General Disarray

Bifurcation

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 04:44:47 +0000

This blog has a certain duality. I have had several popular posts on Digg and del.icio.us/popular, and I have many incoming links to my instructional articles on LaTeX, Word and Excel. However, I fear that someone coming to this blog through one of those links may be put off by the fact that the material that they are reading is mixed in with my miscellaneous thoughts. I also think that it’s a good practice to delineate between “personal” blogs and “topical” blogs. So far, General Disarray has been a mixture of the two.

The solution? A bifurcation. Instructional information about technology can be found at How To’s, a newly created WordPress.com blog; personal thoughts and opinions regarding this and that can be found at I Think These Things.

My intuition is that most of the subscribers to this blog came to it via Digg or a search engine, and probably aren’t interested in Chuck Norris quotes or anecdotes about my notorious insomnia. Such readers will want to subscribe to the How To’s feed.

I’m not going to update General Disarray anymore. I will, however, update How To’s as frequently as I have something interesting to say. Posting will be less frequent, since I’m going to exercise restraint and stick to one broad topic.

A note about Blogging platforms

I am a huge fan of WordPress.com, and I eagerly watch the feed for new developments. However, I have chosen to use Blogger — despite its deficiencies — to host my personal-thoughts weblog. The calculus for this decision is this: WordPress.com (and WordPress in general) is much better at organizing information than Blogger — categories and pages make your blog much more navigable. However, some of the security limitations of WordPress.com (this does not apply to custom WordPress installs) are annoying. For example, I cannot embed Odeo podcasts in WordPress.com posts, and I can’t customize my themes. In the final analysis, I think these limitations are outweighed by WordPress.com’s superior functionality and community (which is why I use it, rather than Blogger, for the material that I want to share with the most people). But the purpose of running a personal blog (for me at least) is to have fun, and as a former web developer, I enjoy messing with my templates.

Oh, the unbridled awesomeness

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 03:27:57 +0000

OpenOffice.org/X11 tips

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 00:38:19 +0000

Marc Liyanage – Software – Mac OS X Packages – Tips and Documents – OpenOffice on Mac OS X:

Along the way, I also had to tweak some font settings and libraries to get our corporate font working and to fix the ugly font rendering in the OpenOffice GUI, so that it is easier on my X11-weary, Aqua-spoiled eyes

This page has some excellent tips for X11, and OpenOffice.org on X11, in particular. For example, you can use the command key for keyboard shortcuts, and you can drastically increase the font rendering in OpenOffice (it looks just like NeoOffice).

Update: Got a screenshot. I wish I had thought to take a before shot, but if you install OpenOffice.org for the Mac, you’ll see the difference.

Postmodern playhouse

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 06:26:30 +0000

Oh, when you get a second, please read this list of secret words on Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

The Office Webisodes

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 22:14:04 +0000

NBC.com > The Office. Having worked in an office, I identify with this show.

1000th

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 20:18:28 +0000

If gas was $.001 more per gallon, I’d be outraged.

FTPing like a chump

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 04:44:37 +0000

I’ve been calling OneButtonFTP (not a bad client, by the way) to FTP files for a website I’ve been working on, forgetting that TextWrangler has built in save to remote server functionality. D’oh.

Writing errors and non-errors

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 21:46:22 +0000

Common errors, common suggestions, and common non-errors. I like the historical perspectives, they remind me of when I lobbied to bring the word “coercedly” into the mainstream. It didn’t happen.

Virtual PC is free!

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:54:54 +0000

Never mind. It’s not the Mac version. Should have looked a bit more closely.

Working with i-Packages locally

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:14:12 +0000

i-Packages are compressed sets of files and instructions used by i-Installer, the open-source package management utility used by many to install, update and remove gwTeX (the standard LaTeX distribution for OS X) and related programs, such as fondu, ghostscript, etc. It’s a good system, since the files that must be downloaded are very large, and a nontrivial amount of configuration is necessary to get things working correctly.

But something always bothered me about i-Installer: it mostly requires an internet connection for it to work. Obviously you need the connection in order to download the software, but for removal too? What if, when WWIII starts and all of the ISPs go dark, I decide I don’t want LaTeX on my system anymore?

I finally figured out how to work around this annoyance (at least for most i-Packages). Normally when you install an i-Package, a few basic files are installed on your computer, and the rest are left on the server, since they’re not all necessary. This is efficient: you spend less time downloading, and the mirrors spend less time serving up data that you don’t really need. But by opening i-Installer, selecting an i-Directory, then opening the desired i-Package, you can choose to download the entire archive, including the configuration and installation instructions.

To do this, select Make Fat from the i-Package menu:

Then the entire i-Package will be downloaded[*]. If you want to modify the package, even with no internet connection, you can double click on the ii2 file (the i-Package itself) which will open i-Installer and allow you to perform any of the actions for which scripts have been written for that package.

The reason why I think this is important is that, because of their Linux roots, most of the LaTeX-related programs for OS X are installed directly in the BSD subsystem (/usr/local, to be exact), so uninstalling them is most definitely not a matter of dragging the application to the trash.

Anyway, with this new-found knowledge, I have become a born-again gwTeX/TeXShop user[**].

[*] i-Packages are stored in ~/Documents/i-Packages.
[**] As an aside, I have also discovered TeXShell, a frontend for gwTeX and teTeX on OS X that works just like CMacTeX — drag files onto the icon and they are processed by LaTeX (or send them to TeXShell from within TextWrangler using an AppleScript). Very convenient.