V1.3 software update for the nook

Last week Barnes&Noble released version 1.3 of their nook Software. I was really excited about this version, since I hoped that B&N improves the overall performance of the nook. I updated my nook and after restarting the device, I opened the last book I was reading and it opened up much faster than before (which I didn't measure, just my feeling).


The overall performance improvements in regards of page flipping and opening documents was more than I expected. I have some large PDF documents on my nook and they opened much faster than before. Great!


There much more features added then I would have asked for. My current favorite is

Add highlight or note

which works in epub and PDF documents. Even if this feature is not bug-free yet (sometimes the cursor movement is not predictable)


Click here for a complete list of improvements.

sourcecode syntax highlighting added to my blog

If you are looking for a quick solution have a look at this post: easy syntax highlighting for blogger

groovy oneliner - delete all files except those with a given extension (in this case *.tex)

Since LaTeX creates a lot of intermediary files, I use the following oneliner in groovy to wipe out all these files except the original LaTeX source:

MacPorts contribution

3 weeks ago I submitted my first Portfile to the MacPorts Project. You can find it here!
This port provides the xjobs utility to execute jobs in parallel to leverage the power of multi-processor/core machines. It works similar to the xargs tool that you can find on nearly any Un*x based system nowadays.

Bugfix for Project-Sprouts

A couple of days ago I setup Project-Sprouts on my Mac. I usually use maven with flex-mojos to build my Flex projects, but I wanted to have something that creates the TestRunner class and adds the necessary dependencies (in this case asUnit) to my project.
So I decided to give Project-Sprouts a try.

After updating my RubyGems installation I was able to install everything and create my first project.

Calling rake (per documentation) and downloading several other necessary stuff (flex sdk, flashplayer, asunit) the execution of the mxmlc failed with a weird error (at least for me). Rake failed while executing the mxmlc command. I started to investigate on this error and found out, that the mxmlc wrapper shell script had the wrong line endings (in this case for Windows). I opened the wrapper shell script and fixed this temporarily, to see if my analysis was correct (it was). Since I'm not really experienced with rake and the whole infrastructure, I postponed my further exercise with this toolchain to monday night in order to get things fixed. But now I discovered that Luke Bayes already found the problem and provided a fix for it. I updated Project-Sprouts with the latest version and now it's working "out of the Box". Thanks.