robfelty.com

Em dash in LaTeX

robfelty — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 04:53:43 +0000

My friend Daniel Reeves was recently discussing different ways to typeset em dashes. Here is the way I like to do it in LaTeX.

\documentclass{minimal}
%this sets up a new command \dash, which makes nice dashes
\DeclareRobustCommand\dash{%
\unskip\nobreak\thinspace\textemdash\thinspace\ignorespaces}
\begin{document}
Let's test out several different variants on making an em dash using the
\LaTeX typesetting system --- this one uses \verb|---| with spaces around it

Let's test out several different variants on making an em dash using the
\LaTeX typesetting system---this one uses \verb|---| with no spaces around it

Let's test out several different variants on making an em dash using the
\LaTeX typesetting system \dash this one uses my \verb|\dash| command
\begin{verbatim}
\DeclareRobustCommand\dash{%
\unskip\nobreak\thinspace\textemdash\thinspace\ignorespaces}
\end{verbatim}

\end{document}

Here is the resulting output:

Different ways to make em dashes in LaTeX

Notice how using spaces around the --- can result in a dash at the end of a line, which is not desirable. And using no spaces around the --- doesn’t look nice, and can also result in problems when copying and pasting. The \dash command solves both of these issues. I did not come up with it myself, but I cannot remember where I found it.

Vetting vignetting

robfelty — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:18:16 +0000

We recently got some family portraits taken at JCPenney. I think they turned out very nicely. They had a bunch of different effects that they could apply. While we were at the studio, I really liked the way that the vignetting effect brought out our faces. However, after investigating the full set (we bought the digital images), I decided I didn’t like the vignetting, because it was actually making my face a bit dark in one shot. Then I decided to play around with vignetting a bit more. I was disappointed to see that Picasa does not support vignetting. Fortunately I found a handy gimp script to do the job. At first I tried using it with a rectangular selection. Then I tried an oval one which I like best. Here are the various pictures:

UNIX/Linux permissions and groups – getent

robfelty — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:16:50 +0000

I keep forgetting this command, so I writing it here so I know where to find it. Getent will list information about users and groups on a UNIX/Linux system, including NIS and LDAP users, which is crucial networks with multiple nodes. For example to list information about a user named robert_felty, you can do:

$ getent passwd robert_felty
robert_felty:$1$iPJ.svD/$ce77I/wxh129FLt2Z7UOm.:5440:112:Robert Felty:/home/robert_felty:/bin/bash

Cherry rhubarb pie

robfelty — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:17:07 +0000

Slice of cherry rhubarb pie

We joined a CSA this year, taking over Greg and Mekayla’s fruit share. This week we got 3 lbs of pie cherries and a huge bundle of rhubarb. That sounded like pie to me.

Cherry rhubarb pie

I have never made cherry rhubarb pie before, only strawberry rhubarb, but I found some recipes, and decided to give it a go, using mostly this recipe, with my mom’s crust recipe. I haven’t made pie in about 10 years, and I know that making the crust is tricky. I knew it wasn’t going well while I rolled it out. I kept adding more and more water. The fourth ball I rolled was finally about right. I need to get back in practice. In spite of the pie not being super well constructed, it still tasted very good.

Cherry rhubarb pies

Image stabilization in Canon EFS 17-85mm lens

robfelty — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 03:58:36 +0000

Canon EFS 17-85mm with image stabilization off

Canon EFS 17-85mm with image stabilization on

I recently bought a new lens for my Canon Rebel XT. I debated for about 6 months between a new body, and one of three lenses, the 17-85mm f4/5.6 EFS, the 28-135 f 3.5/5.6 EF, and the 17-55 f2.8 USM. I ultimately decided that I’d rather have a new lens than a new body. My body is 5 years old now, but the only major thing I feel like I am missing is video. I also learned that some of my accessories for my current body would not work with a new Rebel, in particular the battery grip, which is probably my most expensive accessory, at about $150.

I have several lenses – the kit lens for my Rebel, which is an 18-55mm EFS, a 50mm f 1.8 single focal length, and a 28mm f1.8 single focal length. I really like the 28mm, but my wife frequently wants some zoom capability. My 28mm lens has USM focusing though, which is very nice, and I like being able to get good indoor shots without flash. Speaking of focusing, I had noticed recently that my 18-55mm seemed to be having trouble auto-focusing, which is what led to me consider a new lens. I decided that I definitely wanted a USM lens. I had almost decided on the 28-135 lens, which was the cheapest, but ultimately decided that I wanted to be able to go a bit wider than 28mm for my all purpose lens.

So far I am very happy, especially with the image stabilization. It is far better than I had expected. Normally I don’t take pictures slower than 1/30 of a second, but I was able to capture a pretty decent shot at 1/4 of a second. I took two versions of the picture, one with and one without image stabilization. There is a dramatic difference.

Random featured images in wordpress

robfelty — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 22:29:21 +0000

I’ve had random header images on the Fedibblety Family blog for quite some time. I originally implemented this by looking for images in a particular directory. However, I had to manually add pictures to this directory, which was a bit cumbersome. I started thinking, why not just select randomly from all the featured images I have for my posts? So I hacked up a quick function to do that. Here it is:

Postie 1.4.2 released

robfelty — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:52:39 +0000

Yesterday I released Postie version 1.4.2, the WordPress plugin which gives you advanced features to post to your blog via e-mail. I haven’t done much work on Postie in the last several months, so I finally just decided to call the development version stable, since lots of people have been using it.

Improvements over 1.4.1 include:

Fixed mailto link bug (thanks to Jason McNeil)
Fixed bug with attachments with non-ascii characters in filename (thanks to
mtakada)
checking for socket errors when checking mail (thanks elysian)
fixed issue with multiple files not being inserted correctly
Added support for ISO 8859-15 (thanks paolog)
fixed sql injection problem (thanks Jose P. Espinal for pointing it out)
Fixed namespace clashing for get_config function

Please report any bugs in the postie forum

Site redesign

robfelty — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 16:50:39 +0000

robfelty.com 2.0

I started my website in 2003. At the time it was hosted by the University of Michigan, where I was a graduate student. They gave all students some space for a personal website. It was really great, though it did come with some limitations, like no php or cgi allowed. I managed to kludge some server side includes and javascript together to get a fairly decent food website. I also had some other stuff on my site like some academic info. In 2006 I started a blog, and started learning wordpress. Since then, most of the new content on my site has been in my blog, and the rest of the site has kind of just been sitting there. I finally decided to try to integrate it all, for several reasons:

Consistent style for all pages
Get everything in a database (for better searching among other things)
Learn some new technology

For that last reason, I had started to look at learning more about drupal, since I have seen a number of jobs looking for drupal developers recently. I spent a week or so looking at that in June, and got a little bit excited about a recipe module I found. However, I decided that I wasn’t crazy about drupal. I think WordPress is miles ahead of drupal in many ways. I was very surprised to find out that uploading pictures is not part of the core of drupal, but rather in a module (and not a very good one at that). Of course, up until WordPress 3.0, WP was mostly just a blogging platform. No longer! With version 3.0, WordPress can easily be used as a full-fledged content management system. So I decided to integrate the disparate portions of my website all into WordPress. During the conversion process I got to learn more about the new features in WordPress 3.0, especially custom post types.

robfelty.com 1.0 - food

The biggest challenge of the conversion was converting my recipes. Most of the old pages on my site simply became a WordPress page, but the recipes clearly needed special treatment. I thought I might use a custom post type for recipes, but after a little searching around, I quickly stumbled upon RecipePress, which basically does everything I was looking for (and does in fact use custom post types). RecipePress will work out of the box with any theme, but, upon my request, it also will let you use your own custom theme, which is the route I chose. One small dilemma I faced was that I had multiple pictures in some of my recipes, but I could not insert them into the post content, since RecipePress uses that for the recipe directions. Instead, what I ended up doing was using one image as a featured image, and then I wrote some custom code to display any additional images below the ingredients and contents, like so:

/* additional images here */
$pics =
get_children('post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&post_parent=' .
$post->ID );
if (count($pics)>1): ?>

Additional pictures

foreach ($pics as $image): ?>
if ($image->ID!=$thumbnail_id): ?>

echo wp_get_attachment_image($image->ID, 'medium')?>: echo $image->post_excerpt?>

endif ?>
endforeach ?>

endif ?>

As I started to figure out how I wanted the navigation for the site to work, I also realized that I wanted to update some of the WordPress navigation plugins I have written – Collapsing Categories, Collapsing Archives, and Collapsing Pages. I added support for custom post types for the first two, and added an option for the pages plugin to only list subpages of the current page (this is how the navigation works for the academic, web design, and wordpress plugins portions of the new site). These features are all in the development versions of the respective plugins right now, but I should put out a new stable release soon.

While I was working on importing content from the old site, I also decided to make a new theme as well. I decided to try out the new child theme functionality in WordPress 3.0. It turned out to be quite easy. The only slightly confusing thing for me was how to disable some of the functionality of the parent theme. There are hints on how to to this in the TwentyTen functions.php file, but it took me awhile to actually figure it out. For example, I did not like how TwentyTen handles excerpts, so I wanted to remove the filters for the the except which TwentyTen adds. The way that WordPress handles child themes is that it first looks for the functions.php file in the child theme, and processes it all. Then it looks at the parent theme’s functions.php file and processes that. This means that if you try to simply remove a filter from the parent theme in your child theme, it won’t work, since the child theme is processed first. Instead, you have to do all of this in a function which is called in the after_setup_theme hook. Here is what I used in child theme functions.php file:

function robfelty_child_theme_setup() {
// We are providing our own filter for excerpt_length (or using the unfiltered value)
remove_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'twentyten_excerpt_length' );
remove_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'twentyten_auto_excerpt_more' );
remove_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'twentyten_custom_excerpt_more' );
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'robfelty_child_theme_setup' );

I also added in some CSS3 features, including rounded corners with border-radius, and gradients as well. As always, it is still a work in progress. Feedback is welcome.

New WordPress plugin – Image Browser

robfelty — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:55:03 +0000

Screenshot of image browser plugin in action

Today I released my 8th wordpress plugin. This one is quite a bit different from all the other plugins I have written. A friend of mine was looking for a way to create a gallery on his family blog. “No problem!”, I told him, “there are lots of plugins for that”. But I then quickly realized that no plugins were available for what he was looking for. All of the other image gallery plugins for wordpress function by creating galleries manually, say a gallery of wedding photos, or a gallery of a trip to the zoo. My friend was looking for an easy way to browse all pictures he has ever posted on his blog. That is what the Image Browser plugin does. It allows you to browse through all of your pictures on your blog, and also allows you to restrict by year, month, category, and by caption text. It is easy to install and use. Simply install it, then create a new page, and insert the [imagebrowser] shortcode. That’s it. Options can be set either in the settings page, or by using shortcode parameters. If you would like a demo, please take a spin at my family blog gallery, or the image browser page on this site.

New wordpress plugin – Image Meta

robfelty — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:59:46 +0000

Image meta options

I just released my 7th wordpress plugin, Image Meta. This one has to do with image handling. Before wordpress 3.0, when you uploaded an image, the filename of the image was set as the title, and if you had given the image a caption (e.g. with Picasa), then the IPTC caption would be used as the caption for the image. In wordpress 3.0, the default is now to use the caption for the title of the image. I don’t like this, mostly because I had set up my theme’s image handling based on the old way. So I decided to write a little plugin which hooks into the image uploading process, and sets all four image fields at once – the title, alt text, caption, and description. The plugin allows you to select between setting each field to either the filename, the IPTC caption, or leaving it blank. I hope some others find it useful.