Mathew’s blog

Yesterday evening i stumbled over cryptolib. A crypto library that looks quite good and feature rich. In addition the library has bindings to a lot of different languages for example: C/C++, Python, Java, C#, Delphi,…

In the past I got some experience with OpenSSL which worked well but has almost no documentation at least for the development interface. The cryptolib has a very nice documentation as far as I can tell. It is very easy to read not the usual library gibberish that is almost as boring as sitting in a waiting room.

The library is distributed under a dual license one opensource license the Sleepycat license and a commercial license. But it is still free to be used for small and research application without a buying a license.

The documentation of the library has also some interesting information about the usage of cryptography in applications. It describes how security is used today and who this could be improved.

Today needed to change the namespace of my project. Since this would lead to go through all the sourcefiles and change the namespace I was looking for a tool that helps me with this. After a few search request I found in the beginning only windows tools. Then I found a python script that helped in the ActiveState Python Cookbook.

I made some small changes to the script to get it easier to use.

• use of getopt to get the command line parameters.
• added ignore regex to specify files/directories that should be ignored
• changed the use of the regex for the files. now match is used instead of search

The script can be found here

An example how to to use the script you find here.

An other way to solve this problem would be using a full featured development environment. But since the project was setup with vim this was not an option.

For the DustBot project here at the University I needed a test framework for C++. I found CPPUnit what looked like what I was looking for but it took me almost a day to figure out how to use it. The example in the CPPUnit Cookbook shows everything you need to now but there was no complete ready to use example. What I wanted was just an easy example ready to use. I found on Wikipedia (CPPUnit) a simple example but this was not complete there was the TestRunner missing.

I wrote a short example/tutorial with a few comments how to setup a test framework for your C++ application. You will find the tutorial here and the example code here.

I haven’t talked about my project yet. As a short introduction Yaom has the goal to be a media center that satisfies my personal needs of a media center. I tried other open source media centers before. Every one has it good points and they are quite major sometimes. I tried to improve them but some time they just did not fit for what i wanted. So I decided to do it my self.
The main goal is to have every functionality as a plugin, that if a plugin can’t do what you want it should be easy to replace it.

At the moment I have a kernel with a configuration backend working, both will be used by the plugins. The rest of the functionality shold be implemented in the plugins not should not be fixed in the application.

Today I just got the file loader for the audio backend working. It now loads the files and stores the meta information of the audio files with the help of kaa.metadata into the data base. For the database access I use the object-relational mapper Storm from Canonical. It is quiet easy to use so far.