So I come down with a salvaged Sempron 3800 box running Ubuntu Jaunty (total cost: $0) and quickly put that in place of my mom’s dinosaur.  Using VMWare Player (total cost: $0) we installed a bootleg copy of Win2k (total cost: $0, but not legally) in order to support her Quicken habit (GnuCash, my personal (though reluctant) choice for personal finances, sadly does not rise to the level).  On John’s end, the ancient CRM database program Q&A doesn’t run under Windows 7 but it does under dosbox; and Outlook express did not seem to be capable of transferring settings to regular-old outlook under Windows 7 (I didn’t work on this at all, but John assured me he spent a good bit of time) but Thunderbird imports it just fine… and finally, an old Agfa Snapscan e-20 is not yet supported on Windows 7, but the binary driver is still usable by xsane if it is extracted from the WinXP self-extracting executable (with a little help from wine; thanks to this post).

The only disappointment of the day was in how complicated it is to transfer a thunderbird profile from one computer to another- requiring showing hidden files and editing configuration files.  I could do it just fine, but it’s too complicated for John to do for someone else.  There is a ‘managed’ way to do it, but it requires installing another application (which is windows-only, by the way). Why is there [still] not an “export profile” option? It could just store the profile folder in an archive which can be imported elsewhere.  Maybe there’s a good reason for not doing this but I can’t think of it.

So minor config issues notwithstanding, OSS is finally reaching the level of being generally usable by the broader public.

UPDATE 2009-12-28

More good news: my Dad and his fiancée will be using my Wordpress installation to host their wedding page, which will be found at monaandron.com and hosted (presently) by FreeBSD.

Then some bad: Thunderbird 3.0 has another big FAIL: clicking “get mail” doesn’t get mail??  The configuration interface has also changed in subtle ways that make it very difficult to troubleshoot problems for non-tech-savvy family members over the phone.  Very frustrating.

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.

Essentially, I create a file which includes the \pspicture environment and all the graphics commands, which I call somepicture.fig. I then \input{somepicture.fig} into my main document when I want the picture to appear. When I then want to convert the picture into a standalone graphic, I run a script called figuretops.sh(link to file) which performs the conversion by making use of the very neat “file here” notation in bash:

cat >> filename.tex <<EOF
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pstricks-add}
\usepackage{calc}

\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\color{white}
\fbox{
\color{black}
\input{}
}
\end{document}
EOF

When I run LaTeX on this file, it gets to the blank \input{} directive and asks the user for the filename. I solve this by echoing the filename into the LaTeX invocation in the bash script. I then clean up temporary files and use

convert -density 300 somefigure.eps somefigure.png

to convert the eps image to a 300-DPI image.

Here’s a source figure, the bash script, and an image it produced:

Here’s another (naively crafted: TeX source) but more interesting figure:

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.

Every time I sit down to use TeX I end up whiling away the hours..  Sunday night I picked up the poster I had made for SBC 2008, which I had been very happy with, to adapt it to the new conference.  It took me probably 90 minutes to solve a technical issue on the install  that I had already solved at least once before (it was my first time making a poster on a new laptop, and I probably solved it the same way on the last machine the last time I made a poster).  Whenever I spend time solving the same problems multiple times it gives me an opportunity to berate myself for using such idiosyncratic software when anyone “sensible” (implicitly including everyone else in my department and, it seems, the entire conference-attending public) uses PowerPoint.

Instead I find myself investing 4 hours into learning how to plot data with PSTricks… maybe 6… anyway, it was spread out over two days and involved searching for bugs and bug fixes.  Because doing new stuff in TeX never works properly the first several times through.

Searching for bugs and bug fixes is the characteristic behavior in the use of open-source technology.  Because anyone can contribute solutions (some projects have broader user participation than others– compare TeX to, say, octave-forge), the question faced by the user is, “How have other people solved this problem?”  And that was how I came to search for bugs in the pstricks “\savedata” mechanism and found this.  Or something very similar.  Behold!  The problem had long ago (1997) been discovered and worked around.  I just have to make sure that I don’t use \savedata inside another macro, otherwise it won’t work.  Anyway, now I could continue with my work.  Only took 45 minutes of troubleshooting followed by 5 minutes of google.

I don’t suppose anything like that ever comes up in PowerPoint when you’re using its built-in data-plotter and axes-maker, but I wouldn’t know.

So I berate myself.  Maybe if I weren’t distracted by all the technical difficulties, I would get more real work done.  I spend all this time solving all these problems and what do I have to show for it?

(Aside from carpal tunnel collapse and a sore neck, I mean): A beautiful poster.  Entirely TeX (though it is a bit of a mess: source).  It turns out that yes, it is the right tool for the job.  If you have the time to sink into it.

I’m sure it’s possible to make the same poster in PowerPoint (plus, probably, Excel.. and EndNote.. ) but for now I’ll stick to the tools I [more or less] know.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say TeX is pleasant to work with, but at least I can grope my way through it when there’s a problem.  And maybe I do need an instruction manual every time I want to change arrow styles.  But hey- that’s why I have multiple desktops.