Beyond the Misty Mountains

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

So back when I was still in college I went hunting around the internet for a OpenOffice.org resume template. I eventually found one that I liked and started using it for my resume. Fast forward 4 years and I was still using this same template. Now I liked the look of this template but I always hated editing it. It was full of tables and different formatting, the template was originally for OpenOffice 1 and 3 is the current version. Needless to say I never really updated it unless I had to and even then only like a word here and there.

That’s when I discovered LaTeX. Well not really discovered, I’ve known about LaTeX for awhile, just have never looked at doing anything with it. But one day I was surfing the internet and came across a LaTeX resume class file. I loved the look of it and figured if I could get it to work it would be so much nicer than the OpenOffice file.

Lets take a step back for a sec so I can explain what LaTeX is for those who don’t know. LaTeX is an extension of the TeX document markup and typesetting program. Basically you write up a document in plain text with some extra LaTeX markup that describes the documents look. This allows you to focus more on the content of your document while LaTeX handles the typesetting. You can then generate the final look using that plain text. Usually creating a PDF. LaTeX is used most by mathematicians and scientists for writing formulas and by book writers. Here’s an example taken from wikipedia.

Here’s the LaTeX markup:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\title{\LaTeX}
\date{}
\begin{document}
  \maketitle
  \LaTeX{} is a document preparation system for the \TeX{}
  typesetting program. It offers programmable desktop publishing
  features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of
  typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and
  cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies,
  and much more. \LaTeX{} was originally written in 1984 by Leslie
  Lamport and has become the dominant method for using \TeX; few
  people write in plain \TeX{} anymore. The current version is
  \LaTeXe.

  % This is a comment, it is not shown in the final output.
  % The following shows a little of the typesetting power of LaTeX
  \begin{align}
    E &= mc^2                              \\
    m &= \frac{m_0}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
  \end{align}
\end{document}

This generates to look like this:

Pretty sweet. That’s something I can get on board with, writing the document in plain text and then generating the final look. So much easier than fighting a word processor to attempt to get what I want. So I downloaded the class file and set out trying to figure out the LaTeX markup. Now as you can see from the example above the markup can be a little confusing at first. Starting out I mostly just copied the markup from the example from the class file, using the LaTeX book on wikibooks to look thing up as I came to them. After this I found The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX, a relatively short (about 125 page) free ebook. Highly recommended.

So now I have my resume as a plain text file, that is under version control using git. This makes it much easier to go in and make changes whenever I want without having to worry. If I change something that I later don’t like I can just look at the history. Then after I’m done making my changes all I have to do is a “pdflatex resume.tex” to generate a pdf copy to look at. Also because LaTeX is a typesetting system the final output looks amazing.

So there you have it, my conversion to LaTex. Unfortionately the only thing I’ve used it for so far is my resume. It’s too bad I wasn’t enlightened when I was still in college, I would have written every paper in it. So now I keep thinking about what I could use it for. I recently discovered Beamer, a LaTeX class for creating presentations. Tho I don’t usually create slides for my presentations. Maybe I should write a book….

Between the launch of Endeavour on STS-127, LRO sending back pictures of the Apollo landing sites, and the 40th anniversary of landing on the moon, I’ve been thinking about space a lot. The other day I was discussing NASA’s future plans with a friend, about the design of the Ares I and Ares V and NASA’s plan to return to the moon. The conversation then went into the establishment of a base on the moon. And saying that struck me as something that’s only in science fiction, a “moon base”. At the time it just seemed terribly absurd.

But then I thought about it and it doesn’t seem so crazy. There have been people living in space stations orbiting the earth since about 1971. First in the Russion Salyut stations and later Mir, then the US Skylab, and now in the International Space Station, which has had a perminant crew since November 2000. A crew that went from 3 people to 6 this past May. At this point I would say we’re pretty experienced with things like building habitations in space and dealing with the effects of micro-gravity on the human body.

So living on the moon really wouldn’t be that much different. In some ways I think it would be easier. The moon has 1/6th the gravity of earth, making tasks like eating and getting around simpler. Also being on the moon would give you places to go. You could put on your suit, step outside the outpost, and go for a ride in your dune buggy, play a round of golf, or watch the earth come up.

The idea is to send up an outpost piece by piece. Basically like single rooms that you could link together to build the place. By now I’m thinking this is totally possible. And not only that, but possible within the next several years. If I ever get a chance to vacation on the moon, I’m taking it! Science fiction is becoming reality.

-Dexter-

Being the geek that I am I have more projects that I am working on than I can ever hope to finish. Recently I decided to add another one to the list.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve had the itch to get back into 3D Animation. Its been a few years, since college, that I’ve done any animation. So I decided to download Blender and go through some of the tutorials I have. One of the things I have is a Blender 3D Design Course. I was happy when I fired Blender up and I still remembered some of the keyboard shortcuts. I also like some of the new features that have been added since I last used it.

To start off the course it went through a tutorial to model and animate a little submarine.
(sorry wordpress doesn’t like my flash video)

The next lesson was about basic modeling skills. The first tutorial from this lesson was modeling a sofa.

Then it had you apply a texture to it.

The 2nd tutorial was modeling a simple hand.

Then adding an odd texture to it.

The 3rd tutorial in the lesson was modeling a snowman scene. I went a little further than the tutorial did. First this is how they wanted it to look.

I decided the straight black arms, black nose, and circle mouth all looked kinda stupid, so I made mine better.

The next lesson has you animating the snowman scene and I’ve already been thinking about how I’ll make it better than what they show.

All in all I’m having a lot of fun and look forward to learning more about Blender than I have known in the past. I’ll have to dig up my stuff from school and post it.

-Dexter-

Hello Planet!

So today Herlo noticed that my blog wasn’t on the Utah Open Source Planet and decided to add me. I’ve been meaning to get myself added but thought that I should wait until I started writing more tech-ish content. Well looking at the past things I’ve written most are pretty tech-ish in nature. Guess I’m more of a geek than I thought. So I guess its good that I finally got added to the planet. Except now I might have to get rid of my “nobody reads my blog” shirt…. hmmm. Anyway hope you enjoy it.

-Dexter-

Woot. Server is back up and running. Took a little while longer than I expected but its all good now. Got the server reformatted and new versions of everything installed. Got a little more work to do to get everything how I want it, but that will be able to wait a bit.

So my mom picked up one of those little pumpkin carving kits and my brother and I decided to give it a whirl since we haven’t carved pumpkins in a few years. So I was out running some errands the Saturday before Halloween and decided to swing by to the pumpkin patch to pick a couple up. And being me I got a couple of decently large ones.

The following Sunday we sat down to carve them. My brother went with a pattern from the kit called AI Face. I used one I had found on the internet of the linux mascot tux.

Beginning to carve

Its slimy and gross in there

Yes the tongue helps

Me scraping my pumpkin

My brother doing some carving

My brother getting help from dad

My brother's pumpkin lit up

The way mine turned out

My brothers looked awesome when it was lit up. As you can see on mine I carved out the middle but then scrapped down the feet and beak areas. Scraping a pumpkin, just so you know, is insanely difficult. I ended up using an X-acto knife to help. I was hoping the effect would be something like a glow through the part of the pumpkin that was still there. It kinda worked but not as well as I had hoped. Oh well it still looked cool and was fun to do.

btw. Blogging pics with wordpress is kinda a pain. I need to get gallery2 setup and hooked into this thing.

So here we are at the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference. I’ve been excited for this over the past few weeks. Got some really nice swag. Got a nice new messenger bag, several t-shirts, a cool little penguin, and other small things. Presentations were been good. Hit up a python one to begin with. Learned some nice beginner python stuff. Then went to a wordpress performance one. Joseph Scott did a good job presenting ideas to speed up a wordpress site. I then went to a SSH Tips and Tricks presentation. Learned some cool stuff about secure tunnels. After that I got roped into the Guru Labs Trouble Shooting Challenge. Only managed to figure out 2 of the 6 questions. Still glad I didn’t go down the sysadmin route. The first day ended with keynotes by Mac Newbold of Code Greene and Paul Frields of Fedora. Mac talked about the benefits of using open source in a business. Paul talked about the Fedora community.

Day 2 started with Chad and I missing the first round of presentations, cause neither of us can get up that early. The first presentation I made it to was Linux Media, Security and Automation which was an interesting talk about setting up your house with security cameras and motion sensors and light dimmers, all controlled by Linux. Unfortunately I thought he spent too much time talking about the costs and the interoperability of the different items, than talking about the hardware and how to set it up and stuff. Next I went to HOWTO: Start an open-source radio station presented by Michael Place of utah.fm. This was a cool talk about what it takes to create an online radio station. It was a surprisingly relatively inexpensive project.

There was then a lunch break followed by that days keynotes. Friday’s keynotes were by Michael Place and Joe Brockmeier. Michael Place is the author of Schlock Mercenary and talked about how he’s making money off of a free comic. He was a great presenter and I’m going to have to add Schlock Mercenary to my reading list. Joe Brockmeier is the project manager for openSUSE and talked about where openSUSE is today and where its going.

Things at the conference got a little out of whack after the keynotes and presentations ended up getting pushed back or something so I spent the next presentation slot hanging out in the exhibiters hall talking to people like mindjuju, fungus, and John Taber. Next I went to the Vim and Python presentation which the presenter didn’t show up for so Kevin Kubasik tried to fill in and was able to talk a little bit about vim but unfortunately I didn’t learn anything new.

After the presentation there was a geek dinner over at Tucanos in The Gateway. There were like 50 some odd geeks and geekettes there. The food was great and the conversations with all the other geeks were interesting. UTOS payed for Brazilian Lemonades for everyone, which were delicious. After the dinner Erik and I managed to catch the last train of the night.

Saturday I started off the day with an Ubuntu keynote. Christer Edwards talked about using Ubuntu in the enterprise. Next up I went to a presentation by Kevin Kubasik on Writing Web Crawlers. The way he was doing web crawlers was quite advanced and way better than the way I used to do it. Then I went to Tools for Video and Images which talked about the various programs for dealing with images and video on Linux. After this we had lunch provided by The Smokehouse.

After lunch there wasn’t any particular presentation that I was intent on going to see and I was quite tired so I called it quits. I went home and promptly crashed on the couch for about 3 hours.

Overall I had a great time at UTOSC this year. Got some nice swag. Learned some new things. I’m looking forward to next years.

So previously I was running a terribly old version of Wordpress. (like installed over a year and a half ago old). Problem was I installed it then never really used it. I’d been telling myself recently that I should upgrade it and start using it. But I thought that if I was going to upgrade Wordpress I might as well make some upgrades to my server and the other things on it. But upgrading my server has been something I haven’t gotten motivated to do. I use it so much that pulling it offline just doesn’t sound fun. So recently I decided to just start using my blog.

It’s been bothering me having that old of a version of Wordpress running, but I didn’t feel like going through the pain of figuring out the upgrade. Well this evening I was reading an article on linux.com about the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, so I thought I’d give it a shot. It wasn’t as smooth as I’d hoped but it seems to have gotten the job done.

I installed the plugin then started the process. The plugin stated that it would ask for my “ftp credentials” so it could gain write access, but it never did. I ended up getting permission denied errors 3 or 4 times. I also don’t think it even completed the last couple of steps it was supposed to take.

After the upgrade I went to view the site and all my categories were missing. Looking at the database, the records were still there but they were all blank. Luckily I only have a few categories and was able to just go into the database and re-enter them. Although I think I’ll start using tags from now on. And on a random tangent, anyone know if there’s a way to do rss feeds based on a tag or a category? So that rss feed only shows posts that have that tag/category.

I really like the admin for 2.6. Quite professional feeling. Now I just need to get the actual site looking not so ugly. And figure out what these ‘widget’ things are….

-Dexter-