Fixnum.org

I was looking for a way to concatenate PDF (or Postscript) files on Linux today, so that I could easily print some coursebook. Professors have this annoying habit of "conveniently" splitting their books into one PDF for each chapter. Very annoying if you want to print a file double-sided (like the...

It is a common misconception that installing Linux from a USB key is a difficult task. It's not. And I'm going to prove it to you in this short article.

This method is not just useful for machines without an optical drive, but it also helps you save on writeable CDs/DVDs, and it is are a...

As I posted earlier, I recently got myself a Thinkpad X31. It's a nice and sturdy laptop, but being a 12-incher, it lacks an optical drive. I've been using Kubuntu/Ubuntu 7.10 for the past months, and all was well.

But then I...

I've been quite busy lately, but - with my previous blog post being two months old - you probably already figured that out. So let's get down to business and give you an update.

I've had exams. Yeah, really. Two of them, and I failed both. Yay for me. Let's move on to more...

I've spent very little time around my keyboard lately, but here's a quick update: I've been to Budapest with Eva for a few days last week, it was wonderful and a lot more relaxing than ANY of my previous travels. After that, I spent a day with my good friend Bernd (like I do...

In the past month, I've been working at the Federal Public Service of Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment. I was told to do some input work and fix some bugs in the application I had...

If you're anything like me, you have probably spent hours (or even days) of your life looking for free games on the net. Yes, there's no shame in admitting it, getting things for free is fun. And playing games is fun. So playing free games is... well you do the math.

The only...

Recently, I discovered Full Circle Magazine, a free linux magazine everyone can contribute to. They focus on Ubuntu, the most popular distribution out there, and my personal favorite. In the #1 issue, they have...

With all these ruby implementations floating around, I thought it would be nice to compare a few of them and see which one turns out to be the fastest. Although speed shouldn't be the only thing you consider when you need to pick a runtime, ruby's poor performance is often targeted as a problem...

Recently, in my neverending quest for a truly portable computing experience, I've tried to use an emulator and a USB key to make me a portable operating system for use with the computers at school. The only problem is that USB keys are slow, and QEMU on Windows is even worse. I am used to the...

I've changed a bit about the way the blog engine works: I stopped using the file's modification time and added the date explicitly to the article file. I just got tired with touching the file with its original time every time I correct a typo. This is probably the last update ever,...

Well, lately I haven't really done much. I've tried to get some studying done, but I can't say that was very productive. I hope I'll have more luck the next week, although that's very unlikely, as Tom, a friend from the UK, is coming over for a few days. Besides studying I've been working on a...

Last week, I attended FOSDEM for the third time in my short life, and I liked what I saw. FOSDEM is an open source convention, held every year at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Being one of the largest open source gatherings in Europe, it would be a crime not to go when I live so close...

Well, I finished GameR's event handling and timers, and I'm working on the tetris clone to demonstrate its power now. I've got 137 lines of code so far, so that means it's about 65,3% finished ;) This server is going down for maintainance, because I'm stuck with 128MB of RAM and I'm running...

I haven't written anything in a while, so I thought I should let you know that I've been hard at work finishing GameR. Image support is finished, and so is event handling. Next on the list is a Timer class, which will be 100% ruby. When that part is finished, I will release the code as a project...

Ruby is an extremely powerful and flexible language, but Ruby is also slow. According to performance zealots, when you use Ruby, you have signed a pact with the devil where you agreed to trade off pure effeciency for simplicity. It's a bit more complex than that though, because 90% of the time,...

Most of you probably watched the keynote where Steve Jobs finally showed us the iPhone. And I must say, I immediately thought "I want one". Until I started investigating the device more thoroughly.

Granted, the iPhone is a wonderful device that seems to do everything you ever wanted to...

Those of you who know me personally will confirm that I'm a linux enthousiast. Until last year, I could even be called a zealot. Recently, I re-installed Windows XP in order to play a videogame, which still doesn't work in Wine. I also used the opportunity to check if all of my code worked on...

In the little spare time I have these days, I have been playing around with C to create a decent, object oriented SDL binding for Ruby, and the way it's going it could well become a full featured game development kit for Ruby. My main goal is simplicity, and a close second is efficiency, but only...