One of the reasons for the Web’s triumph over the Gophernet in the early 90s is its superior organisational structure. Hypertext links allow any one page to be linked from any other page without regard for hierarchy or location, but you can still define hierarchy and location like you would in a filesystem. Early on, in 1994, Ward Cunningham invented the wiki, a sort of mini-web that leveraged the associative power of hypertext linking within a single website. This was good, and it paved the...
For a long time, I’ve been trying to figure out just how to get the best of both worlds in terms of running Windows and Ubuntu on my desktop PC. I’ve tried the obvious options: I dual-booted Windows and Ubuntu on my laptop for most of my university career, and more recently I’ve tried just running a Windows host with a virtualised Ubuntu in VMWare. Neither of these approaches fully satisfied me.
With dual-booting, the other OS on your system is a full reboot away. If you’re...
LaTeX is the document preparation system of choice for middle-aged computer scientists. Despite its dense, esoteric and downright old-fashioned syntax and general workings, it’s probably still the best way to prepare and typeset complex documents, provided you’re prepared to learn and struggle a lot up front to get your tools and templates set up correctly (and then have everything work forever).
One of the nifty things LaTeX provides is the ability to define custom macros. This allows you to do neat, effort-saving things like this:
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So here’s a trivial-seeming task that required a bit more digging that I anticipated. I’m increasingly using Google Music streaming over my local music collection these days, but I’d like to get the same general experience as I’d have with a local music player. This includes being able to play and pause with one of the extra buttons on my mouse and seeing what song’s playing in the conky-powered i3bar at the top of my screen.
If you’re using i3wm with the default i3status...
I have been reflexively using Git version control for all of my programming projects since being introduced to it by Michael Hartl’s excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial book. The most immediate and obvious advantage of doing this is the ability to use Github, Bitbucket and others as online backups of one’s work – the especially paranoid can even tie their code to more than one of these hosts, or host their own Git server. And then, with a few pulls and...
