Author Archives: paolog

About paolog

homo technologicus cynicus

The quest for a decent Android RSS aggregator

Posted on April 9, 2013 by paolog

Do you pick posts to read on your 7″ Android tablet from a few RSS feeds ? Do you need an Android app to aggregate them, download the posts for offline reading and present them in a clean, lightweight list … Continue reading →

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Subscribing to trac’s RSS feed

Posted on March 25, 2013 by paolog

With trac version 0.11.7 we hit a bug where requesting the timeline RSS triggers a UnicodeDecodeError. This can be fixed by changing line 224 of the file /usr/share/pyshared/buildbot/status/web/feeds.py as follows: unilist.append(unicode(line,’utf-8′,’replace’)) where we exploit the more recent resilient version Python’s unicode function: with the … Continue reading →

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Howto output XLSX files from C++

Posted on January 18, 2013 by paolog

The title of this post should really be: Howto output Office Open XML (OpenXML) spreadsheet files from native C++ with as little hassle and unwanted dependencies as possible. We will not discuss the many other options available, both commercial and … Continue reading →

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Howto diff XML files or assemblies thereof such as OpenXML or ODF files

Posted on January 17, 2013 by paolog

Office Open XML or Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) are both zipped, XML-based file formats, that can be extracted to directories. Diffing XML files is tricky because the common diff tools may be confused by different line endings … Continue reading →

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git push errors “insufficient permission for adding an object to repository” and “unpack failed: unpack-objects abnormal exit”

Posted on December 21, 2012 by paolog

We occasionally have this error when pushing to a git repository: $ git push Counting objects: 7, done. Delta compression using up to 2 threads. Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done. Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 1.14 KiB, done. Total 4 (delta … Continue reading →

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Howto link in boost::test on select platforms and get smaller test executables

Posted on December 4, 2012 by paolog

The most useful boost libraries are include-only so it is handy to install just the boost headers on the select platforms (i.e. Windows) where it is cumbersome to install the compiled boost libs. If you are using boost::test Unit Test … Continue reading →

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Connecting LIBPF OPC to a Honeywell TPN Server via DCOM

Posted on August 7, 2012 by paolog

The current DCS offering from Honeywell is Experion PKS, but there are still many plants around which use the previous system, Total Plant Solution (TPS). On the TotalPlant Process Network (TPN) , additional applications are run on the Application Processing … Continue reading →

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Detecting non-ASCII characters in a text file

Posted on May 25, 2012 by paolog

Our internal coding standard for C++ source files dictates that 7-bit US-ASCII should be used for file encoding. This decision is based on the fact that the current C++ standard (2003) limits characters that can be used in variable and … Continue reading →

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Analyzing and manipulating settings.xml of LIBPF OPC

Posted on May 18, 2012 by paolog

LIBPF OPC is the LIBPF module that adds plant control system connectivity via the Classic OPC interface (OPC DA). The module is configured using the LIBPF OPC Configurator, but the underlying configuration data are stored in an XML file called settings.xml. … Continue reading →

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Step-by-step guide: adding new files to a LIBPF project

Posted on May 15, 2012 by paolog

Reference documentation is great, but often boring to read and not helpful to solve specific problems that arise in day-to-day use. To tackle these, a step-by-step guide can be helpful. Here is one such step-by-step guide for adding a new … Continue reading →

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