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Molecular models

I've pretty much always been interested in organic chemistry; and when I was quite a young child my parents gave me a set of plastic parts for building models of molecules, notwithstanding the warnings in the instructions that it wasn't a toy for children. It served me well not only when I studied high-school chemistry myself, but also a couple years later when I tutored high-school students in chemistry. I still have it.

(4 March 2010)

KDE 4 annoyances and how to solve some of them

I recently converted my system to KDE 4, because some software I wanted to run required it. I'm less than impressed: it seems the developers decided to break a bunch of things that were not broken, in the name of progress. That's the sort of thing I expect from commercial operations who need to justify every new version as new and different; I hope for more stability from free software. Here are some notes on making the new system livable.

(11 December 2009)

Bonobo Conspiracy's Quick Guide to the LaTeX \linebreak command

Okay, one more time. (16 July 2009)

Japanese, Korean, KDE 3.5, Slackware Linux, and LaTeX

I recently started studying Japanese, and so I wanted my computer to work in Japanese too - if nothing else so I could use it to prepare study aids. I use a home-brewed configuration of Slackware Linux (effectively "Linux From Scratch," though I didn't actually follow that project's how-to documents) and I wanted the Japanese stuff to work nicely with the rest of my configuration, including the application software and tools I already use for Canadian English. And I wanted to typeset in Japanese with LaTeX. That meant it wasn't as simple as just choosing "Japanese" during installation of one of the more entry-level distributions. Here are some notes on what I had to do, which may be helpful for others in similar situations.

(5 July 2009)

Making ogle work after mplayer has fucked your X server

When I run mplayer to view a video file, it does something to the X server so that if I subsequently run ogle to view a DVD, ogle appears to run normally except that the video appears as just a black window (or black screen in full-screen mode). This anticompetitive behaviour seems sub-optimal. Stopping and restarting the X server returns it to a state in which ogle can run, but that requires killing all the clients, and is not something I want to do regularly. Web searches for this problem found other people experiencing it, asking about it, and receiving such helpful advice as this gem from a Gentoo mailing list:

(7 August 2008)

PDF/PNG Astrological Chart Service FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions for my PDF/PNG astrological chart service. (29 June 2008)

LaTeX tips and tricks

Every so often there's something I want to do with LaTeX for which I can't find a solution in the usual sources. This page is to record the answers to such problems for my own future reference and to help others who might be searching the Web for them. (26 October 2007)

Condition variables in SDL

I recently had occasion to want to use condition variables in SDL. I know enough about concurrency to, for instance, know that condition variables were the things I wanted to use; and I've got most of a PhD in computer science and can certainly be expected to read and understand the original work by people like Hoare. However, I never did actually take a concurrency class, and knowing how these things are supposed to work from a computer science point of view doesn't necessarily prepare one for whatever weirdness might be built into SDL's particular implementation. So I went looking on the Web for tutorials and other information on using SDL condition variables in particular, and I discovered to my horror that it was all written by game programmers. So here are my notes on how to use condition variables in SDL, posted both for my own reference and for anyone else who might be in a similar situation. (3 September 2007)

How to concatenate PDFs without pain

In my work I recently had a situation where I needed to concatenate several PDF files into one big PDF file.  That turns out to be a much harder problem than it sounds, and the Web isn't as helpful in solving it as should be the case.  Here's a summary of what I've discovered on the subject, so that someone else who wants to append PDF files on a real computer won't have to go through what I went through.  This page covers only software that will run under Linux and similar FLOSS environments. (9 January 2007)

Postscript and PDF tricks for free software users

My PDF concatenation page is quite popular, and I recently had occasion (while publishing a book through Lulu) to need a couple of other hard-to-find Postscript and PDF-related techniques, so I'm recording them here in case they're useful to others. (22 June 2006)