Recent blog entries for karlberry

TeX Live 2008 was released. Usual spate of post-release bug reports, but surprisingly enough, it seems the basic functionality of dynamic updates is working for most people. Yay.

Halfway through the next TUGboat (TUG'08 proceedings), mostly awaiting papers as usual.

Received a renewed TeX development grant from an anonymous donor; matching donatations needed!

TeX Live 2008 is theoretically frozen. Unless major problems crop up with this build, this is what will be burned onto 6000 DVD's for TeX user group members. Fingers crossed.

Next TUGboat has started, awaiting papers from the authors at TUG 2008. Heck, the deadline was only yesterday ...

While waiting for svn cleanup to run ...

TeX Live 2008 testing requested.

TUGboat 29:2 off to printer.

TUG 2008 papers posted.

First pass through GNU package list done. Many old packages decommissioned.

Saw Leonard Cohen and Glenn Gould in Toronto last weekend. Wow.

svn cleanup done now, back to it ...

Released GNU texinfo 4.12 after too long.

Put the new release into TeX Live, too. On the compiled-sources front, only dvipdfmx is really left to update. LuaTeX is in, with lots of fun Web2C work by me and Taco. Should be pretty easy to drop in from now on, though.

Next regular TUGboat issue is getting closer, with articles on DTX files, Zapf's Euler font update, Asymptote, and lots more. Hopefully it'll go to the printer in May.

Gotten some submissions for TUG'08 in Cork, Ireland, but lots more are welcome.

Did Google Summer of Code org admin for both GNU (third time) and TUG (first time) this year. The proposals might be a bit more solid than in the past. At least the process is pretty familiar by now.

A new Texinfo pretest is available at http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-4.11.90.tar.gz. Please try it if you can. Standalone Info has some smallish UI changes to try to make it friendlier, and install-info has many new features to try to be compatible with Debian install-info.

Peter Breitenlohner has installed lots of changes in the TeX Live autoconf infrastructure, so we can finally switch to the standard release and not be stuck with the autoconf 2.13 that I hacked so many years ago for our include needs. Yay. Zillions of other updates continue on our way toward starting the release cycle next month sometime.

Some favorite books for 2007, since I wrote this up already to send to a friend:

Landscapes, Mary Randlett -- collection of her amazing nature photographs. (I'd never heard of her before accidentally running into a show of hers at a museum.)

Obligatory latest Stephen King -- Lisey's Story; a departure for him, but still him.

Crashing Through, Robert Kurson -- nonfiction, an extraordinary man blinded at an early age who has his sight restored.

The Best Day The Worst Day, Donald Hall -- an elder poet and his experience losing his younger wife (Jane Kenyon, also a poet) to cancer.

Run, Ann Patchett -- much as I liked all her previous books, I thought this was a quantum leap in readability and drive. (I also got to see her give a short reading in person, very cool.)

Bonus older entry: Neither Wolf Nor Dog, Kent Nerburn -- a book about (American) Indians (by a white), unlike any other I've read.

By the way, if anyone happens to have a lead on a C/GNU/Linux/Unix (or TeX :) job in the Portland, Oregon area, please email me at karl@freefriends.org. My friend Oleg Katsitadze (Eplain maintainer, Texinfo contributor, ...) is immigrating here from Ukraine in just a couple weeks and so is looking for work. Thanks.

Thanks to Norbert doing many TeX Live package updates and other filtering, now around 300 msgs left.

EuroBachoTeX proceedings (210+ pages) getting close to going to some printer, somewhere.

Installed CentOS 5 on my machines; all went fine, except I chose (more or less randomly) to install the xen/virtualization kernel, and eventually discovered that xen takes over ttyS0. How bizarre. Have to boot with xencons=ttyS4 (for example) to get my serial ports back.

Laurie Anderson's acceptance speech for the Gish prize.

Got TeX Live below 400 todo msgs (namely 396), figured I better post quick.

TUG 2007 proceedings coming along nicely. More photos, FWIW.

Window washing tomorrow. Physical windows, that is :).

Made some audio cd's for my family. Discovered sox can convert from other formats to wav, and can also make a mono file into stereo with -c 2 (part of "CD-quality" is stereo); shntool could split a big file into pieces of any length (contrary to some reports, I did not experience any "popping" between tracks); and xcdroast to burn the cd's (I used "track-at-once" (TAO) mode to get some space between the tracks -- again, no popping or other discernible problems). However, I gather dvd-burning is not included in xcdroast without payment, so I'll be looking for an alternative soon; I know there are lots out there.

I also tried normalize to make the volume dynamics of all tracks the same, but the result just didn't sound right. I had some very loud and some very soft tracks, and I think the range was just too great to be normalized. Neat idea, though.

Texinfo and GNUzilla (completely free firefox) have pretests that need, well, testing. Give it a try if you can.

The TeX conference in San Diego went fine. The presentations are online, thanks to Kaveh Bazargan. Some photos have also been contributed, thanks to Jennifer Claudio.

TeX Live is at 404 and getting worse. Sigh.