Perl on Miek Gieben

New Dutch Teletext Script

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:17:00 +0000

Last week, the Dutch public broadcaster (NOS) decided to “fix” their online teletext offering, there breaking [an old script I had laying around](/2008/july/15/teletext_nl_script/index.htm l). Their new web interface (displaying gifs) can be found here.

After @bdekruijff discovered their newly, hidden text feed, I decided to adapt the old script to this new situation. Thanks to this page I was able to (partially) reconstruct the feed. Most escape sequences are working, I’m still fiddling with finding Unicode chars for the “Contiguous Graphics Set”.

String multiplication in zsh

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:46:00 +0000

In Perl you have this:

% perl -e 'print "a" x 5, "\n"'
aaaaa

With that you can easily create a separator string consisting out of 60 spaces.

I always missed this in my shell - until now.

In Zsh have the following expansion:

l:expr::string1::string2:

Pad the resulting words on the left. Each word will be truncated if
required and placed in a field expr characters wide.

See zsh.dotsrc.org. There is also a r: variant which operates in the same way.

A library at home

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:20:00 +0000

I’ve told a few times about how to build a library.

But there a some extra things that must be done before you can call yourself a complete librarian.

ID-ing the books you have
Storing the information
Marking the books
Sorting and shelving the books
Remembering who borrowed what

ID-ing books

For this I bought a barcode reader that reads the ISBN number of the book’s backcover. With book_get (Perl code) I can retrieve the author, title, genre and year published from Google.