OSX – Page 4 – neverendingbooks

minute changes

Published December 28, 2006 by lievenlb

These
lazy days between christmas and new-year’s eve are ideal to do finally
those things one would like to postpone indefinitely. Here is a list of
the tiny changes made to this blog : At last, an upgrade from WordPress version
2.0 to 2.0.5. Something I always defer because of the warnings to
back up databases and all changed files and preferences (and as I have
these sporadic periods of changing the PHP-code to my taste, I tend to
forget the changes I’ve made). Still, things went smoothly as far as I
can detect, the only problem I encountered was following the
instructions to the letter, such as

Special Exception:
the wp-content/cache folder should be deleted.

when what
they really mean is that one should only delete the
contents of the cache-directory. So, I had a 5-second
scare starting up the homepage and being greated with an error message
saying something to the effect that WP couldn’t write to this directory.
Apart from security reasons, this upgrade was necessary to install
some WordPress Plugins.
Top of my wish-list being RS-
Discuss.

RS Discuss is a brand new, tiny, lightweight
wordpress forum plugin that is entirely self-contained and integrates
tightly and seamlessly into your existing WordPress website. Despite its
size, it’s got everything that makes a forum a useful tool:
Full
integration with WordPress’ own user system
Multiple forum
setup
RSS feeds for forums, topics and user activity to keep
track
Search capabilities
Sidebar widget integration
Totally customisable, including different setups for different themes
Fully featured mdoerator controls including pinning and locking
topics
Clean uninstall if you don’t like it

So, if
you like to make your own contribution to this site (apart from
commenting), the forums (note to old schoolmates : i know it should
really be fora…) are open to all from the top menu :
forum. At present I’ve only set up a forum dedicated to discussions
on noncommutative algebra/geometry but if you like other discussions,
you will find a way to let me know. Below each post you will now
find a collection of colourful logos. They enable someone who registered
to one of the may social-bookmarking sites to add the post to their
bookmarks. Here, I used the Sociable
plugin. Last year I had a brief period experimenting with CiteULike
(see
this post ) and I intend to explore some of these bookmarking
systems further over the coming months. I’ve moved My Online Publication Page
over to this blog using the bib2html
plugin. It is now avalable from the top menu
: biblio. Every publication has its own BibTeX-popup link as well as
a link to the full PDF-file of the preprint version of the paper or book
(which may differ slightly from the published version). This page will
soon replace the older MOPP-page. I’ve moved the Archives of this
blog to the top menu :
archive using the Smart Archives
Plugin which gives a much better way to read though the past of
NeverEndingBooks. Actually getting this plugin to work did cost me some
time and (security)-worries, but these are solved, I hope. I you cannot
get it to work under WP-2.0.5, contact me and I’ll hopefully still
remember what I did. The default Calendar is replaced by an iCal-subscribable
calendar using the Event Calendar
Plugin. So far, I haven’t added upcoming events yet, but it seemed
like a good thing to have when our masterclass-noncommutative geometry
starts next semester. Note to Self : Event Calendar is incompatible with
the Sociable-plugin, so deactivate it when you want to add a new event.
And then there are some totally useless plugins which I just couldnt
resist to install. Such as the mystatus plugin
which offers an easy way to let you know what keeps me bizzy these days
(you will find it in the left-hand sidebar) or the GeoPress
plugin which enables me to add google-maps to whatever post I like.
For instance, as you may have guessed, I wrote this post from our home
and as google-maps of Antwerp have improved drasticly, you can zoom in
to my environment to any level of detail you feel appropriate…

INSERT_MAP

Added : this map seems to work with
Firefox, Flock and Camino under MacOSX but not with Safari. If you
happen to know why, please let me know.

make your own mopp

Published March 23, 2006 by lievenlb

If you
want to make your own ‘My Online Publications Page’ (MOPP) similar
to mine here’s what you have to do :

in case you are running
Linux, all you need is the mopp package and
follow the instruction on this page.
if you are onto Mac OSX you have to get and compile a few more
packages. To start, go to the BibTeX bibliography tools page and
download the bibclean file. Go to
the directory, do a ./configure and a
make and copy the resulting executable bibclean to the
bibtools/bin folder of your mopp-folder (see first
step).
get the latest gawk package. Do a
./configure, then a make and a
sudo make install and gawk gets installed at
/usr/local/bin/gawk. Make a symbolic link (or use a
bruteforce copy) to /usr/bin/gawk.
Make a
symbolic link or a bruteforce sudo cp /bin/ksh
/usr/bin/ksh.
If you are using only scanned
pdf-files it is sufficient to get DjVu-versions of them using the Any2DjVu service. If you want
to do the conversion from Pdflatex-files yourself, get the DjVuLibre package, configure,
make and install it as before. All programs get installed under
/usr/local/bin, write down the files in the
djvu/bin folder of the mopp-folder, remove them and
copy your compiled version of them from /usr/local/bin to the djvu/bin
directory.
Open the work/mopp.sh script of
the mopp-folder in an editor, comment out the recode
line and change the awk line into
awk -v
THENAME=”$MOPP_NAME” -v
THELOGO=”$MOPP_LOGO” -f bib2html.awk \
(that is
add a space after the two -v options).
You should now be
able to follow the remaining instruction from the How to make “My
Online Publications Page” page to get a mopp-page which looks
roughly like this one.
If you want to change the layout of that page, you should
modify the work/bibtex2html.awk file to fit your taste.
If you want to have a layout similar to mine email me and I’ll send you my bibtex2html.awk file.
One Comment

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…

Tag: OSX

minute changes

make your own mopp

MyLife@300dpi