Balance of Cowards

Kategorie: Code

  • [:en]Speeding up consumption of daily news articles[:]

    [:en]In nowadays web it is easy to come up with a huge list of websites to check for daily updates. News, comics, blogs, … one would like to check them all, regularly. To keep up-to-date with websites, RSS feeds are an invaluable tool, and feed aggregators help to bring order into our surfing habits. For those who use multiple machines, like me, having an online database that keeps track of which articles one has already seen and which ones are new, is really a great time-saver. The TinyTinyRSS team has done an outstanding job of providing just that functionality.

    I have been using a privately hosted TinyTinyRSS instance for quite some time now. Unfortunately, lately the web interface started to become increasingly sluggish. That made me think: Why not write a (small) program that provides me with just the functionality I need on a daily basis — show unread articles and, on demand, open them in a web browser. Luckily, the TinyTinyRSS folks have created a nice RESTful API. Tinkering around with Python for a few days I could get a wrapper for the API and two small scripts (one graphical, one console-based) which provide me with exactly the needed functionality.

    The code could be useful for others, as well (writing a full-blown TinyTinyRSS desktop client comes to mind). It is available on my GitHub page, project pyttrss. Comments and critique are very welcome :)[:]

  • [:de]BibTeX als Webservice[:en]BibTeX as a Webservice[:]

    [:de]Ich habe eben einen kleinen Webservice geschrieben, der es erlaubt aus einer BibTeX Datei eine schön formatierte Referenzenliste im PDF-Format zu generieren. Ich habe das selbst schon ein paar Mal gebraucht. Da ich grade am Aufräumen war, und die Funktionalität nicht verlieren wollte, habe ich es sozusagen „in die Cloud ausgelagert“ :)[:en]

    I just wrote a small Webservice that creates a nicely formatted list of references in PDF format from a raw BibTeX file. I have needed that a few times already. Since I was cleaning up my computer and didn’t want to lose the functionality, I „outsourced it to the cloud“, so to speak :)
    [:]

  • [:de]Münzspaltereien[:en]Coinage[:]

    [:de]

    Ein interessantes Problem über das ich heute gestolpert bin: Für einen beliebigen Geldbetrag n – was ist die minimale Anzahl an Münzen, mit der man diesen Geldbetrag erreichen kann? Also zum Beispiel kann man ja 10 Cent als zehn einzelne Cent-Stücke, oder aber als zwei Fünf-Cent Stücke, oder als ein Fünf-Cent Stück und fünf einzelne Cent-Stücke darstellen, und so weiter. Für zehn Cent ist natürlich die minimale Anzahl an Münzen genau eine Zehn-Cent Münze. Aber wie löst man das Problem allgemein?

    [:]
    [:en]
    This article is only available in German, unfortunately.
    [:]
    (mehr …)