Advogato blog for karlberry

24 Apr 2013

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:05:52 GMT

The latest TUGboat (v.34 n.1, http://tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents34-1.html) contains an item I'm especially proud of: the first fiction we've ever published, a one-page short story by Daniel Quinn, titled Colophon. It's just a fun story (in the members area of the web site, at least for now), but I hope it will encourage people to read Daniel's other (much better known) work, such as Ishmael, Story of B, and Beyond Civilization. His main web site is http://ishmael.org. (TeXxies: it was also the first time it seemed appropriate to use cmfib in running text. :) Thanks to Daniel for giving us permission to reprint it from his collection, At Woomeroo.

6 Oct 2011

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 23:40:01 GMT

Disable Google's super-cookie at http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/ (or with a browser add-on if you don't feel like trusting google :).

Learned about the existence of this from Steven Levy's new book, In the Plex, about Google.

25 Aug 2011

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:26:49 GMT

TUGboat 32:2 has been mailed and is now available online.

22 Aug 2011

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:04:25 GMT

I believe the backlog of package updates from the time of the TeX Live freeze has
been cleared, as of tonight's update. (With the exception of a couple
packages with problems, about which I've written the authors.)

9 Aug 2011

Tue, 9 Aug 2011 17:34:52 GMT

And another TeX/TUG newsletter to go with the releases.

4 Aug 2011

Thu, 4 Aug 2011 01:18:40 GMT

Sent off the next TUGboat to the printer in the morning (112 pages), got the next TeX Collection master DVD (8gb) on the way to the replication house in the afternoon, installed the recent LaTeX2e small update in the middle. Despite the never-ending todo pile, some days there is at least a small sense of completion.

21 Jul 2011

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:36:09 GMT

Just felt like reposting rms's brief note on the dangers of ebooks.

4 Jul 2011

Mon, 4 Jul 2011 15:56:27 GMT

Barring some new critical problem coming to the light, the last TeX Live pretest is posted now. I hope all the TeX Collection DVD components will be put together in the next couple days and it will go to manufacturing this month.

24 Jun 2011

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:37:18 GMT

Sent out the next TeX/TUG newsletter. Boris (Veytsman) has been working hard on more book reviews and publisher discounts, it's been great to have him on board :).

12 Jun 2011

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 18:48:09 GMT

Finally changed mktexlsr (in the TeX Live pretest) to support trees with spaces in the name. Long ago had lazily processed args with simply

trees="$trees $1" # which obviously loses when $1 contains a space

Since we certainly can't use arrays or any other advanced (ba)sh features, and rewriting in Perl would have been much more work, I now just write $1 to a temp file and then read it back with IFS=''. Of course names with newlines will still fail, but no one ever complains about those and doing \0 terminators was also too much trouble. I guess the goal is to be as lazy as possible (but no lazier)?