Refactored to compile on Ubuntu/OSX

Roman,

Thanks for putting this together.  I was going to do something similar to do some experimentation with hdf5 and your code provides a good starting spot.  I reworked your build system so that it will compile on Ubuntu and it passes your unit tests still on OSX.  I also took the liberty of integrating it into travis-ci and putting a small little readme.  

-b