olpa, OSS developer

I prefer to use TeX from TeXlive distribution, not the default TeX bundled with an operating system. The problem is that rpm and apt tools check dependencies and insist on installing the wrong TeX. To trick the system, a fake package should be made and installed.

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vim includes many keyboard layouts, defined as mappings for symbols of the english layout. Unfortunately, these maps are not useful when the base layout is german. QWERTZ vs QWERTY is not the only difference. Now, deutsch-russisch und deutsch-arabisch vim keymaps sind da.

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The keys “powerbook.blogger.de/2004/01/26/58788/mein-deutsches-pc-tastatur-layout-fr-macosx-103/.

Sometimes vmware makes something very wrong, and X server do not understand the keys CTRL, ALT, SHIFT and similar anymore. Solution: “setxkbmap” without any arguments.
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After I discovered anki, a tool to assist in remembering facts, I started to actively use it. Among other uses, I want to keep in memory some important chess positions. To display these positions in anki, I have written a plugin.

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From the delta debugging homepage: “With Delta Debugging, we can find failure-inducing circumstances automatically—circumstances such as the program input, changes to the program code, or program executions.” I tried to apply this technique to LaTeX, and surprisingly it worked. The code and samples of the experiment are uploaded on github.

The tools are:

* diffdelta.py: Finding which diff chunk causes an error.
* latexdd.py: Finding a minimal failing example
* stydd.py: sty-bug hunting

In some cases, macports can’t or should not download a file from internet. Instead, it should use an already downloaded local copy. Unfortunately, this use case is not supported, and a workaround is required.

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After some system update, vmware stopped working. It wrote some information which modules are loaded, and then silently exited. In a log file “ui-NNNN.log”, I found: “vmui| Caught signal 11″. The stacktrace said only that the crash was likely due to some signal.

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I’ve got PostScript files, which does look ok on the screen, but badly printed on Lexamark E232. The letters collide each with other, seems like instead of Helvetica some monospace font is substituted.

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The goal of this release is to mark the milestone 1 (on github, as .tar.gz). I wanted to understand the GVM and to check if compilation to PHP is possible. This is done. While the current gambit-php version is very limited (only a few primitives are partially implemented), it covers all the important functionality:

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In order to find if I can affect a program through environment variables, I decided to trace all getenv calls and see if there is something interesting. Easy to said, harder to make. Fortunately, it is possible.

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XeLaTeX package “fontspec” provides an useful command “AddFontFeature” to add an effect to the curently selected font. Unfortunately, it works only if fontspec is used. Otherwise, a workaround is required. So far here is a draft to make text narrow:

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At some moment, my USB WLAN stick stopped working, and the log was polluted by messages like:

usb 6-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 62
hub 6-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1
hub 6-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1

At first, I decided that the stick had broken after years of work, but out of curiousity tried to connect it to every USB port I found. It worked. The stick worked again when plugged into the keyboard, which in term was connected to the KVM.

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Theoretically, a part of a PDF file is allowed to be stored externally. The “external streams” were introduced already in an ancient PDF specification. But only Acrobat (Reader) 5 supports it. For Acrobat 8, one has to find a hidden security option to activate support. Apple Quartz seems not to support external streams at all. The same for poppler (definitely, the source code is checked) and maybe its ancestor xpdf.

I hoped that eSATA interface allows to attach and detach HDDs to Linux on the fly, and the system would notice the changes automatically. The reality was quote apposite, the system hung during experiments. Finally, after scanning internet knowledge, and trying to get commands like atacontrol or scsiadd working, I found the command for manual swap.

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To display unicode (utf8) files in vim in windows, the following commands should be added to %PROGRAMS%\Vim\_vimrc:

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After reading Paul Isambert’s article “Three things you can do with LuaTeX that would be extremely painful otherwise ” I finally decided to check LuaTeX. Unfortunately, the code from the article does not work under old LuaTeX from TeX Live 2009 (and probably from TeX Live 2010 too). I downloaded a binary from the site, tried to run it and got an expected error:

This is LuaTeX, Version beta-0.40.6-2009100220 (TeX Live 2009)
(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

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I’m not sure that a typesetting system exists, which could break within a table row. I managed to do it (in the first approximation) in LaTeX: source code, PDF, some explanations.

After experimenting with CPSCM, I have to drop it. The final now consists of two implementations: Chicken and Gambit.

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After I retired a blog, I continued with a forum. Unexpectedly, this step consists of two tasks:
1) convert phpBB2 forum to static pages
2) retain the old URLs

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