Advogato blog for karlberry

16 Aug 2008

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:35:11 GMT

TeX Live 2008 is theoretically frozen. Unless major problems crop up with this build, this is what will be burned onto 6000 DVD's for TeX user group members. Fingers crossed.

Next TUGboat has started, awaiting papers from the authors at TUG 2008. Heck, the deadline was only yesterday ...

15 Jun 2008

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:59:43 GMT

While waiting for svn cleanup to run ...

TeX Live 2008 testing requested.

TUGboat 29:2 off to printer.

TUG 2008 papers posted.

First pass through GNU package list done. Many old packages decommissioned.

Saw Leonard Cohen and Glenn Gould in Toronto last weekend. Wow.

svn cleanup done now, back to it ...

20 Apr 2008

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:24:56 GMT

Released GNU texinfo 4.12 after too long.

Put the new release into TeX Live, too. On the compiled-sources front, only dvipdfmx is really left to update. LuaTeX is in, with lots of fun Web2C work by me and Taco. Should be pretty easy to drop in from now on, though.

Next regular TUGboat issue is getting closer, with articles on DTX files, Zapf's Euler font update, Asymptote, and lots more. Hopefully it'll go to the printer in May.

Gotten some submissions for TUG'08 in Cork, Ireland, but lots more are welcome.

Did Google Summer of Code org admin for both GNU (third time) and TUG (first time) this year. The proposals might be a bit more solid than in the past. At least the process is pretty familiar by now.

24 Feb 2008

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:26:23 GMT

A new Texinfo pretest is available at http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-4.11.90.tar.gz. Please try it if you can. Standalone Info has some smallish UI changes to try to make it friendlier, and install-info has many new features to try to be compatible with Debian install-info.

Peter Breitenlohner has installed lots of changes in the TeX Live autoconf infrastructure, so we can finally switch to the standard release and not be stuck with the autoconf 2.13 that I hacked so many years ago for our include needs. Yay. Zillions of other updates continue on our way toward starting the release cycle next month sometime.

14 Dec 2007

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:55:45 GMT

Some favorite books for 2007, since I wrote this up already to send to a friend:

Landscapes, Mary Randlett -- collection of her amazing nature photographs. (I'd never heard of her before accidentally running into a show of hers at a museum.)

Obligatory latest Stephen King -- Lisey's Story; a departure for him, but still him.

Crashing Through, Robert Kurson -- nonfiction, an extraordinary man blinded at an early age who has his sight restored.

The Best Day The Worst Day, Donald Hall -- an elder poet and his experience losing his younger wife (Jane Kenyon, also a poet) to cancer.

Run, Ann Patchett -- much as I liked all her previous books, I thought this was a quantum leap in readability and drive. (I also got to see her give a short reading in person, very cool.)

Bonus older entry: Neither Wolf Nor Dog, Kent Nerburn -- a book about (American) Indians (by a white), unlike any other I've read.

24 Nov 2007

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 01:00:53 GMT

By the way, if anyone happens to have a lead on a C/GNU/Linux/Unix (or TeX :) job in the Portland, Oregon area, please email me at karl@freefriends.org. My friend Oleg Katsitadze (Eplain maintainer, Texinfo contributor, ...) is immigrating here from Ukraine in just a couple weeks and so is looking for work. Thanks.

22 Nov 2007

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:21:52 GMT

Thanks to Norbert doing many TeX Live package updates and other filtering, now around 300 msgs left.

EuroBachoTeX proceedings (210+ pages) getting close to going to some printer, somewhere.

Installed CentOS 5 on my machines; all went fine, except I chose (more or less randomly) to install the xen/virtualization kernel, and eventually discovered that xen takes over ttyS0. How bizarre. Have to boot with xencons=ttyS4 (for example) to get my serial ports back.

Laurie Anderson's acceptance speech for the Gish prize.

27 Aug 2007

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:15:46 GMT

Got TeX Live below 400 todo msgs (namely 396), figured I better post quick.

TUG 2007 proceedings coming along nicely. More photos, FWIW.

Window washing tomorrow. Physical windows, that is :).

11 Aug 2007

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:59:46 GMT

Made some audio cd's for my family. Discovered sox can convert from other formats to wav, and can also make a mono file into stereo with -c 2 (part of "CD-quality" is stereo); shntool could split a big file into pieces of any length (contrary to some reports, I did not experience any "popping" between tracks); and xcdroast to burn the cd's (I used "track-at-once" (TAO) mode to get some space between the tracks -- again, no popping or other discernible problems). However, I gather dvd-burning is not included in xcdroast without payment, so I'll be looking for an alternative soon; I know there are lots out there.

I also tried normalize to make the volume dynamics of all tracks the same, but the result just didn't sound right. I had some very loud and some very soft tracks, and I think the range was just too great to be normalized. Neat idea, though.

Texinfo and GNUzilla (completely free firefox) have pretests that need, well, testing. Give it a try if you can.

The TeX conference in San Diego went fine. The presentations are online, thanks to Kaveh Bazargan. Some photos have also been contributed, thanks to Jennifer Claudio.

TeX Live is at 404 and getting worse. Sigh.

16 Jul 2007

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:23:01 GMT

TeX Live: 398, after playing with the infrastructure for a month and two hours of updates this morning.

TUGboat: new issue is at the printer's now, will post online in a week or two.

Texinfo: Oleg added support for quotes in many forms (depending on the EC fonts for TeX support), and real support using \marks for chapter and section names in headers/footers. Yay for Oleg! Released a 4.9.90 pretest before those changes with document/diagnostic locale separation, another pretest also in a week or two.

GNU: GPLv3 and LGPLv3 were released. They seem pretty good to me. Been getting the files all cleaned up for use in packages. Released new versions of GNU Texinfo and GNU Hello under GPLv3, along with lots of other GNU maintainers updating theirs.

Now it's time to get to the airport and see if the system will let me make it to TUG 2007.