Reverse LaTeX?

I know LaTeX better than I know how to do accents in word or equivalent. What I’d find useful is a way to type TeX commands and have something automagically replace that command with the unicode character.

For example: I’d type \’a and it would transformify into á. That would be cool. I can’t imagine many people would use it…

I actually quite like how my phone handles it.* You hold down the letter in question and a little menu appear containing a useful symbol, and then various accents you can put on the letter. Could that be implemented on laptops? Could you hold down the “a” key until a menu of accents popped up? I think that might have more appeal than my TeX geekery idea…

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*Yeah. I typed this blog post on my phone. Welcome to the twenty first century, baby!

Learn the rules! Establishment, establishment…

Cyclists who ignore traffic lights or otherwise disregard the rules of the road annoy me. As do cyclists who cycle on the pavement. Obviously cyclists are much more vulnerable than people in cars on the road. Does that not give cyclists even more incentive to obey the rules? apparently not. I regularly see cyclists run red lights. To my mind, they deserve to be knocked down. You are on the road and there are rules you should obey. A couple of days ago I saw someone on a bike go through a red light on her bike with no helmet on whilst talking on her mobile phone. You stupid stupid woman.

In other news I have migrated from Texmaker to Kile. I originally avoided Kile because I objected to using programs made for KDE in Gnome. But since then I’ve realised that Kile is significantly better than Texmaker. I can also get Kile on both my main computer and my little Acer Aspire One. Linpus linux that ships with the One doesn’t have texmaker in its repositories. (Check this out for how to get a package manager on Linpus and other cool stuff.)

Free Stuff!

This started as part two of my list of web resources for students. But it has kind of devolved into a list of free stuff available online. Basically, as far as I can tell I got most of the good sources for philosophy online the first time round…

Here are some more sources for free stuff on the net.

• John Baez has a great big list of free maths and physics texts available online. Be careful, there’s an animation on that page that crashes my browser.
• Project Gutenberg is a massive store of out-of-copyright texts in electronic formats. Lots of cool stuff available there.
• The Online Books page has lots of stuff on it. I don’t know if any of it is any good, though.
• Books about linux available online.
• Googling online free books gets you lots of hits. Most will probably be dubious however… Most search results always are…
• Here’s a book that looks interesting and is available for free by Alexandre Borovik of A dialogue on infinity fame. It’s called Mathematics under the Microscope.
• Another free book. It’s called God’s Debris and it is by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. This one I have read. But I can’t really remember if it is any good…

Any suggestions as to other similar stuff is welcome.

I forgot to mention Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods which is kind of almost a dialogue. And while I’m linking to freely available stuff, The Elements is online for free. Read Digest and Be Impressed by the most successful maths textbook ever. 2000 years and still going strong.

“Read, digest and be impressed” I like that phrase. I shall use it regularly. Whether it is relevant or not.

I am a great cook.

I fried up some chicken in madras curry paste and put in in a bun. It made a very tasty sandwich. Next time, though, I’m going to get some less spicy curry paste. The hot madras one is a bit too much.

I’m also rocking Gutsy Gibbon now. I don’t like the new default font. I should change it. The “!” is particularly crappy. I might change my general font to Gentium. If I can find out how…

Geekgasm

So I’ve been fiddling round with Ubuntu a bit. I’ve added a whole bunch of useless crap to my top panel thing. CPU monitor, network traffic monitor, it shows me the weather, there’s a sticky note widget thing. It’s great. Pimp my desktop. I only did it because I had two of the same thing for some reason and then I deleted the entire top panel and had to recreate it. So I decided to knock it up a notch. Bam!

Now that my desktop is pimped, I feel so much nerdier. It’s been a good day…

Have I mentioned that Gasm should be a tog?

Spending money

I splashed out on the ability to edit my CSS on this blog, but then decided I don’t have time to work it all out. I should be studying… One day I will get round to it. But wordpress deserve some money off me, I suppose. I use their bandwidth and whatnot…

Other things I have spent money on recently include;

• A ludicrously over-engineered umbrella (it was raining and we hopped into Black’s and all they had was uber hiking stylee umbrellas…)
• A sexy watch (actually pretty cheap)
• Jimi Hendrix CD. Because I didn’t have one.
• Japanese food for me and the ladyfriend. Was very tasty. Much recommended.

And now I should probably get back to some revision, before it’s time for Friday night telly. HIGNFY and Peep Show, Oh yeah! The only time there is something on TV that isn’t shit

Eurovision tomorrow! Is everybody excited? I hope I get to watch it. It would be a shame to miss the most gaudy tasteless camp night of television of the year…

My keyboard is buggered. I need to do something about that. It keeps just not recognising  keystrokes, and sometimes my computer decides I am holding down the the “i” key or the “left” key… Quite annoying. Need to fix that somehow…

Happy ANZAC day haiku

Happy ANZAC day
Australian haiku chaps
also New Zealand

I should find that list of maths haikus I made last year instead of listening to measure theory lectures;

A finite union
of disjoint rectangles is
elementary

Or maybe I shouldn’t…

Also, I’m having a problem with my new USB memory stick thinger. Ubuntu doesn’t like unmounting it properly and randomly deletes data off it when I remove it… I unmount it but the light remains flashing… I tried some bug workaround I was directed to on the Ubuntu forums, but it didn’t fix the problem… Le sigh.

So that’s my exams finished for now. Which is cool. Time to work on the ol’ essays again now. Yippee! I am actually glad I’m not revising any more maths for now. It’s good to be back to the reading and writing.