Stuff
Swimming
I enjoy swimming enough to have set up a page listing the swimming pools of Brussels. I originally was checking out the websites of the different pools because I was looking for a 50m one (this was before I had heard of Swimmer's Guide). To my disappointment, there's not really a good 50m pool in Brussels. But there are still a number of pools in Brussels worth checking out for other reasons, check my list.
Vegetarian Restaurants in Brussels
When travelling abroad, I've always appreciated fellow vegetarians making available some info online about where to go for dinner. So I thought I'd return the favor, check my list of veggie restaurants in Brussels.
Software
Besides the artifacts I've developed for my research, I've written a number of scripts and small applications. Whenever I feel the need to automate something, I try to spend the extra time needed to develop the solution into something which can be used by others. While it's more work, I find in the end the result is more useful to me as well. Well that, and after 16+ years I'm still not bored with doing some programming just for fun!
All of these require a Mac to run, with the exception of some stuff I've written for Squeak and VisualWorks Smalltalk.
I can also be found on SourceForge and VersionTracker which list some of my projects.
| RAR Expander Maintained: Yes | RAR Expander is a Mac OS X application for extracting the files contained in RAR compressed file archives. RAR Expander supports single- and multi-volume archives and uses the official unRAR library internally so it is fully compatible with archives produced by WinRAR. |
| NFOViewer Maintained: Yes | NFOViewer is a Mac OS X application for viewing ASCII art ("*.nfo") files. Files with the extension ".nfo" were used in the pre-Internet Bulletin Board System days to describe the content of archives posted on the bulletin board and often contained elaborate "ASCII art". These images were drawn using just letters and some graphical symbols. Because these symbols were specific to PCs, modern text editors on the Mac don't do justice to "nfo" files, but NFOViewer can show the files using the proper symbols allowing one to once again appreciate "ASCII art". |
| TeXMaid Maintained: Yes | TeXMaid is a small extension to the Mac OS X version of the LaTeX document typesetting system, it changes the system so that its auxiliary files are no longer written to the same folder as the one containing the LaTeX document. The TeXMaid package installs pdflatex and bibtex wrapper scripts that change the way TeX writes auxiliary files: rather than cluttering up your LaTeX sources folder with the .bbl, .aux etc. files, auxiliary files will be written to a subfolder texaux. 2008-02-22: Note: I've received some news TeXMaid is currently not working on Leopard. An update will follow. 2004-6-3: updated to work with multi-file TeX documents. |
| Make PDF from Graffle Maintained: Yes | "Make PDF from Graffle" is a script to help convert drawings made with the Mac OS X application OmniGraffle to PDF, it is particularly useful for those using OmniGraffle together with the LaTeX document typesetting system. This script automates the conversion of OmniGraffle files to PDF. You can use this script as an application or a Script Menu item. When using it as a Script Menu item, select files in the Finder first and then run this script from the menu. To use it as an application, simply open it or drop OmniGraffle files onto it. The OmniGraffle files will be opened in OmniGraffle and then saved as a PDF. |
| Copy and Move Selected Files Maintained: Yes | "Copy and Move Selected Files" is a Mac OS X script to automate copying of files to a folder and then moving the original files to another folder. This script is particularly useful if you want to move large files to a Mac over the network, while keeping the file on the local Mac as a backup. Select the files and use this script to make a copy to a folder on the other Mac, and then move the files to the backup folder on your local Mac. |
| Copy Originals of Aliases Maintained: Yes | "Copy Originals of Aliases" is a Mac OS X script to make a copy of the original file an alias file points to. An example scenario where this script is useful: if you want to copy some files from a Mac server, but copying them now would take too long, you can make aliases to the files and copy them later with this script. |
| Export iTunes Artwork Maintained: Yes | "Export iTunes Artwork" is an "action" component for the Mac OS X workflow automation application Automator, the action takes songs from iTunes as input and outputs the album artwork stored in the song file. This action comes with a few example Automator workflows to export the artwork of the currently playing song and to export one artwork cover for each album your iTunes library. |
| Filter Songs with Downloaded Artwork Maintained: No | "Filter Songs with Downloaded Artwork" is an "action" component for the Mac OS X workflow automation application Automator, the action takes songs from iTunes as input and filters the songs which have at least one piece of artwork downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. An example workflow is included which creates a playlist of all songs in your iTunes library for which iTunes has downloaded artwork from the iTunes Music Store. |
| Download Metro Newspaper Maintained: Yes | "Download Metro Newspaper" is a Scheme script to download a PDF of today's edition of Metro, a free daily newspaper distributed in Belgium. The online version of Metro is available as separate PDFs for each page, this script combines the pages into one PDF and places it on your desktop. By default it downloads the Flemish edition of today's paper, but it can be easily configured to get the Walloon edition instead. Requires PLT Scheme on Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. |
| BibPubList Maintained: Yes | "BibPubList" is a set of PHP files to generate a list of publications from a BibTex file, in the style used by the PROG research laboratory at VUB. This is the script I use to generate the list on the Publications section of my home page. It is set up to take a BibTex file generated by BibDesk. Take a look at the source for an example of how to use it. It uses the BibTexParse library by Mark Grimshaw and Guillaume Gardey. |
| ToDoS Maintained: No | ToDoS is a simple 'to do' tracking system for users of the VisualWorks Smalltalk programming environment. ToDoS keeps track of todo items using the StarBrowser. It's mostly useful for one-man projects because the todo items are kept in your image rather than on a global server, though they are stored in classes so they can be easily filed out and published on a Store. After installing you should use MagicKeys to bind a shortcut key to the action #mgDefineNewTodo:, you can then press the shortcut key in all text editors in VisualWorks to quickly add a todo item you just thought of. (MagicKeys is automatically loaded when you load ToDoS.) You also need to execute the following code to get a list of the todo items in the StarBrowser (which is also automatically loaded):
SCG.Classifications.ExtentionalClassification root add:
(SCG.Classifications.SmalltalkIntentionalClassification
name: 'Todo Items'
descriptionSource: '[ToDo.Storage.ToDoStorage subclasses]').
|
| Talk Timer Maintained: No | Talk Timer is a small application written in Squeak Smalltalk for use at conferences to help speakers keep track of how much time they have left. 
Talk Timer shows a timer which counts down the number of minutes reserved for a talk and turns red when only 5 minutes are left, when time's up it also flashes. I originally quickly hacked this together at the Camp Smalltalk event at the ESUG 2005 conference, where we installed it on a computer next to the speakers. A number of people where interested in getting a copy of it, so I cleaned it up a bit, you can download the result here: |
| Fancy Transcript Morph Maintained: No | Fancy Transcript Morph is an extension for the Squeak Smalltalk programming environment, it provides a much 'fancier' and more useful version of the standard window used for showing textual output from a running program. 
A Fancy Transcript Morph is like a transcript window, but looks fancier. I created it because I felt transcript windows were never there when you need them. Usually I'm opening a lot of different windows while I'm working on some code and at some point the transcript window I have open gets hidden behind a bunch of other windows. When I then try out some code I can't see any debugging information that is being printed on the transcript while the code is running so I have to wait till the code is done and then try to find the transcript window again. A bit more clever window positioning on my part would have of course solved this problem but one day I was kind of bored so I tried my hand at making a new kind of transcript window: one that would automatically pop up whenever something is printed on the transcript. While at it I also put in some fancy transparancy tricks. The screen shot (click to zoom) shows the Fancy Transcript Morph, it's the blue transparant thingy on the top right in case you missed that :) |
| VisualWorks Opener Maintained: No | VisualWorks Opener is an extension to the Mac OS X version of the VisualWorks Smalltalk programming environment, it allows wrapping the different files of a programming project into a single Mac "package" file. Something that has annoyed me about running VisualWorks on the Mac for quite a while is that it does not exploit MacOSX's 'file package' functionality for saved images. A saved VisualWorks image consists of two seperate files, the memory dump image and a changes file. On MacOSX, these can be wrapped into a single document by putting them in a 'file package', a directory that is treated by the Finder as if it were a regular document file. This way you don't have to be careful about copying both files, or moving both of them when you want to copy or move the saved image. Unfortunately VisualWorks doesn't exploit this, and I'm left with seeing and manipulating the two seperate files in the Finder. Added to that comes the fact that the file icon provided by VW for the image files is just plain ugly, so I was annoyed enough to create 'VisualWorks Opener'. VisualWorks Opener adds support to VW for putting saved images into a new type of file package with extension '.vwimage'. VisualWorks Opener itself is an application that can open these .vwimage files: it will handle them by simply telling the real VisualWorks application to open the image file that is embedded in the .vwimage file. You can download VisualWorks Opener below, instructions for use are included in the download. Download VisualWorks Opener 2004-12-4 (Note: you probably shouldn't use this in the new VW 7.3 since it also includes changes to the ObjectMemory class) Addendum: The README included in the distribution mentions that the 'VW Opener Support' package which you need to load makes some changes to the image saving mechanism, but it doesn't clearly explain why this is necessary and I've gotten some questions about it. The need for the change is quite simple: when you do something like "(Filename named: 'test') makeDirectory" you don't want this directory to be created inside the .vwimage 'directory', but in the directory where the '.vwimage' package itself is located. Unfortunately when VW Opener tells VW to open the image file included in the '.vwimage' package, VW will set its current directory simply to the '.vwimage' directory itself, thus any files you try to open or create will be looked for or created inside the '.vwimage' package by default. So I changed some of the start-up code of the image to change the current directory at startup, and also had to change some of the image saving code to make the saved image still go in the '.vwimage' directory as the original code always saved simply in the current directory. Note thus that the actual core saving mechanism is left untouched, I've only introduced some small changes to the file name and directory assignments. Hopefully nothing that should blow up your image ;) |