Older blog entries for karlberry (starting at number 36)

TUGboat: edited a short paper by Anita Schwartz on problem solving in LaTeX, and a MetaPost paper by Denis Roegel on kissing circles (the Apollonian gasket, pretty fun).

TeX Live: installed small fix to dvips to avoid embedding of arbitrary files (from Yukata Oiwa), and to afm2tfm to ignore WY elements for vertical spacing (from Werner Lemberg).

Enjoying Nick Hornby's new book A Long Way Down, and Andrew Vachss's Two Trains Running. Also enjoyed watching The Motorcycle Diaries (about an early trip by Che). Guess it was a good weekend for culture.

TUGboat: edited a paper by Tristan Miller on using RPM with TeX, but can't finish because we'll have to splice with a previous article to get the figures to come out right. Sigh.

TeX Live: reinstalled the ibygrk, aka ibycus4, Greek Type 1 fonts, as all the files ended up in the doc directory before.

More work on Nelson's paper. Catching up on mail backlog.

Learned that my mail server was blacklisted by spamcop, so am being rejected by lots of people. Our server has never been correctly blacklisted yet, and it takes soooo much time to get it fixed, if it's even possible at all. Sigh, sigh.

Spent the day editing Nelson Beebe's latest opus for TUGboat, a historical retrospective on TeX and Metafont's software design and environment. Lots of info on the PDP-10, SAIL, and other bits of the past.

Have 80 or so messages left to answer after my week away, but it seemed this rather massive project should take precedence.

TeX Live: nothing (but answering mail), for the first time in ages. Didn't complete anything else, either. Had a nice walk down to the ocean, though, and now it's time to take to Michigan for a week of family reunions.

TeX Live: faq, betababel (ancient Greek input using the Beta Code), xkeyval, fontspec (easy access to XeTeX font features). Played with dvips error wording.

TUGboat: edited short paper on stacks in TeX and commutative diagrams.

Conferences: much discussion with Hong about TUG 2005 and Azzeddine about TUG 2006.

GNU Coding Standards: got ready to commit text about quote characters (good old ASCII ` and ', despite everything), but need to mention the quote and quotearg modules in the Gnulib documentation first.

TeX Live: pdfcolmk (color marks/stacks). Played with our xputenv function; some libc's make a copy of what gets passed to putenv, others use the string as is. For some reason, the latest pdftex triggers a failure on MacOSX. Tried to put in some preventive tests with help from Hartmut Henkel, but can't test it, not having a Mac development environment. Rebuilt images anyway. No one else is building binaries yet :(.

TUGboat: edited a nice paper on getting started with beamer, a LaTeX package for making presentations.

GNU Hello: added --greeting option to override the output message, for the sake of having an example of an option with an argument, and preparing for having sample config file support.

Read Mammoth, John Varley's latest novel. Liked it a lot more than his other recent ones, too. Yay. Also enjoyed the collection of his published recently, the John Varley Reader, which had some lengthy intros by him to each story, close to an autobiography. He has written some great, great stories.

TeX Live: esint (every sort of integral sign), TeX FAQ, glossary. Also increased ssup_trie_size in tex.ch and related change files and rebuilt the binary, so we can have a large-enough trie_size in texmf.cnf (300,000, it turns out) to load all the existing freely available hyphenation patterns for LaTeX.

Finished One Shot, Lee Child's latest book. I enjoyed the book very much, more than his last few, basically a well-done mystery story, until the last couple chapters, anyway.

TeX Live: algorithms (typesetting) package update, but more importantly, finally got the TeX Live test image rebuilt, including new i386-linux binaries. So many backward-incompatibilities and other details to wade through to get to this point, but I'm hoping it won't be as all-consuming for a while.

Spent yesterday in Eugene, including a visit to the rock store We like rocks. Rocks in the garden, rocks in the path ... rocks in the head, too.

TeX Live updates: vntex (Vietnamese support), subfig (multiple figures), sf298 (ANSI standards), pictex, collection of one-file macros/generic packages. Main thing is fixed up the tpm support to once again find all the files in the tree. alpha-linux build fails with true/TRUE/boolean madness, sigh. Still, getting closer to a test release.

TUGboat: did David Ignat's paper on word-to-latex conversion for a massive nuclear fusion paper he edited, and Peter Flom's nice article on inducements and barriers to getting started with LaTeX.

Been listening to Lord of the Flies, read by William Golding near the end of his life. He has a little commentary at the end of each chapter, which is fun. Got onto the book after (re)listening to Hearts in Atlantis, where the book plays a big part.