Stefaan Lippens inserts content here

When you're working on a software development project where not all parties use the same code style conventions or editor setting (like tabs vs. spaces, removing trailing spaces, etc), the signal to noise ratio of a source code diff can be a bit frustrating. Luckily, most diff programs have an …

Today I struggled a bit with pylab's plot_date function and overlapping date tick labels:

After some googling, I found that matplotlib offers nice flexible date tick control and formatting. I added a date tick locator and a date formatter to the mix as follows:

import pylab
import matplotlib
import …

When making a document with Lyx (or LaTeX), I often create figures and diagrams in XFig. I know, Xfig's user interface looks and feels very dated. (I tried the Java port JFig, but that one even feels worse to me.) However, the main reason I bite the bullet is that …

You know those URL shortening services like tinyurl.com, is.gd and bit.ly? Here is an example: http://twurl.nl/jvuncl. Looks like a pretty normal shortened URL, right? Now eat this:

~/tmp$ wget http://twurl.nl/jvuncl
--13:56:22--  http://twurl.nl/jvuncl
           => `jvuncl'
Resolving twurl.nl …

How to undo/rollback a Subversion commit? A fairly basic question, but every time I need the answer, I can't manage to remember it from the previous time I did it. Asking Google helps eventually, but the signal to noise ratio of the top hits is a bit disappointing. This …

At first it felt annoying, but now I really like that git uses a pager when it has to present something (e.g. a log or a diff) that is longer than your screen. Git even provides a built in option --color to show you a diff with helpful colors …

If you're not afraid of a a bit o' Unix/Linux/OSX command line delight, you're probably having grep hanging on your tool belt.

One option you'll wonder how you could live without is --color, which enables highlighting of the word or pattern you are grepping for. I find it …

I prefer a qwerty keyboard for programming, but to write in my native language (Dutch) I need sometimes accented characters like ë, ï, é, etc, which do not have dedicated keys on a qwerty layout.

A handy way under Linux is to use a "compose key" ([Alt Gr] on my …

Sometimes, Subversion thinks that a PDF is a text file, instead of binary data. This can hurt during commits or diffs, because Subversion tries to do textual diffs with binary data.

Solution: you can explicitly flag the file as PDF data and Subversion will handle it as binary from then …

Reminder to self: how to set up a virtual host for localhost webdevelopment on OS X with MAMP

1. DNS setup: add an entry for the local domain name in /etc/hosts, e.g.

   127.0.0.1     foo.localhost
   

   and flush DNS cache with

   dscacheutil -flushcache
   

   1. Apache config (/Applications/MAMP …