olpa, OSS developer

Not a first time when I need to trace a LaTeX layout by digging into the details, and again I’ve spend time remembering how to do it. Fixing the magic in writing.

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I’m talking about XSieve at XTech 2006. Very nice.And I’m a bit embarrassed to be in the star company. But there is no time to fuss about, there is time to start preparing the paper.

Adobe Illustrators seems to be a very good tool, even although I’ve never used it. Unfortunately, I have problems with AI results exported as SVG and EPS.

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Recently I got an XTech 2006 speaker notification. It said that acceptance or rejection notifications would be sent this week, and some more papers would be selected at the week of 27 February and later.

I believe that my XSieve proposal isn’t in the category “undoubtedly should be rejected”, but I don’t expect it’s in the category “definitely should be accepted”. I think it’s somewhere in the middle.

I surmise that XTech reviewers might read my blog, so I’d like to incentive you: vote for XSieve acceptance! XSieve isn’t a revolution in XML world, but it’s anyway an important milestone and worth to be popularized.

The utility psnup puts multiple logical PostScript pages onto each physical sheet of paper. Unfortunately, I’ve found that I don’t like result. I’ve got a better result after playing with pstops:

cat ~/print.ps | \\
pstops '2:0L@.6(19.5cm,1cm)+1L@.6(19.5cm,14cm)' -pa4 >out.ps

I wanted to play video on my Siemens M75. After some research, I found that the format is 3gp. Video files can be converted to this format using the Linux utility “ffmpeg“.

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There is rumour that sometimes people start to speak in a foreign language, even if they have never learnt or heard it. That could be assigned to the overworld mind. But I think the things are simplier.

Today I visited a German hospital. Unexpectedly, I alone had to entertain a 7-month German baby. So I recited Russian poetry for 2 hours. A seed for new wonder has been sowed.

I’d like to enhance an Adobe tool, so some retrospective is useful.

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Straightforward and honestly about scientific life:
* finishing your dissertation and finding a first job
* your academic responsibilities
* the tenure track
* your life as an academic

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000668.php

A funny quote from frameusers mailing list:

Creating XSL-FO is easy – I just tell a programmer what I want.