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Tag: mac

MyLife@300dpi

Published March 20, 2006 by lievenlb

Three years ago I did spend three weeks next to my Canonscan, painstakingly scanning all individual pages of every preprint I ever wrote. Next, I converted every page to PDF, resized it (in order to control the size) and bundled them into PDF-files. A typical preprint would take me roughly three quarters of an hour and the final result was mediocre. For example, here a blown-up sample from the original 1992 ‘Moduli
spaces of right ideals of the Weyl algebra’ -preprint, resulting in a 1.7Mb PDF-file

Recentlty, the department bought a Ricoh-copier which makes scanning a lot more fun. To scan a preprint at 300dpi and convert it into a single PDF-file takes under a minute (actually, downloading the file using a web-interface takes longer…). For this particular preprint, the resulting PDF-file took up 1.2Mb and looks a lot nicer

Still, 1.2Mb is a huge file but converting it to a DjVu-file (DjVu=deja vu) using the handy Any2DjVu Service gives us a mere 236Kb file which comes a lot closer to the filesize of a PDFLaTeX-file and the output is still very legible

So, I decided to rescan my entire life at 300dpi and convert it into DjVu. Next, I got the MOPP-package (MOPP = My Online Publications Page) working using the instructions from this page and some obvious MacOSX-modifications (if I can do it, so can you but perhaps I’ll write up the details in another post, just to remind myself). You can see the result at my homepage. I’ll update the latter one regularly (there are still some preprints missing, as are all my courses etc. and cross-references) and only afterwards I’ll update my homepage again. So far there is 250Mb to download (including all versions of the noncommutative geometry@n book, including the published ones…) so this should keep you busy for a while…

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Inform

Published February 10, 2006 by lievenlb

Once
upon a time, not so long before the video-games era, people needed the
command-line and knowledge of esoteric commands like _examine_,
_look_, _take_, _drop_, _go south_ etc. to
get into the mysterious worlds of dungeons &
dragons. If you have nostalgia to the heroic times of text-based
adventure games (nowadays called IF for _interactive fiction_),
there is a short message : get Inform(ed)! Here’s a
slightly longer message for those who have a mac running OSX and want to
know the quickest way to get to a screen like and start
playing Christminster (or another of 300 IF-games) (if you’re on a
different system, things will be just as simple but you’ll have to find
it out yourself starting from the Inform-Z
machine page). step 1 : Get a
copy of an inform installation and expand it to get an
Inform-folder and place this in your Home-folder. step 2
: Go in the Finder to Inform/Games/MyGame1 and double click on
the _MyGame1.command_ file. A Terminal window will open and exit
and you will see that a new file appeared in the Folder :
_MyGame1.z5_. Double click it and a warning message will appear
that this is the first time you will open _Zoom_, tell it’s ok
and Zoom will launch and you can play your first (though primitive)
Inform game! step 3 : If you want to play other
games (such as Christminster), go to the Z-
code archive and pick one of the 346 games. For example, click on
the minster.z5 link and the file will download to your
Desktop. Place it in the Inform/Games folder (not necessary) double
click it and you should see the above wellcoming message. That’s it,
start playing. step 4 : If you don’t know how to
play such games, there are excellent tutorials
available on the Inform site.

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added to MyBrain : arXiv

Published January 31, 2006 by lievenlb

Clearly, someone who
subscribed to your brain shouldn’t have to check the arXiv every morning only to find out
that you still haven’t posted _the_ paper s(h)e is expecting of
you, based on your recent BrainActivity…

So why not
package this into your Brain subscription? It is easy enough to get all
posts by a specific author from the archive but, unfortunately, the
arXiv doesn’t provide RSS-feeds of this information (at least, not to my
knowledge). Still, it is possible to fix this with a tiny
Perl-script.

So copy the code and adjust it replacing MyInfo
by Yours (or sligthly safer, get the arxivpost.pl
 file as I had to add a few spaces to get it un-parsed) and safe it
somewhere on your system.

So how to put this to use? Btw. I know
that all of you know this by heart and that I may have given you the
(false, i swear) illusion to be fairly knowledgeable writing a
Perl-script in half an hour, but believe me, in two months (and sooner
when it’s up to me) I will have completely eradicated all this
techie-stuff from MyBrain. Then, it will take me infinitely longer to
remember/reconstruct things than it will take me now to blog this here,
so please either bear with me or go somewhere more interesting.

You’d better have Perl installed on your system, but then you have to
install extra modules from CPAN the
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (this is to Perl what CTAN is to TeX for the mathematicians
among us). That’s pretty easy if you remember the correct commands. The
generic way to do this is by firing up your Terminal and typing things
like

 iBookLieven:~ lieven$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
Password:  cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation
(v1.83) ReadLine support enabled  cpan> install Template::Extract

and similarly for the other modules you’ll need,
LWP::Simple and XML::RSS. You may be asked questions but just go for the
default. If something goes wrong and you get a message that the module
failed to install, you have to go for a manual override…

Go to CPAN and do a search on the module’s name. You’ll
be given a list op files to download, go for the one you need and
download the souce somewhere. Then, again in Terminal do the following
routine

  • cd to the downloaded and extracted directory
  • perl Makefile.PL
  • make
  • make test
  • sudo make install

Even if the test fails with
certain errors, just go ahead (it will not matter for the trivial uses
we have for these modules) and the last command is Mac OSX only (I’m
pretty certain that Linux-fanatics know what to do instead and for
Windows-diehards, well….).

Having all modules installed
you can execute the file with

perl arxivpost.pl

(assuming you created the Directory in which the program
is supposed to safe the arxivXXX.rdf file and assuming you made it
writable). That’s it. You now have your own RSS feeds of all your papers
on the arXiv which you should make for of YourBrain subscription).

Just one more thing you should do. Make this a cron
job. Check at what local time the arXiv puts online the new papers
of the day (assume it is 3am) then do a sudo crontab -e
and then add a line to the file as

5 3 * * Mon-Fri perl
/pathtowhereitis/arxivpost.pl

and your subscribers will
only have to wait 5 minutes to know whether you did it…(or not).
You can check it out either by subscribing to MyBrain or subscribing to
http://www.
neverendingbooks.org/FOAF/arxivLLB.rdf.

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