Planeta Blogów WMI UAM

Kupiłbym sobie pseudo-przewodnik Etiopia. Ale czat! - ładnie wydany, dużo zdjęć (trochę zbyt podkoloryzowanych jak na mój gust, ale całkiem ok), Etiopia fajna jak zawsze, no i ten czat i...

Jako, że padający deszcz pokrzyżował moje weekendowe plany, postanowiłem odwiedzić jedną z wystaw, które ostały się po Miesiącu Fotografii w Krakowie, a mianowicie

Dzisiaj mając chwilkę czasu podłączyłem stary dysk SATA aby sprawdzić co na nim się znajduje. Niestety był to dysk dynamiczny i nie szło go zaimportować na windowsie XP. Dane nie były dla mnie ważne, ale chciałem sprawdzić w jaki sposób w razie problemów mógbłym je odzyskać.
Ponieważ nie byłem pewien wyników badań, zrobiłem sobie backup dysku nieśmiertelnym dd.
Zaczynamy walkę, jedyną operację jaką mogę wykonać na dysku to konwersja na dysk podstawowy, która ma usunąć wszystkie dane. Mam backup więc próbuję. Dostaję dysk bez partycji, ale nie wierzę, że dane są usunięte.
Próbuję odzyskać je Easy Recovery Professional, które jak dotąd mnie nigdy nie zawiodło. Niestety nie tym razem, ERP nie rozpoznaje nic.
Podejście drugie, Acronis Disk Director 10. Szybki skan znajduje mi partycje. Klikam commit changes i po chwili w systemie mam nienaruszone partycje, ale już na dysku podstawowym. Oczywiście system nie wstanie, ale wszystkie pliki mam nienaruszone.

W ramach poszerzania horyzontów poszedłem dzisiaj obejrzeć ekranizację ballady o dobrym dresiarzu. Nie spodziewałem się wiele, Masłowskiej nie trawię i daleko mi było do oczekiwania na jakikolwiek „polski Trainspotting”.

Dostałem jednak coś zaskakującego –...

Dzwoni telefon, na wyświetlaczu “Biuro Obsługi”. Super. Może dadzą mi nowy aparat?
Odbieram. W słuchawce odzywa się zmęczony głos zmęczonej pani:

- Dzień dobry, dzwonię z biura obsługi [...]
- Dzień dobry, słucham?
- Przygotowaliśmy dla pana, znakomitą ofertę…
- Tak…?
- Może pan zmienić dotychczasową taryfę na nową. Za jedyne 40 złotych otrzymuje pan 70 minut do wszystkich sieci…
- Ale ja płacę 35 i mam 80 minut.
- Eee… ale nie do wszystkich…?
- Do wszystkich.
- Aha… To… W takim razie sprawdzimy naszą ofertę i zadzwonimy do pana jeszcze raz.

Taa…

Dzisiaj już drugi raz, tym razem wspólnie z kol. Piotrem Kasprzakiem, opowiadałem o TeXu na Festiwalu Nauki i Sztuki na WMiI UAM. Oczywiście, można pobrać plik pdf z prezentacją.

KategoriaBlog, KategoriaTeX

DeletedPage

Jakkolwiek Richard Gere nie jest aktorem, który przyciągnąłby mnie do kina, to muszę przyznać, że jedną z jego (w miarę) niedawnych produkcji oglądałem z niekłamaną przyjemnością. Hunting Party, bo o tym filmie mowa, oparty jest na...

Ponieważ takie mamy dziwne czasy, że na polityce zna się każdy i każdy ma prawo o niej mówić – chyba, że jest katolikiem, bo wtedy go zakrzyczą jako ciemnogród – więc zacznę od pewnego rodzaju usprawiedliwienia. Nie będę się przy tym usprawiedliwiał z tego, że piszę o polityce – bo do tego mam takie samo prawo jak każdy inny obywatel, gwarantowane mi zresztą przez Konstytucję Rzeczpospolitej (jeszcze?) Polskiej. Usprawiedliwić się chciałbym raczej z moich własnych słów. Otóż to nie dlatego nie piszę (zwykle) o polityce, żebym uważał, że jest to temat nieistotny czy niegodny zainteresowania; raczej dlatego, że staram się raczej pisać o sprawach, na których się jako-tako znam, i które mnie bardzo interesują, a nie o rzeczach, które są dla mnie osobiście drugorzędne.

Teraz do rzeczy. Jak doniosła niedawno Fronda.pl (za m.in. Kath.net), decydenci w Parlamencie UE wystraszyli się… wody święconej. No ja przepraszam, ale kto się boi wody święconej, to dobrze wiadomo.

Już od dawna wybryki brukselsko-strasburskiej biurokracji były śmieszne. Teraz to przestaje być zabawne.

KategoriaBlog, KategoriaWiara

Wróciłem z miasta nietoperza. Teraz parę dni luzu i dalej - do...

Jako, że kryzys idzie i należy dywersyfikować źródła dochodów, zdecydowałem się pokłonić przed bożkiem mamony i wprowadzić reklamy na blogu. Jeśli ktoś chce dołączyć do szacownego grona sponsorów moich drobnych wojaży, to zapraszam serdecznie do ramki z boku.

Nie...

Dostałem Macbook Air od Klienta, który chciał mieć na nim Windowsa. Kupił go, bo lapek jest lanserski, ale część aplikacji must have na MacOSie nie działa :)

Według instrukcji znalezionej w necie nie powinno być problemu.

Postanowiłem zrobić backup partycji za pomocą Partimage tak just in case.

Niesety SystemRescueCD, którego zawsze używam nie zbootował się. Restarcik i ... system nie widzi napędu DVD. Ani MacOS, ani pseudobootloader. Okazało się, że nie działa USB, a w tym "boskim" sprzęcie więcej USB nie uraczysz.
Czekała mnie więc wizyta w serwisie. Na szczęcie w Poznaniu jest jeden autoryzowany serwis Cortland.

Naprawa była na szczęście dość szybka, bo już dwa dni później miałem lapka sprawnego z wymienionym gniazdem USB.

Wieczorkiem znów chciałem zrobić obraz partycji i znów to samo, zwiecha systemu przy bootowaniu i brak USB po restarcie.
Byłem prawie pewien, że wina nie jest po stronie sprzętu. Następnego dnia pojechałem do serwisu informując, że USB jest prawdopodobnie sprawne a wina jest softu. Po chwili dostałem procedurę na resetowanie SMC.
Niestety nie zadziałała.
Serwisant powiedział, że wystarczy wyciągnać baterię i SMC się zresetuje, ale bateria jest wbudowana i musiał to zrobić serwisant, bo inaczej straciłbym gwarancję :/

Na szczęcie dalej było już tylko lepiej. W BootCampie utowrzyłem partycję dla Windowsa XP i puściłem instalację. Sterowniki dostarczane są na płytce instalacyjnej z Leopardem. Wystarczyło odpalić jeden setup.exe zrobić jeden restart i mam wszystkie sterowniki zainstalowane. Tutaj należy się duży plus dla Apple.

Na koniec zbeszczeciłem Maczka stickerem od Windows Visty :)

Some time ago, a friend of mine asked me how to put a symbol below a quantifier—in other words, how to typeset e.g. 0 $" />0 $" />0 $'/> instead of 0 $" />0 $" />0 $'/> (this is quite common in Polish typography).

That’s easy, I said. You just put \limits right after the \forall. Well, easy as it was, it didn’t work. The reason is obvious (at least, after a reading session with The TeXbook): \limits (and it’s twin, \nolimits) work only after so-called operators. For example, you can get when you say

\int\limits_\Omega \int\nolimits_0^1

to (La)TeX. (Note that LaTeX, and particularly AMS-LaTeX, has some defaults, different for, e.g., sums and integrals. Note also that you may change them globally: either by using some options of AMS-LaTeX, or by saying something like

\let\originalint=\int
\newcommand{\int}{\originalint\limits}

in the preamble of the LaTeX file; plain TeX or ConTeXt users would use \def\int{...} instead of \newcommand{\int}{...}.)

Since by default, \forall is an atom of type Ord (as in “Ordinary symbol”; for discussion of atoms and their types, see Chapter 17 of The TeXbook), it can’t take \limits (neither \nolimits). It is easy, however, to convince TeX to treat it as an Op (”Operator”) atom: you just have to say \mathop\forall instead of just \forall. This way, you may type

$\mathop\forall\limits_x x>0$

to get the result shown above.

Note that this has also an interesting side-effect: Op atoms, unlike Ord ones, are vertically centered. I don’t think this is a problem, but if you really don’t like it, here’s how to avoid it:

$\mathop{\hbox{$\forall$}}\limits_x x>0$;

don’t ask me why this works, just look at Rule 13 of Appendix G in The TeXbook.

But this is not the end of the story. The quantifier symbol, even with \mathop, does not really behave like an operator: it has a fixed, rather small, size; we would sometimes like to have it a bit bigger. (In fact, it would be best if its size adapted to different circumstances—but I guess it can be safely assumed that no-one puts quantifiers into sub- or superscripts, so I don’t want to go into this kind of details. If you really want to know how to do this, look up \mathchoice in The TeXbook‘s index.) An easy solution would be to say

$\mathop{\large\forall}\limits_x x>0$

or something similar; again, this does not work. The reason (sorry to say that again, but this is explained in detail… well, you know where) is that TeX chooses fonts for a math formula on the basis of current settings at the end of the formula; maybe because of that, if you try to use \large in a math formula, you get a LaTeX Font Warning: Command \large invalid in math mode...

This way, we have at least two choices. One is to redefine some (La)TeX internals and start to mess up with font families, mathcodes etc. I didn’t want to do this, since the thing is complicated even in plain TeX. The easier solution might be to try the \hbox trick again (notice the two occurences of \mathop):

$\mathop{\hbox{\Large$\mathop\forall$}}\limits_x x>0$,

which yields 0 $" />0 $" />0 $'/>. However, this is again not very good—the “for all” symbol seems shifted a bit up. This is true: although it is centered around the so-called vertical axis, the axis height is taken from the \Large size, i.e., it is higher than it should be here. How to overcome this new problem? Again, it is (of course!) possible, and in fact not that difficult: you just write

$\mathop{\vcenter{\hbox{\Large$\forall$}}}\limits_x x>0$

and finally get 0 $" />0 $" />0 $'/>! (Note that the \hbox is necessary here, since \vcenter takes vertical material as its argument; try removing the \hbox and see (and explain) what happens! Also, the second \mathop is now made obsolete by \vcenter.)

Obviously, if you need such a construct, it is best to use a macro so that you don’t have to repeat the above code every time you need a quantifier; for example, in LaTeX you write

\let\originalforall=\forall
\newcommand{\forall}{\mathop{\vcenter{\hbox{\Large$\originalforall$}}}}

and use \forall as usual (with or even without subscripts).

Two final remarks are:

1. Yes, I know that you want to say that the example formula is wrong. It isn’t; I just forgot to mention that it should be interpreted in the universe .
2. Even the last thing is not really (typographically) optimal: the best solution would be to use a font with a predesigned large “for all” symbol (which is absent from Computer Modern fonts; also the Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List does not mention any font containing it…). The used way (with \Large and similar commands) may result in incosistent line widths etc. In case of , this seems to be tolerable: you get thicker lines, which make the symbol visually heavier, but still the lines are thinner than in, e.g., (\bigvee). But I’m not a font designer, and thus can’t help this problem…

CategoryBlog, CategoryTeX, KategoriaLateX, KategoriaLateXPorady

Once in a while you want to typeset a list of publication of somebody (maybe yourself, maybe not). It would be good if this could be automated somehow.

I am a big fan of the amsrefs package, which is an excellent replacement for BibTeX. One of its nice features is that you don’t have to learn a strange language—everything is done within LaTeX. Changing amsrefs settings so that the author field is omitted in the bibliography is very easy; but then, a problem arises: sometimes you have coauthors, and you don’t want their names to disappear. A possible solution would be to store the author’s name and modify the author-typesetting macros so that they ingore it; this might be a good idea, although a bit difficult because you would have to take into consideration a few special cases, like having both “Smith, J.” and “Smith, John” disappear (and what about a paper by, say, Jack Newman and John Newman?). Having to do some manual work is not a big problem for me, especially that any good editor has a search-and-replace feature, so I went for another solution: change the relevant “author” into “coauthor” fields. And this is a code fragment I put into the preamble to achieve this:

\BibSpec{article}{%
  +{}  {\textit}                      {title}
  +{.} { }                            {part}
  +{:} { \textit}                     {subtitle}
  +{,} { \PrintContributions}         {contribution}
  +{.} { \PrintPartials}              {partial}
  +{,} { }                            {journal}
  +{}  { }                            {volume}
  +{}  { \PrintDatePV}                {date}
  +{,} { \issuetext}                  {number}
  +{,} { \eprintpages}                {pages}
  +{,} { }                            {status}
  +{,} { \PrintDOI}                   {doi}
  +{,} { available at \eprint}        {eprint}
  +{}  { \PrintTranslation}           {translation}
  +{;} { \PrintReprint}               {reprint}
  +{}  { \PrintCoAuthors}             {coauthor}
  +{.} { }                            {note}
  +{.} {}                             {transition}
}
\BibSpec{book}{%
  +{}  {\textit}                      {title}
  +{.} { }                            {part}
  +{:} { \textit}                     {subtitle}
  +{,} { \PrintEdition}               {edition}
  +{}  { \PrintEditorsB}              {editor}
  +{,} { \PrintTranslatorsC}          {translator}
  +{,} { \PrintContributions}         {contribution}
  +{,} { }                            {series}
  +{,} { \voltext}                    {volume}
  +{,} { }                            {publisher}
  +{,} { }                            {organization}
  +{,} { }                            {address}
  +{,} { \PrintDateB}                 {date}
  +{,} { }                            {status}
  +{}  { \PrintTranslation}           {translation}
  +{;} { \PrintReprint}               {reprint}
  +{}  { \PrintCoAuthors}             {coauthor}
  +{}  { \parenthesize}               {note}
  +{.} {}                             {transition}
}
\BibSpec{collection.article}{%
  +{}  {\textit}                      {title}
  +{.} { }                            {part}
  +{:} { \textit}                     {subtitle}
  +{,} { \PrintContributions}         {contribution}
  +{,} { \PrintConference}            {conference}
  +{}  {\PrintBook}                   {book}
  +{,} { }                            {booktitle}
  +{,} { \PrintDateB}                 {date}
  +{,} { }                            {pages}
  +{,} { }                            {status}
  +{,} { \PrintDOI}                   {doi}
  +{,} { available at \eprint}        {eprint}
  +{}  { \PrintTranslation}           {translation}
  +{;} { \PrintReprint}               {reprint}
  +{}  { \PrintCoAuthors}             {coauthor}
  +{}  { \parenthesize}               {note}
  +{.} {}                             {transition}
}
\BibSpec{report}{%
  +{}  {\textit}                      {title}
  +{.} { }                            {part}
  +{:} { \textit}                     {subtitle}
  +{,} { \PrintEdition}               {edition}
  +{,} { \PrintContributions}         {contribution}
  +{,} { Technical Report }           {number}
  +{,} { }                            {series}
  +{,} { }                            {organization}
  +{,} { }                            {address}
  +{,} { \PrintDateB}                 {date}
  +{,} { \eprint}                     {eprint}
  +{,} { }                            {status}
  +{}  { \PrintTranslation}           {translation}
  +{;} { \PrintReprint}               {reprint}
  +{}  { \PrintCoAuthors}             {coauthor}
  +{}  { \parenthesize}               {note}
  +{.} {}                             {transition}
}
\BibSpec{thesis}{%
  +{}  {\textit}                      {title}
  +{:} { \textit}                     {subtitle}
  +{,} { }                            {type}
  +{,} { }                            {organization}
  +{,} { }                            {address}
  +{,} { \PrintDateB}                 {date}
  +{,} { \eprint}                     {eprint}
  +{,} { }                            {status}
  +{}  { \PrintTranslation}           {translation}
  +{;} { \PrintReprint}               {reprint}
  +{}  { \PrintCoAuthors}             {coauthor}
  +{}  { \parenthesize}               {note}
  +{.} {}                             {transition}
}

\DefineAdditiveKey{bib}{coauthor}{\name}
\def\PrintCoAuthors#1{%
  \PrintNames{(coauthor\Plural{s}: }{)}{#1}%
}

(Note that most stuff is copied-and-pasted from the amsrefs source.)

Now how does this work? \BibSpec is a normal, user-level command documented in the amsrefs manual. \DefineAdditiveKey defines a new field, which is additive (i.e., may be repeated a few times in one bibliographical entry). Next we define the \PrintCoAuthors command (very similar to \PrintAuthors). The \PrintNames macro takes three arguments: the start string, the end string and the actual list (we are currently not really interested in its form).

(In fact, \PrintAuthors is a bit more complicated since it has to take care for inverting the name in certain cases; I skipped this problem here. To be sincere, I don’t know how to enable a similar option for coauthors.)

The last interesting part is the \Plural command, whose meaning should be obvious.

Now you can try the whole document:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{amsrefs}[2007/10/22]

\makeatletter
...
!!!PUT THE REST OF THE CODE FROM THE BEGINNING HERE!!!
...
\makeatother

\begin{document}

List of publications:
\begin{biblist}
  \normalsize % you don't want your publication list in \footnotesize!
  \bib{a1}{article}{
    author={Borkowski, Marcin},
    coauthor={Smith, John},
    title={Some paper},
    journal={Some Journal},
    volume={1},
    date={2001},
    pages={1\textendash 10},
  }
  \bib{a2}{article}{
    author={Borkowski, Marcin},
    coauthor={Smith, John},
    coauthor={Newman, Jack},
    title={Another paper},
    journal={Another Journal},
    volume={2},
    date={2002},
    number={1},
    pages={12\textendash 20},
  }
  \bib{b3}{book}{
    author={Borkowski, Marcin},
    coauthor={Smith, John},
    coauthor={Newman, Jack},
    coauthor={Brown, Jill},
    title={A book},
    publisher={A Publishing Company},
    date={2003},
  }
\end{biblist}

\end{document}

(this example should Just Work™—with reasonably recent TeX installation, at least).

Happy LaTeXing (and don’t forget to run LaTeX twice on this document)!

CategoryBlog, CategoryTeX, KategoriaLateXPorady, KategoriaLateX

I would like to welcome everyone on this new and old blog. (New, because what you see is the first English entry; old, because it’s Polish version (http://mbork.pl/Blog) has more than two years.)

I chose the title for this blog to emphasize that it is both the content and presentation that I consider important. It is obvious that without interesting content, good presentation is worthless; but even the best content poorly presented is often miserable.

You might be curious what this blog will really be about. Well, the Polish version is devoted in (roughly) 80% to (Roman-Catholic) religion and in 20% to TeX and mathematics. I expect that the proportions in the English edition (which will be independent, i.e., only sometimes the same article will appear twice, as an original work and a translation) will be approximately inverse - mainly because my English vocabulary is much larger when speaking about TeX and much smaller when talking about faith. How things are going to develop, however, I don’t know. For certain, all these subjects (religion, maths and TeX) will be present, possibly with occasional rants on different subjects.

As for religion, I will probably most often quote people wiser than me, with occasional thoughts of my humble person. Even if you are not a Roman Catholic (nor even Christian), these topics might be of interest for you, for the Church had a lot of really wise men over the ages (to be precise, by “men” I mean here “human beings”, the meaning now mostly abandoned because of the political correctness dictatorship, which I actively fight against).

As for mathematics, I am not going to write too much about my personal research (which, on the other hand, however fascinating, is most probably not very interesing for most people; it is metric fixed point theory and metric geometry, in case you want to know), but rather about beautiful, amusing or interesting things in elementary mathematics.

As for TeX, I will very often write about typographic nuances which are seldom noticed, but which make the typographic work much better. Also, expect advice on how to achieve various things in various flavours of TeX and (probably) some musings on LaTeX innards.

In this first entry, I’d like to show why I am convinced that all these three areas are connected, and how the blog title fits in. So, let us now listen for a while to Saint Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer (I took the quotes from http://www.escrivaworks.org), one of the wise men I mentioned before:

Many people begin, but few finish. And we, who are trying to behave as God’s children, have to be among those few. Remember that only work that is well done and lovingly completed deserves the praise of the Lord which is to be found in Holy Scripture: ‘better is the end of a task than its beginning’. (Friends of God, 55)

I used to enjoy climbing up the cathedral towers to get a close view of the ornamentation at the top, a veritable lacework of stone that must have been the result of very patient and laborious craftsmanship. As I chatted with the young men who accompanied me I used to point out that none of the beauty of this work could be seen from below. To give them a material lesson in what I had been previously explaining to them, I would say: ‘This is God’s work, this is working for God! To finish your personal work perfectly, with all the beauty and exquisite refinement of this tracery stonework.’ Seeing it, my companions would understand that all the work we had seen was a prayer, a loving dialogue with God. The men who spent their energies there were quite aware that no one at street level could appreciate their efforts. Their work was for God alone. Now do you see how our professional work can bring us close to Our Lord? Do your job as those medieval stonemasons did theirs, and your work too will be operatio Dei, a human work with a divine substance and finish. (Friends of God, 65)

Well, the last thing I would like to say is: come back here from time to time and let me know if you have valuable remarks; it is the comments part which makes many blogs worth much more than the author’s writings!

On 12 April 2009, the day of Resurrection of Our Lord, Jesus Christ.

CategoryBlog, CategoryFaith, CategoryMaths, CategoryTeX

Aby dodać znak zapytania w poleceniu np. konfigurując DynDNSa w CISCO należy wcisnąć Esc Q ?