Rethinking my online presence

I have started blogging a bit more than 10 years ago (wow!). The motivation was simple. I was using Linux and to connect to the internet with the ADSL modem I was using at the time was not simple, so I wanted to help others in performing this very specific task. Although this was not my first web presence—my first trial was just an exercise of technology—, this was my first maintained effort and that is running up until now.

Ten years ago the web was different, less crowded and not so personal. The extensive use of nicknames gave us masks that protected our identity and boosted our authenticity. Now we have services like Facebook that allow tracing back all the way back to our inception. With the web culture imposing an open kimono policy, I feel the pressure to have a tight control over what I say. Or rather, the medium (service) I am using for communication has a big weight on what I say and how I say it. For example, I prefer to use email over Facebook for private communications.

While Facebook made being online simpler (forget classic blogs!), Google+ made us think about our audience. I think Google+'s approach failed because it did not aim high enough. We are different personas to different groups of people. Not only do we want to control the group of people receiving a message, but we also want to have a different profile to different groups of people. Until then, I will have multiple email accounts and multiple "social profiles."

Where I store my data became important. The Megaupload case pointed out that we should think about to what laws our data is subject to. Projects like Diaspora* are the natural reaction to this, an evolution over Facebook and Google+ as we know them. The integration among these services, however, is limited, to say the least, and that hinders the adoption of new services.

To wrap this up, this blog mutated into something less personal and more work-related, where I share about my research, technology-related musings, and my latest open source hacks. As for other more personal-level topics, they became disassociated with this presence right here, and can now be found in services like Facebook and Tumblr. Which reminds me, I need to update my homepage.

On using Bazaar to access a Subversion repository

I really like Bazaar's intuitive (CLI) interface and workflow. Things tend to Just Work™. I've even been using Bazaar to operate with an SVN backend. The BibleTime developers created an amazing resource to introduce the concept, and help out avoiding the common pitfalls.

GNOME Pages mockups

The GNOME folks are rethinking the browser for desktop. Meet GNOME Pages. Seif Lotfy blogs about some very clean mockups.

Proof Wiki

I stumbled upon an interesting site called Proof Wiki, might be a valuable resource. Besides laying out proofs and relating them, there are also bibliographical references.

Android 4.0 (ICS) for x86 released!

Android 4.0, aka ICS, is out for x86. There is an ISO available, featuring hardware acceleration for AMD Radeon, but not yet for Intel-based systems. There is also a VirtualBox image available. Also related, there are some videos floating around of ICS running on the ZTE Blade.

Update: there is a video on YouTube showcasing Android 4.0 x86.

Zotero to help me research, Pandoc to power my website

Some days ago I've stumbled upon Zotero, a well-integrated application to aid in collecting papers.
Meanwhile, while thinking about that I want to update my homepage I googled for yet another website generator and I encountered Pandoc, again. This time I looked a bit more carefully to the Pandoc's help page and found CSL, "an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies." I can use Pandoc to load my BibTeX databases, through Andrea Rossato’s hs-citeproc. I can even use templates to customize the output. Seems interesting.


PhD dissertation tips and some relevant PhD thesis

Tips on PhD dissertation proposal tips.

• Dalhouse University has some PhD thesis proposal guidelines.
• Trevor Strohman gives some dissertation proposal tips.

Relevant Computer Science dissertations:

• William C. Benton. Fast, Effective Program Analysis for Object-Level Parallelism. It is about multicore and parallel programming. Has a delightful typesetting, a good overall structure, and even tablatures (!).
• Daniel Frampton. Garbage Collection and the Case for High-level Low-level Programming. Was distinguished by CORE with best PhD thesis, 2011. Is working on implementation issues for X10 with Josh Milthorpe.
• Alexandra Tsyban. Formal Verification of a Framework for Microkernel Programmers. Highlights the relevance of formal verification.

PhD thesis templates (LaTeX and XeTeX)

I am gathering a list of PhD templates to use in my thesis:

• xdthesis
• xelatex_thesis_template: Has support for XeLaTeX. Got stuck the absence of file svn-multi.sty, installed it with command sudo yum install texlive-svn-multi. Then I got hit by

  The font "Courier 10 Pitch" cannot be found.

  on the line 53 \setmonofont{Courier 10 Pitch}, from file fonts.tex. I commented out that line. I had to install package texlive-ntheorem. Finally, got hit by error message:

  kpathsea: Running mktexmf rsfs10
  ! I can't find file `rsfs10'.
  

• cambridge is a classic.
• Thesis/Template looks like a complex, useful piece of work.
• willb/wi-thesis-template has a very nice readme and looks good too and points to a solid collection of tips for LaTeX packages used in the template.
• LaTeX for humans presents a list of templates from English and American Universities.

Some links on XeTeX, OpenType fonts

XeTeX seems as an improvement over LaTeX. One of its nice features is that it is easier to use TTF and OpenType fonts on the document typesetting. David J. Perry made a nice open font named Cardo and also a tutorial on XeTeX. Google Webfonts is a great resource for open source fonts. Hyndman—has a great looking homepage—gives a a push on Getting started with XeLaTeX. TUG also has a good resource listing on XeTeX.

Package iftex is important to enable adjustments to your style when running under LaTeX, XeLaTeX, or LuaLaTeX.

To install the cardo font on Fedora 15, just do:

sudo yum install scholarsfonts-cardo-fonts

XeTeX on Fedora 15

XeTeX (XeLaTeX) is broken out-of-the-box on Fedora 15, see bug #717268. To make it work, install and update texlive from the TeX Live 2011 repository:

sudo rpm -i http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/packages.f15/texlive-release.noarch.rpm
sudo yum clean all
sudo yum update
sudo yum install texlive-xetex
sudo yum reinstall texlive-xetex # make sure the configuration is refreshed

The error I had was:

$ xelatex file.tex 
This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-0.9997.5 (TeX Live 2011)
 restricted \write18 enabled.

kpathsea: Running mktexfmt xelatex.fmt
I can't find the format file `xelatex.fmt'!

The idea to update the TeX Live distribution came from Leo. The tip on how to refresh the configuration of XeTeX came from Stephen.