A question came up on the Lua mailing list, asking whether there was a PDF version of the Lua manual. This is, of course, the home domain of pandoc, and I got nerd-sniped into producing a PDF (and ePUB) version of the manual. This is a good opportunity to showcase some pandoc features. The post describes the process of going from an HTML web page to a PDF file via LaTeX and pandoc. We will see how to quickly convert documents with pandoc;

My first exposure to Lua has been as a pandoc user, and adding new Lua features to pandoc turned Lua into one of my favorite languages. In this post I will take a look at pandoc, the universal document converter, and explore how one can script and extend it with Lua. Pandoc includes a Lua interpreter since 2012, but the integration of Lua has been expanded significantly with the latest 2.0 release.

Last night was the night of this year’s MetaNook. It was the fourth time that the local hackers, most notably MetaMeute and Chaotikum, joined forces to organize a night full of beginner-friendly introductions, advanced tech talks, and project presentations. My talk contribution this year was a brief introduction in the “magic” of the command-line.

The zeitkraut server is configured to work with IPv6. For quite some time now, I’ve been seeing some strange errors in my log files. If you’ve been noticing something similar, here is what’s going on and how to prevent the messages from appearing. The Problem Everything works as expected, except for some weird messages in the logs: rt6_redirect: source isn't a valid nexthop for redirect target Not even startpage was of much help.

Having a good working environment is vital for feeling comfortable being productive. This extends to computational tools and the command shell is an integral part of the daily work for many of us. It’s a good idea to configure the shell’s interface to be efficient and pleasant to use.

One of the many great things about free and open source software and the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem are the simple yet powerful tools available. The possibilities enabled by almost trivial programs are incredible. A very positive side effect this has on me is that I like to go and explore technologies with the tools at my disposal.

A couple of friends and I just discussed the idea of Russian Process Roulette: Everybody starts a little program which kills processes at random. The winner is the one whose computer remains usable the longest. Is this crazy? Yes. Immature? Sure. Fun? Definitely. Adviced against to actually play unless the consequences are fully understood? That too. Playing the game is as simple as starting a command like the following: while sleep 600;

Spam just doesn’t die. Every major mail provider has really good spam filters in place, as do the common mail clients. Nontheless, there seem to be enough people reading – and acting on – spam mail to make it a profitable business. No matter how much we hate it, we need to deal with spam. Better than having a good spam filter is not to be spammed in the first place.