The Web is Agreement

Wonderful work by Paul Downey.
Tower of WS-Babel, exactly.

The Day The Routers Died...

Via Stefan Tilkov via James Snell, The Day The Routers Died...,

"a song performed by the secret-wg in the closing plenary of the RIPE 55 conference"

Google Reader supports search now

This morning I found search interface appeared on Google Reader page finally. It is time to retire the Google custom search engine made for blogs.

Solution of window resizing and moving for MS Windows with multiple monitors

I have tried several free tools on Windows system for window resizing and moving in and around multiple monitors. They were not that good, and even did not work when I have two monitors with different resolution and also layout (one portrait and one landscape). However, WindowPad surprised me by how easy this can be done using AutoHotKey. The original version of WindowPad is available at http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic21703.html. I made some small changes to

1. Set the NumLock of keyboard to be always on when the script runs;
   


2. Restore a maximized window before moving it to the next monitor, and then maximize it again.
   

The first change fixes the problem that the NumLock is set off when I remote connect to the box from the laptop at home. The second change makes the script work for moving a maximized window from a high resolution monitor to a low resolution one. The original script has been updated to fix the problem mentioned here and other bugs. Please check the latest version.

Notes on installation and configuration of latex2html with MiKTeX

"Installing LATEX2HTML with MiKTEX" and "Tools for Publishing LaTeX Documents on the Web" are two good reference for dealing with latex2html. The following are a list of notes I wrote down when installing and configuring latex2html with MiKTeX.

1. It is important to install MiKTeX, Ghostscript, and latex2html in a path with no space in between, the default place under "Program Files" will introduce problems.


2. If you install NetPbm for Windows using the Binaries release, do not forget to drag the Dependencies as well. So you will not get error messages about missing dll's.


3. Change the location where Ghostscript, NetPbm, and latex2html are installed in prefs.pm. The line numbers are not exact the same as in Installing LATEX2HTML with MiKTEX due to versioning.


4. Change the $TMP in l2hconf.pm to a path with no space in between as well.


5. While most configurations are done by updating l2hconf.pm in Installing LATEX2HTML with MiKTEX, I suggest use $INIT_FILE_NAME to do the customizations that you like. You need to change $INIT_FILE_NAME to a file name that Windows system can recognize like 'dot.latex2html-init'. The default '.latex2html-init' is not accepted by Windows.


6. Jos has a latex2html-init file that fixed several bugs in the original one coming with latex2html distribution. I found it is very helpful. I reused all the perl functions in that file, but did not use his style part.


7. In order to get white background of the images, I set
   

   
   @IMAGE_TYPES = qw(png gif);
   $IMAGE_TYPE  = $IMAGE_TYPES[0];
   

   
   which means use png format.
   And in the latex2html-init file, I set
   

   
   $TRANSPARENT_FIGURES = 0; # default = 1
   $LOAD_LATEX_COLOR = "\\usepackage[dvips]{color}";
   $LATEX_COLOR = "\\pagecolor[gray]{1}"; # 1 means white and 0 means black
   

   
   


8. In order to change the personal information in the $ADDRESS and "About this document", I set
   

   
   $DONGHOME = "http://homepage.usask.ca/~dol142";
   $DONG = "<A href=\"$DONGHOME\"> Dong Liu</A>";
   $address_data[0] = $DONG; # My real name
   $ADDRESS = "Copyright &#169; <I>$address_data[1]</I>  <I>$DONG</I>"; # rewrite $ADDRESS
   

   
   

Grammar check of documents generated by LaTeX

LaTeX is good for formatting academic papers and thesis with provided style files. Spelling check of LaTeX documents is never an issue by using a tool like Aspell or with the support of your text editor. However, grammar check still looks like an impossible task. For Windows users, this may be the most strong excuse to say Word is still better for everyday writing. Yes ... and why not use Word to do that task for LaTex documents? Word does not interpret LaTex, but how about RTF or HTML?

I have tried several applications converting pdf files to RTF including Acrobat professional. The generated files are messy. So I tried tools generating HTML. The one that I am using now is latex2html. Open the generated HTML files and let Word to spelling and grammar check them (F7), and then you can modify the tex file correspondingly.

Search blogs subscribed in Google Reader

Basically, there are two ways to searching all the blogs in your Google Reader. One is to use Google custom search engine, and the other is to use Google gear and Greasemonkey script.

The details about the latter option is described in Raúl's blog. The offline function of Google Reader works for me, but the Greasemonkey search script halts everytime I try to start the offline search. I cannot figure out what is the problem.

What I currently use is the first option: create a custom search engine that has all the links of subscribed blogs in its site list. The details is described on Google Operating System blog. The search function really helps when you want to testity some 'Déjà vu' of your reading.