Halt Condition

Bloody RTA

At the start of the month I attended a workshop up in Kurrajong, and drove back along the Bell’s Line Road. Today I got a speeding infringement notice claiming I was doing 15KM over the limit. I called RTA to clarify a point and was informed (probably in breach of privacy, as the notice was addressed to my girlfriend) that the driver of the car was female. Not the registered owner, the driver, as determined from the footage. I am soooo contesting this one.

Anyway, I’m off today so I’ll post about APAC next week.

Processing Inkscape diagrams for Latex

The latest version of Inkscape (0.42.2) added support for exporting from SVG to EPS on the command-line. This allows the cool ability to generate the necessary PDFs for inserting into Latex documents from Makefiles. Thus your paper/presentation repository can be kept in a source-only condition (highly desirable, otherwise you end up with version-skew between source and generated files). A basic Makefile for this (used to generate my APAC’05 presentation using Latex-Beamer) looks like:

SRC=apac05-presentation.tex
PDF=$(SRC:.tex=.pdf)
PS=$(SRC:.tex=.ps)
DIAGS=ag-socks.svg
DIAGSeps=$(DIAGS:.svg=.eps)
DIAGSpdf=$(DIAGS:.svg=.pdf)

all: $(PDF)

$(PDF) : $(SRC) $(DIAGSpdf)
  pdflatex $(@:.pdf=.tex)

$(DIAGSpdf): $(DIAGSeps)
  epstopdf $(DIAGSeps)

$(DIAGSeps): $(DIAGS)
  inkscape -E $(@) $(DIAGS)

clean:
  rm -f *.aux *.log *.snm *.out *.toc *.nav *~ $(DIAGSeps) $(DIAGSpdf)

distclean: clean
  rm -f $(PDF)


Article on problems with RPC

http://www.iona.com/hyplan/vinoski/pdfs/IEEE-RPC_Under_Fire.pdf

This has a nice overview on the problems and current direction of RPC. However the current research still seems to be along the lines of “Lets do what we were doing, but more so.” rather than just admiting that networking is different and just dealing with it.

Edit: This paper (from 11 years ago) has more nuts and bolts information. This thread on Lambda has some interesting comments too.

Haven’t seen this before …

Processing

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.

Advanced latex processing in Emacs

AUCTex emacs mode.