My software
Software projects I worked on

Writ­ing a LIRC con­fig­u­ra­tion file is the ma­jor part of any re­mote con­trol work with Lin­ux. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the low de­gree of script­ing avail­able in LIRC makes this a lot hard­er – there is no ab­strac­tion from the but­tons on the re­mote con­trol to a gen­er­al con­cept of the task one wants to achieve with the re­mote, which could then be in­ter­pret­ed by clients in their re­spec­tive ways.

To ad­dress that is­sue, I wrote mk­lir­crc. By an­no­tat­ing your lir­cd.conf with a few words, you can tell mk­lir­crc which high-lev­el task like "pause" or "raise vol­ume" you want to get done, and the script will write the LIRC con­trol file for you, in­clud­ing all ap­pli­ca­tions it knows about – cur­rent­ly mythtv, xine and mplay­er, but more are easy to add.

Down­load source tar­ball

I proud­ly present you De­bateTimer, a MIDP ap­pli­ca­tion for your Ja­va-ca­pa­ble mo­bile phone that sup­ports you in tim­ing a for­mal de­bate. After en­ter­ing a speech time, a timer is start­ed which will give a num­ber of sig­nals:

• Start of ques­tion­ing phase. Oc­curs not at all on speech­es of one minute or less, at 30 sec­onds on speech­es of two min­utes or less, and at 60 sec­onds on all oth­er speech­es.
• End of ques­tion­ing phase. Oc­curs not at all on speech­es of one minute or less, 30 sec­onds be­fore the end of speech sig­nal on speech­es of four min­utes or less, and 60 sec­onds be­fore the end of speech sig­nal on all oth­er speech­es.
• End of speech sig­nal. For clar­i­ty, this sig­nal is giv­en twice in short suc­ces­sion.
• Over­time beeps. 15 sec­onds af­ter the end of the speech, the soft­ware starts beep­ing re­peat­ed­ly.

For tim­ing com­pet­i­tive de­bates in Bri­tish Par­lia­ment Style or Open Par­lia­ment De­bate, the us­age is ex­treme­ly sim­ple: En­ter the length of speech and hit the Start but­ton. Every time your mo­bile beeps, ham­mer. Divert con­cen­tra­tion to the re­al tasks at hand.

JAD file for De­bateTimer

JAR file for De­bateTimer

Source code

I proud­ly present you the ver­sion 1.1 of lib­hy­phen­ate. UTF-8 char­ac­ters are now han­dled cor­rect­ly and some bugs were purged. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, I had to add glib-2.0 de­pen­dence to en­able the UTF-8 han­dling.

On the func­tion­al­i­ty side, a lot hap­pened: The lib­hy­phen­ate not on­ly cor­rect­ly hy­phen­ates whole texts in­stead of sin­gle words, but can al­so de­ter­mine the best hy­phen­ation point to fit the text in­to a giv­en width - just what you need to im­ple­ment fixed-width columns.

Down­load source tar­ball of cur­rent ver­sion

Down­load source tar­ball of ver­sion 1.1

Thanks to Adiel Mittmann for patch­ing bugs in the XHTML Hyphen­ator, which will not choke on doc­u­ments con­tain­ing DTDs any­more and won't leak mem­o­ry now.

Down­load source tar­ball of cur­rent ver­sion

Down­load source tar­ball of ver­sion 1.1

Please feel free to con­tact me by e-mail at this ad­dress:

Al­ter­na­tive­ly, you find my full con­tact in­for­ma­tion as a VCard file at: