Archive for category software

Date: December 24th, 2009
Cate: software
2 msgs

A good day for open-source software

Abbie and I are down visiting my folks in San Diego — My mom’s partner has been struggling with the transfer of 7 years’ work from his old XP machine to a new one running Windows 7; He’s been struggling with poor compatibility for literally months, with the new computer still setup on a card table and the old computer still indispensible.  Meanwhile, my mom’s computer is an ancient e-Machine with 256 MB of RAM and it takes 15 minutes to start up a web browser.  She’s been waiting to receive John’s old computer (which is certainly no spring chicken, but a big improvement over the present one). more))

Date: August 15th, 2009
Cate: null, software
3 msgs

Convert LaTeX figures to stand-alone graphics

As I am wont to do, I’ve been frittering away the hours poking and prodding TeX to make beautiful graphics.  This is my way of giving myself the impression of working hard, and actually accomplishing things, though not things that necessarily advance my career.

I’m quite fond of PSTricks, a LaTeX package which allows the author to make use of PostScript’s extensive computational and graphical capabilities from within a TeX document.  My project for this week was to come up with a way to give these figures to my advisor, who works exclusively in MS Word. So what I needed was a way to export TeX figures to graphics files. Here’s what I came up with.
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Date: June 17th, 2009
Cate: software

On Hacks, bugs, and tools

This is pretty neat.  For whatever reason, Internet Explorer has a quirk about how it interprets CSS properties.  So, the CSS maintainers adopt a clarification to their rules (in CSS 2.1) which explicitly allows the quirk, and it becomes a way for web authors to recognize and adapt to any other idiosyncrasies that happened to make their way into IE.

I’ve been thinking about idiosyncrasies and coding lately– mostly because I’ve been laying out a new poster for display at the 2009 ISIE conference in Lisbon, which I sadly won’t be able to attend, owing (at some distance) to California’s present financial difficulties.  But at least my poster will kick ass.  I laid it out in TeX using the “arbitrary” class, a derivative of a0poster which appears to be missing from the comprehensive TeX archive network. Anyway, it’s the only way I know of to make a 48″x36″ PDF in LaTeX.

more))