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Tag: mac

TheLibrary (demo)

Published December 23, 2004 by lievenlb

It is far from finished but you can already visit a demo-version of
TheLibrary which I hope will one day be a useful collection of
online courses and books on non-commutative algebra & geometry. At
the moment it just contains a few of my own things but I do hope that
others will find the format interesting enough to allow me to include
their courses and/or books. So, please try this demo out! But before you
do, make sure that you have a good webbrowser-plugin to view
PDF-documents from within your browser (rather than having to download
the files). If you are using Macintosh 10.3 or better there is a very
nice plugin freely
available whch you only have to drag into your _/Library/Internet
Plug-Ins/_-folder to get it working (after restarting Safari).
If you click on the title you will get a page with hyper-links to all
bookmarks of the pdf-file (for example, if you have used the hyperref package to
(La)TeX your file, you get these bookmarks for free). If you only have a
PDF-file you can always include the required bookmarks using Acrobat.
No doubt the most useful feature (at this moment) of the set-up is
that all files are fully searchable for keywords.
For example, if
you are at the page of my 3 talks on noncommutative
geometry@n-course and fill out “Azumaya” in the Search
Document-field you will get a screen like the one below

That is, you wlll get all occurrences of 'Azumaya' in
the document together with some of the context as well as page- or
section-links nearby that you can click to get to the paragraph you are
looking for. In the weeks to come I hope to extend the usability of
_TheLibrary_ by offering a one-page view, modular security
enhancements, a commenting feature as well as a popularity count. But,
as always, this may take longer than I want…
If you think
that the present set-up might already be of interest to readers of your
courses or books and if you have a good PDF-file of it available
(including bookmarks) then email and we will try to include your
material!

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changes

Published December 13, 2004 by lievenlb

Tomorrow
I’ll give my last class of the semester (year?) so it is about time to
think about things to do (such as preparing the courses for the
“master program on noncommutative geometry”) and changes to make to
this weblog (now that it passed the 25000 mark it is time for something
different). In the sidebar I’ve added a little poll to let you guess
what changes 2005 will bring to this blog (if I find the time over
Christmas to implement it). In short, @matrix will
become the portal of a little company I’ll start up (seems
_the_ thing to do now). Here are some possible names/goals. Which
one will it be? Vote and find out after Christmas.

WebMathNess is a Web-service company helping lazy
mathematicians to set up their website and make it LaTeXRender savvy
(free restyling every 6 months).

iHomeEntertaining is a
Tech-company helping Mac-families to get most out of their valuable
computers focussing on Audio-Photo-Video streaming along their Airport-network.

SnortGipfGames is a Game-company focussing on the
mathematical side of the Gipf project
games by distributing Snort-versions of them.

NeverendingBooks is a Publishing-company specializing
in neverending mathematical course- and book-projects offering their
hopeless authors print on demand and eprint services.

QuiverMerch is a Merchandising-company specializing in
quivers. For example, T-shirts with the tame quiver classification,
Calogero-Moser coffee mugs, Lego-boxes to construct local quivers
etc.

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home jukebox

Published December 4, 2004 by lievenlb


I am trying to put all our music onto one old iMac to make a
HomeJukeBox but ran into an annoying problem. I discovered a pile of 70
Audio-CDs which PD1 ripped away
from home (and more importantly,
away
from internet-access) so if you feed them to iTunes they
only display Track01, Track02 etc. that is, _no_ songtitles,
_no_ artist name, _no_ album information etc. making them
pretty useless for my purposes. Fortunately PD1 wrote on each CD the
Artist and Album names giving me at least a fighting chance to get all
information. Here is how I managed to do this without too much typing
(probably there are other and better methods around but as I am still
waiting for my copy of iPod and
iTunes Hacks to arrive and as I am not the world most adventurous
person I prefer to stick with the first method I tried that
worked).\\r\\nI had a look at the huge collection of Doug's
AppleScripts for iTunes and found on his 'internet-section'
the script CDDB Safari Kit v2.2.1 which he describes as
\\r\\n

These two AppleScripts, “CDDB
Safari” and “CDDB Tracks to iTunes via Safari”, assist
in finding and retrieving Album track names, Album, Artist, and Year
from Gracenote's CDDB website using Apple's Safari browser.

\\r\\nAs this is pretty much what I want, I downloaded
these 2 AppleScripts and put them into my
~Library/iTunes/Scripts folder (you probably will have
to create the Scripts folder) making them available from the Script-menu
in iTunes. \\r\\nNow, insert a CD and double-click on its icon in iTunes
so that its Track 01 Track 02 etc. appear in a separate window. Single
click on a Track to get it marked and then open the CDDB
Safari script from the iTunes-script-menu. A pop-up menu
appears asking you what info you like to find. Click on Album or Artist
to mark them and then click on the highlighted Search
CDDB button and Safari will take you to the Gracenote: Search CDDB site.
Fill in either Artist name or Album name and hit Search. If you are
lucky a list of all song-titles will appear or (in case their are
several options) a list of all relevant Artist/Album combinations from
which you have to click the relevant one and you will get the
songtitle-list. Go back to iTunes and open the CDDB Tracks to
iTunes via Safari script again from the iTunes-script-menu. You
will be guided through the process : it will collect the song-titles and
ask you to use them or not and afterwards it will also ask you to add
Artist-Album-Year info as well, single click on all info you want to
include and press Yes and thank the Script for all its work. Close the
iTunes window and drag the CD icon (which now has the appropriate name)
to the desired playlist and all lost information is regained! There are
a few caveats : check whether the number of songtitles on the
Gracenote-page matches that on your CD and pray that PD1 has not made
her personal sublist of tracks… further some extremely alternative
CDs are not in the database (out of the 50 I tried so far only one
failed) and finally there seems to be a problem with French accents.

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