ExcitingAds! Fischer

Free branch versions of targetcli, rtslib, and configshell for Gentoo Linux

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 21:21:32 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

I spent the better part of today's evening preparing and testing .ebuild files (available in my GitLab repository) for the so-called ‘free branch’ versions of targetcli, rtslib, and configshell called targetcli-fb, rtslib-fb, and configshell-fb. The ‘free branch’ versions are the recommended way of setting up a iSCSI target on Linux, according to the Arch Linux wiki.

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KBibTeX 0.5.2 and 0.6 Released

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 19:46:19 GMT

The following two relases of KBibTeX are now available:

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KBibTeX 0.5.2-beta1 and 0.6-beta1

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 17:43:29 GMT

The following two pre-relases of KBibTeX are now available:

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The State of KBibTeX and Future Releases

Tue, 02 Jun 2015 18:11:42 GMT

After a long time since the last release (13 months ago), I am currently working towards a number of releases for KBibTeX.

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Revisited: Filesystem for large USB storage devices?

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 21:14:20 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

It has been more than a year since my original posting (‘Filesystem for large USB storage devices?’), but the issue still exists. I did some research on this topic and found the following relevant links:

There has been a patch for ext[234] floating around since 2012 that would introduce mount options to enforce UID and GID similar how it already exists for vfat mounts. LWN has an article on this topic: http://lwn.net/Articles/497106/
Here is the discussion LWN is referring to: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.ext4/32276/
I wonder why nothing more happened here. There were some nay-sayers which seem to discourage the original patch author and eventually choked the discussion. Great job, guys :-P

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Pragmatic solution on my previous CalDAV/IMAP posting

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 21:17:13 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

In a posting in November 2013, I argued for a ‘translation service’ from CalDAV to IMAP, i. e. a service that provides a CalDAV interface to the user, but transparently stores the calendar entries in any (read: third-party) IMAP account configured by the user.

Now, soon after my posting I stopped looking for solutions, as other RL matters popped up. However, the need for a synchronized calendar across different devices and family members still exists. Therefore, I restarted my search for a solution.

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Zotero support in KBibTeX

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 20:30:13 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

In KBibTeX's bug list at Gna!, there are currently 39 open bug reports. Most of them are not really ‘bugs’, but rather feature requests. The oldest open bug report is about a request for Zotero support. Trying to fix and close old bug reports, during the last few weeks, I was working on adding basic (read-only) support for Zotero to KBibTeX.

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Storing calendar events in IMAP, providing CalDAV interface

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 21:05:35 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

Recently, I faced the need for a synchronized calendar, i. e. a calendar synchronized between multiple devices (PC, smartphone, tablet) and maybe different persons (sharing a single calendar). Some of the big freemail providers like Google or Live/Outlook.com (Microsoft) offer online or web-based calendars. But those systems have limitations or issues such as residing in the U.S.A. (no protection for non-US citizen) or are tied to a certain application or non-standard protocol. So, there is need for a more generic solution.

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Unity Build using CMake

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 20:41:16 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

A quick pointer to a posting I wrote yesterday on unity builds. It is not only interesting for C/C++ software developers, but also people compiling such projects or distribution package maintainers (esp. Gentoo Linux ;-) ).

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Unity Build in KBibTeX

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 19:40:10 GMT

Inspired by a blog posting on Improving build times of large Qt apps found through Planet KDE, I tried to apply the concept of unity builds to KBibTeX. The idea with a unity build is instead of compiling a set of source code files individually into objects before linking them to merge them into one big source file and only compile this file. This approach promises time and I/O savings for C++, as repetitive reads on included headers can be skipped. Some issues such as name clashes can occur in unity builds, though.

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Filesystem for large USB storage devices?

Thu, 30 May 2013 09:42:51 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

Recently I purchased an external USB harddrive as a replacement for a failing old one. This device came with NTFS preconfigured, but as I plan to use the drive under Linux, I am looking for alternatives.

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Photo Mosaics

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:45:11 GMT

Recently, a colleague of mine moved to a new office and he used the chance to put some posters on his wall. One was a photo mosaic he made back when the first of the new Star Wars movies (the one with Qui-Gon Jinn) came out. Based on a few hundred scaled-down images, those images where chosen and arranged in a grid to for a larger image from the same movie. Large image could be identified from a distance, but if you would step closer, you could clearly see each small image.

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ArchLinux – How I Got There and What I Found

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:55:53 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

I have been using ArchLinux for almost three months now on my work (desktop) laptop. After using Gentoo Linux for more than three years on the previous machine, I thought it would be time to try something new.

In this posting, I would like to share my experiences on Arch compared to other distributions I am/was using.

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Google Web Fonts on your Desktop

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 20:35:51 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

Eager to get as many fonts as possible, but the fonts should be still legal and of high quality? If you are a web developer, you may already know Google's Web Fonts. Google provides you with CSS snipplets that allow you to integrated those fonts into you own webpages. Of course, Google does not own those fonts, but instead uses publicly available fonts which were released under the Apache license or the Open Font License.

You can not only used those fonts for you webpages, but on your own machine as well. All fonts are available for download through a Mercurial repository. If cloning the Mercurial distributed repository is not an option for you (e. g. it is quite large), you can fetch all fonts through the web interface. To simplify this task, I wrote a small Bash script (plus some Perl magic and Curl) to fetch all font files, available at my Gitorious repository. Gentoo Linux users can use the ebuild media-fonts/googlewebfonts.

Enjoy more than 1000 font files of a total size of more than 150 MB!

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Multiline tables in LaTeX made beautiful

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:29:52 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

Many years ago (2007), in one of my first attempts to start a blog, I wrote about settings tables in LaTeX using the booktabs and multirow packages. Apparently, this page is still online and indexed by some search engines, as I got just recently an email with a question about it. As this old posting seem to be still of relevance, I am going to post an updated English translation here.

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Secure WebDAV server in your home directory

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 16:53:55 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

This blog post shows how to setup a personal WebDAV/HTTP server which shares a directory inside your home. It is designed for local networks, but as security (SSL and username/password) is part of the configuration, you could give friends across the Internet access to the server.

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Frutiger-lookalike font CartoGothic in pdfLaTeX, LuaTeX, and xeTeX

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:10:58 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

This posting will show a quick and (comparably) easy way to get support for the font CartoGothic, a Frutiger-lookalike, in pdfLaTeX, xeTeX, and LuaTeX.

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Profiling KBibTeX: Handmade Parser vs. Regular Expressions

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:25:18 GMT

Many years ago I wrote a parser for KBibTeX for KDE3, which would load plain text BibTeX files into an internal data structure in memory. Part of this process is to interpret strings like {\"a} or --- and to protect inline math commands. Internally, this encoder/decoder would have a long table of mappings between LaTeX representations and Unicode representations. Detecting, extracting, and replacing LaTeX representations with Unicode characters was primarily realized using regular expressions.
After ruling out most bugs, it worked well. Indeed, this piece of code has survived into KBibTeX for KDE4 as of today.

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XeTeX and Fonts

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:42:33 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

Recently I started to try out XeTeX. It has two main advantages over the plain, old LaTeX: First, you don't need any \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} as XeTeX assumes UTF-8 as default encoding. As UTF-8 is the default encoding for basically ever Linux distribution, it makes things much simpler. Second, it can make use of TrueType, Type 1, and OpenType fonts without configuring virtual fonts or alike. With LaTeX, you need black magic to include new fonts which is why most people stick with Computer Modern.

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BibTeX editor ported to Windows: KBibTeX

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:27:58 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

I am the developer of KBibTeX, a BibTeX editor for KDE. Yesterday I spent some time porting KBibTeX to Windows and eventually succeeded. I would like to invite you to try it out yourself. There are no easy packages for installation (yet), so those of you who are bold and brave have to compile it from source.

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KBibTeX on Windows

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 10:20:41 GMT

Yesterday, I was working on porting KBibTeX to Windows. Eventually, I succeeded to make it compile and run. Continue to read to learn what changes had to be made and how to get it running on your own Windows machine. Special thanks for helping me go to SaroEngels on #kde-windows.

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Controlling Psi via D-Bus in KDE

Fri, 20 May 2011 18:03:31 GMT

Recently, I stumbled upon a blog posting on how to make Psi logout on suspend in KDE. Although I am not using suspend myself for security reason, using D-Bus to control applications has its charm. In this posting, I will present some more use cases for D-Bus and Psi.

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QTreeView with Radio Button

Sun, 08 May 2011 07:36:15 GMT

Qt's QTreeView widget is a versatile tool to display information such as the content of a filesystem or the DOM tree of an XML file. Using the Model-View-Control (MVC) pattern, you can greatly control what, where, and how information is visualized. You can add icons or checkboxes to items, change color, font, or other aspects of the paint operation. What is missing is support for radio buttons in a QTreeView, but this post will show how to do it yourself.

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How to Make Movies from your Slide Presentations

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 18:24:33 GMT

Think of the situation, where you created a presentation or a lecture consisting of a set of slides. Now, imagine that part of you audience cannot attend, as your presentation is at a remote conference or you are teacher in a distance education course having students all over the world.

There exist commercial solutions, where you can record you presentation slides along with commentary speech, but cannot you achieve the same result using free tools?

The answer is "Yes", as I will explain in this posting.

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Greetings

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 11:20:44 GMT

Nice holidays and a good new year to everyone!

This post was written to show the "christmas cat" icon ... ;-)

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LaTeX and Linux: A Bash scrip to automatically crop PDF files

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:14:43 GMT

This may be interesting for those of you who are into LaTeX and Linux: Auto-cropping PDF files.

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Auto-cropping PDF files

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 21:08:42 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

You may know those PDF files (e.g. scientific publications) which are set in North American paper formats such as Letter or Legal, having a wide margin, and, when scaled to fit on A4 paper, the text has the size of your palm centered on the page.

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Links to 60+ GIMP Tutorials

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 10:24:17 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

Hello,

I found this page of a collection of links to about 60 GIMP tutorials. Worth checking out ...

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LaTeX Beamer tricks

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:14:57 GMT

Posted by: t_fischer

Hello, some of you might be interested in two of my recent postings about LaTeX Beamer.

The first posting is about how to give proper credit to images included in slides, and an alternative to allowframebreaks. The second post shows you how to make links between slides and how to automatically generate extra slides to show small images (or photos) full-screen with a single mouse click.

Constructive feedback is always appreciated ;-)

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More on LaTeX Beamer: Linking images to an enlarged version

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:00:51 GMT

If you have read my previous posting on LaTeX Beamer, you may remember that there were two example slides taken from a lecture of mine. Most slides for this lecture have a similar layout, consisting of a three-column table with fixed column widths. For photos to be shown in the right column, details become beyond recognition if the image or photo has a landscape-like aspect ratio or is scaled down by a large factor.

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Some new LaTeX Beamer Tricks

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:30:15 GMT

The Swedish summer fades into a rainy autumn, which means it is time again to prepare lectures for the coming months. As a long-time LaTeX user, I use the LaTeX Beamer package for all my slides. During the last few months, I have developed some new helper commands and environments for LaTeX slides, which I want to present here.

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