Thursday, December 29, 2005
I’ve always used prosper for presentations, but someone recently put me onto beamer, and I must say I’m impressed. It lets you structure your file using standard LaTeX sectioning, and produces section-level tables of contents by default. There are 26 different themes, and an architecture for easy colour-scheme changes and so on. The documentation (beameruserguide.pdf) [...]
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
It snowed! In fact, I was walking through a snowfall yesterday at about 11pm. Since the Dutch call Boxing Day “Second Christmas”, that almost qualifies for a white Christmas, right? Except that it didn’t settle. Today it more or less did — it’s melted on the roads and some of the footpaths by now, but [...]
Saturday, December 24, 2005
I just sent feedback to a complete stranger, about their recent website redesign. (In my defence, they asked for it, and they needed it.)
Then I realised that it’s Christmas Eve.
Oops.
Merry Christmas all!
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Today I received my sofinummer (Social-Financial number: taxes, for the paying of). Which means that next month I’ll receive a full salary — until now I’ve been paying over 50% tax, which I now have to claim back. All I have to regularise now is my living situation, and I’ll be in the clear (officially [...]
Monday, December 19, 2005
I just received not one but two invitations to present at an upcoming conference, or even to organise a special session, should I so desire. The catch? It’s the 2006 edition of the scam conference that accepted a randomly-generated paper in 2005.
So I guess maybe the personal opening and “We are emphasizing the area of [...]
Sunday, December 18, 2005
From now on I’m requesting evil fairies every Sunday morning.
Via we make money not art, which also has more pics and tries to convince you that this is the work of some “artist.” The discerning reader will doubtless ignore these blandishments and check the fairy traps at once.
(More pics at Clapham Art Gallery.)
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Keith Reckdahl’s excellent tutorial/reference has been updated. The new title is Using Imported Graphics in LaTeX and pdfLaTeX, and the big update is of course the inclusion of pdfLaTeX.
Even if you never use imported graphics, UIG is possibly worth checking out. The second half describes all the unusual things you can do with LaTeX [...]
Monday, December 12, 2005
I spent most of today travelling back and forward between Zaandam (where I’m currently officially living) and Zaandijk (where the city hall is) and Koog-aan-Zijn (the nearest train station), picking up my residence permit. Every few minutes now I take it out of my pocket and look at it, just reassuring myself that it hasn’t [...]
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Well, not me per se, but my AI and computational linguistics training seems to have been overtaken by the march of progress. I refer to Androidal Systems, Inc., whose breakthrough processor “understands the meaning of language.” Yup, the meaning of language — these folk aren’t into understatement. Universal translation, that’s what they’ve cracked. And they [...]
It’s 4:40pm. I’ve had the light on for the last hour, and I just closed the curtains. I guess it’s probably staying light until 9 or later in New Zealand at the moment.
On the other hand, we’ve got the chance of a white Christmas.