A few years ago, I started to write software which primary audience is going to be blind musicians. I did a small presentation of the UI at DebConf15.
Most of the functionality is in a compiler-alike backend. But eventually, I wanted to create a user interface to improve the interactive …
read moreI recently was lucky enough to see one of my long-time favourite drum and bass artists live! Squarepusher! I know and love his music since the late 90s.
My girlfriend got us tickets for the Shobaleader One performance at Progy & Bess in Vienna. It was fantastic! 90 minutes of high …
read moreWe are about to upgrade one of our GlusterFS-based storage systems at work. Fortunately, I was worrying about the upgrade procedure for the Debian packages not being tested by the maintainers. It turns out I was right. Simply upgrading the packages without manual intervention will apparently render your GlusterFS server …
read moreTL;DR: I put a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, a Bluetooth USB dongle, and the required adapter cable into my new Handy Tech Active Star 40 braille display. An internal USB port provides the power. This has transformed my braille display into an ARM-based, monitorless, Linux laptop that has a …
read moreDuring a JAWS for Windows training, I was introduced to the Research It feature of that screen reader. Research It is a quick way to utilize web scraping to make working with complex web pages easier. It is about extracting specific information from a website that does not offer an …
read moreI recently stumbled across an XML format specified in a DTD that I wanted to work with from within C++. The XML format is document centric, which is a bit of a pain with existing data binding compilers according to my limited experience.
So to learn something new, and to …
read moreI've had quite some fun recently (re)learning Haskell. My learning project is to implement braille music notation parsing in Haskell. Given that i've already implemented most of this stuff in C++, it gives me a great opportunity to rethink my algorithms.
Not everything I've had to implement until now …
read moreAt time index 22:35, Bjarne Stroustrup explains in this video what he thinks is very special about organisatrions like Cambridge or Bell Labs. When I just heard him explain this, I couldn't help but think of Debian. This is exactly how I felt (and actually still do) when I …
read moreI am one of those people that best learns from looking at examples. No matter if I am trying to learn a programming pattern/idiom, or a completely new library or framework. Documentation is good (if it is good!) for diving into the details, but to get me started, I …
read moreI am a console user. I really just started to use X11 again about two weeks ago, to sometimes test an a Qt application I am developing. I am not using Firefox or anything similar, all my daily work happens in shells and inside of emacs, in a console, not …
read moreWhile evaluating the cross-platform accessibility of Qt5, I stumbled across this deficiency:
#include <QApplication>
#include <QTextEdit>
int main(int argv, char **args)
{
QApplication app(argv, args);
QTextEdit textEdit;
textEdit.setText(u8"\u28FF");
textEdit.show();
return app.exec();
}
(compile with -std=c++11).
On my system, this "application" does not show …
read moreSince 2009, I am persuing a personal programming project. As I am not a professional programmer, I have spent quite a lot of that time exploring options. I have thrown out about three or four prototype implementations already. My last implementation seems to contain enough accumulated wisdom to be actually …
read moreThe third installment of my crossbreed digital mix podcast is out!
This time, I am featuring Harder & Louder and tracks from Behind the Machine and the recently released Remixes.
My long-term free software project (Braille Music Compiler) just produced some offspring! xsdcxx-musicxml is now available on GitHub.
I used CodeSynthesis XSD to generate a rather complete object model for MusicXML 3.0 documents. Some of the classes needed a bit of manual adjustment, to make the client API really …
read moreI recently ranted about my frustration with GStreamer in a SoundCloud command-line client written in Ruby.
Well, it turns out that there was quite a bit confusion going on. I still haven't figured out why my initial tries resulted in an error regarding $DISPLAY not being set. But now that …
read moreI was recently looking for a command-line client for SoundCloud. soundCLI on GitHub appeared to be what I want. But wait, there is a problem with its implementation.
soundCLI uses gstreamer's playbin2 to play audio data. But that apparently requires $DISPLAY to be set.
So no …
For a little toy project of mine (a wikipedia XML dump word counter) I wrote a little C++11 helper class to distribute work to all available CPU cores. It took me many years to overcome my fear of threading: In the past, whenever I toyed with threaded code, I …
read moreexercism.io is a croud-sourced mentorship platform for learning to program. In my opinion, they do a lot of things right. In particular, an exercise on exercism.io consists of a descriptive README file and a set of test cases implemented in the target programming language. The tests have two …
read moreSomething straight out from the real world: Menu cards in restaurants are not nice to deal with if you are blind. It is an old problem we grow used to ignoring over time, but still something that can be quite nagging.
There are a lot of psychological issues involved in …
read moreIn short: I love my MacBook Air. It is the best (laptop) hardware I ever owned. I have seen hardware which was much more flaky in the past. I can set the display backlight to zero via software, which saves me a lot of battery life and also offers a …
read moreI used to read Slashdot, many many years ago. However, when they started to do more and more "Your rights online" articles, I gradually stopped to read them.
Someone just sent me a link to a slashdot article: m.slashdot.org. If I try to open this with Lynx, I …
read moreThe aaddition of lambdas in C++11 has greatly improved the flexibility of the language as a whole. C++14 will add a few more abilities.
C++ Truths has a very nice and brief overview of what C++14 will allow. Part 1 goes from the very basics via closures …
read moreThere is a strange bug in Planet Debian I am seeing since I joined. It is rather minor, but since it is an accessibility bug, I'd like to mention it here. I have written to the Planet Debian maintainers, and was told to figure it out myself. This is a …
read moreI have been looking for an App like this since I got my first iOS device in december 2011. Finally, it is here! A single-player (bot-driven) poker app for iOS, THETA Poker Pro, fully accessible and usable with VoiceOver. AppleVis has a review.
It doesn't happen very often, but App …
read moreBetween 2001 and 2004, John Wiegley wrote emacs-chess, a rather complete Chess library for Emacs. I found it around 2004, and was immediately hooked. Why? Because Emacs is configurable, and I was hoping that I could customize the chessboard display much more than with any other console based chess program …
read moreIt is that time of the year again, Debian is electing the Project Leader for 2014/15. Whenever a Debian vote is in progress, I find myself rather happy to rediscover that Debian is providing text mode voting graphs. These are quite accessible to me as a braille user. It …
read moreThere is a rather infamous multilingualisation bug in almost every screen reader I have ever used. As a german native speaker, I usually set my operating system user interface language to german. However, since I do a lot of technical work, I frequently end up on english websites. But if …
read moreI love learning about programming languages. But this one really took me by surprise.
Yes, apparently there is a BrainFuck alike two-dimensional esoteric programming language called MarioLANG.
And GitHub even has an implementation written in Ruby.
I should really allocate a bit of spare time to write at least something …
read moreIn my article Contributing on GitHub I recently explained that I can not use certain social features of GitHub on their website directly. I also explained that I make great use of Hub to circumvent some accessibility issues I have with GitHub.
Well, it turns out that adding star, unstar …
read moreI really like to read code written by different people. I've always been the type of learner that can cover a lot of ground by looking at examples. A few of the programming tricks I acquired over time have definitely been learnt by reading programs written by other people. There …
read moreAndrzej's C++ blog has a nice series on type erasure. I found it interesting to read and have learnt some things from it. For instance, I vaguely guessed, but did not fully realize, that std::function<> is of course a performance hit, since the way how std::function<> is implemented …
read moreThere are currently roughly 1500 source packages in Debian which possibly (very likely actually) do have broken URLs in debian/control.
While it is quite useful that we have VCS information and Homepage URLs in the Packages file these days, we also created a rather big source of bitrot. These …
read moreI have unsuccessfully tried to find a solution for the following problem on the internet several times. Now that I have come at least closer to a usable approach, I thought I'd document what I have found so that others trying to achieve a similar thing can use this as …
read more
