webmaster's blog

TeXlipse update 1.2.0

webmaster — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 11:08:09 +0200

Finally after over one year of silence we have released TeXlipse v. 1.2.0, a LaTeX editor plugin for Eclipse.

Actually to some extend this release is owed to Windows Vista, because the previous one was incompatible. So we need to hurry a little bit to release a fresh version.
This is mainly a bug fix release, which corrects over 30 bugs and should therefore be quite stable. Along came some new and funky features, at the head the usage of Open Declaration (F3) as you know it from the Java editor. You can use it to jump to a defining label from a reference, to the definition of a custom command, to the associated BibTeX entry, and open the file that is included by \input or \include.
Also the other features are very useful in every-day-editing-life. For a more complete list take a look at the New and Noteworthy.

Ever wondered why Sourceforge is so slow

webmaster — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 11:08:25 +0200

Sourceforge is a site I am visiting quite frequently but which is sooo slow, that it is a pain. I always thought, that their servers didn't scale with the growing count of visitors, but I also found another thing, which has a huge impact of the speed of the site. Take a look at the head section of a typical sf page:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://static.sourceforge.net/css/sfx.php?secure=0&20070612-2245" media="screen" title="SFx" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://static.sourceforge.net/css/cca.php?secure=0&20070612-2245" media="screen" />
<script type="text/javascript">
	//<![CDATA[
                var link = document.createElement('link');
                link.setAttribute('rel', 'stylesheet');
                link.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
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Ebay with Ruby and Ruby on Rails

webmaster — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:10:37 +0200

Currently I am writing a small RoR application which uses eBay. There are at least two different approaches to use the eBay developer api in Ruby:

Ebay XML Api (Version: 0.10.2)
eBay4R (Version: 0.8.0 beta)

Sadly both projects are not updated regulary to the latest ebay api version, but they use ebay's wsdl (resp. xsd) description of the web service.

I've first tried Ebay XML Api which works quite well besides a minor flaw with the money class (there is already a bug report and a patch). I have tried to update the library with the build-in rake task to the latest ebay version, but it fails (and I have no idea how to fix it).