Logbook - page 4

  • Web pages update

    Created:

    I have updated my web pages, the layout and the CMS, as you might have recognized already. The layout works responsive now. This was one of my main goals. Besides that I simplified the layout so that there are less graphics. This hopefully reduces the page load and loading time. So the pages should be ready for the mobile world. The only part that does not work responsive completely is the gallery. The details view does not resize. I hope that I will find a solution for that. The content is more or less the same as before.

    Now have fun on the pages!

  • efaLive 2.2 released

    Created:

    Today I have released efaLive version 2.2. There are many structural changes but some new features as well. For more information check the efaLive page.

  • Microsoft's hand made parser

    Created:

    I recently had to implement an API to send push messages to Windows phone 8 from Java. So called “tile” messages did work fine after getting the authentication part working. But “toast” messages did not work. The Microsoft push server answered that everything is OK, but the test software on the phone said that there is an error in the payload. The payload for these messages is XML which describes to the phone what text etc it should display.

    After some conversation with Microsoft everything pointed to the encoding of the XML payload. I was wondering, why they use different encoding for tile and toast messages. After some checks in the code, I was 100% sure that I send UTF8 there as required.

    Then I took a test push send software from Microsoft and analyzed the payload. There were some different HTTP headers, but the payload was XML just as mine. The only difference was, that the Microsoft payload was formatted XML. And yes, unbelievable, but this was the problem. After I added carriage return/line feed and some spaces, the toast messages worked as expected.

    Thanks Microsoft for this nice hand made XML parser that expects the payload to contain “\r\n” to form a well formatted XML string!! And I thought that formatting XML is only good for human being’s eyes. You never stop learning…

  • Source of efaLive now on GitHub!!

    Created:

    The source code of everything that makes up efaLive is now available on GitHub. Up to now, the source code was available in the CD image only. There was no configuration for live-build to create CD images. Now, everything is available to create an efaLive CD image. All Bash scripts, Python code and configuration files are there. It took some time to make it available in such a comfortable way. I had to restructure many things so that it is more easy for “external” people to understand the project. See the efaLive page for more information.

  • LaTeX is back

    Created:

    Ok, it has “ever” been there, but I found back to it. I used it once to write my diploma thesis and was impressed how easy it is, to write long texts with it. It is not really easy for people who are used to Wysiwyg software like OpenOffice or so, I think. But for software development oriented people, it is really easy. And the output is much more professional than with any Wysiwyg tool.

    Until now I used LibreOffice to write the documentation for efaLive. Now I switched to LaTeX and am very happy about this decision. The handling of the document is much easier, you have better control of the layout and you just need a tiny editor. To convert the LibreOffice document, I used the writer2latex extension for OpenOffice/LibreOffice. I used the ultra clean setting for the export.

    I should always use LaTeX for long texts!

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