repo and installed pandoc.
Long time no write… I had many ideas for blog posts, but no time to write them. Hopefully, this will change soon. Here just a small update… As you know (if you read my blog), I have a “special” way of storing and “backupping” my files. All my documents are stored in a folder named YYYY/ (e.g. 2021) and have the format YYYYMMDD-<some-name>.<some-ending>. I further categorize my files by using macOS tags.
Every year I prepare a folder tax-YYYY/, where I copy all the files with relevance to my tax declaration. But sometimes I am not completely sure whether all the files in there are in my main YYYY/ folders, too. This is, because I copy files from my e-mail (like invoices) and some files, which relate to year YYYY are from YYYY+1, e.g. the proof of social security. So, after finishing the tax declaration I double check, whether every file that belongs to a year made its way into the corresponding folder with a dedicated unix command (here exemplarily for 2019). For sure this can be used to check the completeness of backup folders, too. A recursive variant may even be used to search complete backups for missing duplicates/files. So here is the command.
ls 2019* | while read file; do; \ found=$(find ../2019 -name $file | wc -l); \ if [ $found -eq 0 ]; then; echo $file; fi; \ done
Be aware, that this does only search for a file with the same name. It does not check whether it is not the same file (e.g. due to file changes). This can be done by using a hashing algorithm
Exciting 🤓.
In a microservice environment it is often the case, that calls from a client to a service result in further calls to other services. One possible scenario is a call to a GraphQL service which gathers information from different backend (REST) services and present it as a cohesive data graph.
In this scenario the user is authenticated to the backend services via OAuth2 (e.g., Keycloak or a Spring Boot OAuth2 server) and the GraphQL service should passthrough the authentication header (a JWT bearer) of incoming requests to the backend services. This way the authentication has to be validated only once in the backend services and as “near” as possible to the (REST) resources.
This is not meant as a replacement for service-to-service authentication, but as an addition if you do not use the full OpenID connect standard with a separate identity token to pass on, but still want to serve verifiable user data to your backend service. In contrast, you may use this to pass through any header (including a identity token). This is just a scenario that I faced.
Read MoreHappy new year.
My blog runs on a VM at Hetzner with an Ubuntu LTS system. That means 5 years of support… I was running trusty from 2014, so there should be support until 2019. But not every open source software has given you this promise, just the Ubuntanians. So, support for Owncloud run out last year and I thought that the days between years are a good time to switch to a new version.
Hence, I did two dist-upgrades after another from trusty to xenial and from xenial to the current LTS version bionic (every 2 years a new LTS version is coming out). The first upgrade was “successful” with a lot of need for adaption in the configurations afterwards. Then after everything worked again, I did another upgrade, which failed because of this issue.
do-release-update.That is, I had to fix a distro upgrade that failed in between… challenge accepted 🤓.
Read MoreFor quite some time I have a paper-free office (at home). I still physically file the papers I get, but in addition I scan all the paper documents, tag them and put them in a folder. I use a very easy system. For the very recent documents (and the ones work in progress) I have a draft folder. Furthermore, there is exactly one document folder per year and I store everything in there (incoming and outgoing documents, scanned ones and ones that I get mailed, even some printed to PDF emails for document-like emails). Each file has a common naming scheme. There is one part that is relevant for this post: at the beginning of each file I put the date of the document in the format YYYYMMDD. This way, the documents are ordered chronologically in a year, if I sort them by name. There is a lot more to my filing system and if someone is interested, please leave a comment, but for this post, this should be enough about my way of filing documents (digitally).
The issue I would like to address here is, that the date when I scanned a file and the “real” date of the document diverges. Sometimes it even happens, that the creation time of two scanned files are in “the real world” in one order, but the scan-/creation time is the other way around. I do not like this situation. Therefore, each year when I “finish the year”, I run a script (on macOS), which adapts the ctimeto the date-part in the name of the file (a one-liner, which I put on 5 lines, for better readability):
find . -name "2017*" | while read file; \
do thedate=$(echo "$file" | \
sed -E 's/^[^0-9]*([0-9]+).*$/\1/'); \
touch -t ${thedate}0000 $file; \
done
If you have another unix-based System with sed you can use -r instead of -E. I am unsure why this option behaves differently on macOS although I installed (and use) GNU sed installed via home brew.
Exciting 🤓.
Lately, I faced the task to make a long-term-support (LTS) backup of a FCP X “green screen” video project. I had two constraints:
The original data took about 
GB, because of junk takes. But, I wanted to store 
–
GB, only. Unfortunately, we chose to take very long shots, so that it was not easy to remove the junk from the FCP X project file (there are paid solutions for this, but the ones I found do not work with combined clips). Just rendering the video in good quality would solve constraint one (C1), but it is hard to make changes to such a file (C2).
Therefore I chose another road: Render the green screen scene with an alpha channel as one long video, in order to sort the wheat (good video) from the chaff (bad video). Using the original green screen instead of an alpha channel was not an option, since I animated the green screen video channel (e.g. moving it from the left to the right) which added black “letter-boxes”. An easy solution would have been to use the keyer to remove the green screen and add a new one via a green background (i.e., an artificial green screen). This can be rendered to a video and a second keyer can be used after a reimport. But this seemed kind of lame (in terms of unprofessional) to me. I wanted a cool alpha channel video as I have seen it in the making of of several films, with an additional video (channel), which is just black and white containing the alpha information.
So, I googled and there was surprisingly sparse information on this topic. There are some formats that should be able to contain an alpha channel like Apple Animation, Apple ProRes 4444, but they all have in common, that they take an unbelievable high amount of disk space, which violates C1 (and they didn’t work for me…). I didn’t find any HowTo or tutorial in THE INTERNET that could help me.
Challenge accepted. 🤓
Lately I had to restore my macbook from time machine. Luckily, the reason was that I got a new MacBook 🤓. So I created a last time machine backup, said goodbye to my old macbook, and moved on to my new machine, starting with restoring from my all new time machine backup. I did this several times now and it went well every time. And… no problem this time either and this is what I tell all my jealous Linux and Windows friends. But what I didn’t tell them is that the next step is less fun: inheriting the backups of the old machine.
In March I wrote about a new project called DIME (Dynamic web application Integrated Modeling Environment), which enables to create full-fledged web applications via a family of GDSLs (Graphical Domain-Specific Languages), with an additional textual representation. It is the beginning of a development style, where technical experts and application experts (e.g., business experts) can work together on one artifact. The underlying idea of the approach is, that the different types of modeling languages (for data, control, and user interface) are interdependently connected and describe the application completely, so that they can be full code generated to a ready-to-use web application. Everything that cannot be captured adequately on the model level, can be integrated in a service-oriented fashion via so called native components.
At the end of that post I announced a DIME landing page, created with this very tool. Now a first version is online, which is responsive and shows already a few dynamic features, like internationalization (you can choose between english and german in the menu) and a comment form, where you can leave your first impressions. But please be kind, the Add Comment-process informs us about new comments and we can delete rude commments in the private area (all generated). The site is work in progress, we will update it with new features, more information, news on public events, and projects where DIME has been used. Further on, we will add a download section as soon as time has come for going public with DIME.
We already have some nice demo applications like a TODO-App as well as a “Reddit”-Clone, which will ship with the DIME installer. Just last week we held a DIME workshop on STRESS’16 co-located to ISoLA 2016 conference.
So please, take a look at the DIME landing page, leave a comment, and stay tuned for more to come.
Exciting, 😉.
Dr. Jan Köhnlein is one of the founders of TypeFox, the moving force behind Xtext, Xtend, and FXDiagram. This is a very extensive follow-up interview to this one. Thanks again to Jan!
Dear Jan, thank you very much for your time. I really like the ecosystem around Xtext, Xtend, Xcore, Xbase, and EMF. I think it is one of the most-disrupting decisions (in a positive way) that, starting from 2.9.0, you address more than just the Eclipse platform! But with this new approach and your all new company TypeFox (as well as the spin-off from itemis), some questions arise…
SpriteKit offers two ways to play audio:
SKAction.playSoundFileNamed:waitForCompletion: for playing a sound onceSKAudioNode (since iOS 9): for playing background music in a loop, or do other advanced audio stuff like positional audio (3D spatial audio effects).The first option is quite unflexible. It just plays the sound once. You cannot change the volume or put any effects on them. SKAudioNode on the other hand offers a lot of cool features via SKActions like changing the playback rate and volume and adding live effects like reverb.
This seems to be a no-brainer. I tried it in my game Fusionate and there was a real bad whistling sound, although I didn’t use any effect or positional audio (just volume changes). So, back to the first option and create a lot of audio files by hand, in order to get the desired effect even for simple things like changing the volume?
No way…