Guy Rutenberg

The hyperref package is notoriously known to cause problem with RTL text, which unfortunately include Hebrew. In this post I present some preliminary workarounds that enable the user to use the hyperref package with Hebrew and possibly other RTL languages. The solution requires XeTeX which is available in TeXLive. I had no success, yet, to port the workaround to pdfTeX, which is more popular.
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For a while now I’ve refrained from using the very nice Algorithm environment for LaTeX papers I wrote in Hebrew due to the way it’s label was displayed. The English label was displayed in reverse.

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Yesterday, Gentoo marked KDE 3.5.10 as stable on amd64. I looked for a way to upgrade all of the KDE related packages, without manually specifying each one of them. Normally one could do

emerge -avu world

but I encountered some nasty conflicts that I didn’t have time, nor will, to resolve at that time. So I’ve looked for a different solution. To my rescue came qlist for the great app-portage/portage-utils package. This package provides a set of very fast utilities to query portage. I’ve used qlist to list all of my installed packages, grep‘ed the list and piped the result as arguments to emerge using xargs.
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I had some problems with the lighttpd-1.4.19 that comes with Ubuntu 8.04, mainly it’s problems of handling the HTTP header Expect: 100-continue (which older versions of Lighttpd return error 417). The problem was fixed in Lighttpd-1.4.21, but 1.4.22 is the newest version so I’ve decided to install it.

As I mentioned before, Ubuntu doesn’t have lighttpd-1.4.22 for 8.04, and it’s also not available in the updates or backports repositories. Fortunately, I’ve found that the package is available from Debuian Sid (unstable). Here are some instructions on how to install it.
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I’ve decided to give Qt a try after long time of wxWidgets programming. When I learn to a new language or how to use a new library I always like to build some small projects to get my hands dirty with. This time I’ve built small checksum calculator – Hash Puppy (in fact, first I had the name then I’ve decided I must use it for some new project).

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I decided to finally learn QT and started to read the “C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4″ (first edition) which is available online. The book comes in a zip file that unzips to a huge, 51MB, pdf file. Even when considering the book is quite long (556 pages), the file size is very large compared to what one is used to except. The huge file size made reading the PDF less convinient, as one notices a considerable delay when opening it (especially if the PDF resides on some portable storage), so I’ve decided to play a little and see what I can do about it.
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As an avid user of Lighttpd, I was glad to receive a copy of the “Lighttpd” book by Andre Bogus (Packt publishing) for reviewing. I’ve been using Lighttpd extensively for production over a year now and I’m very satisfied. However, I remember that as a new user I had my share of frustration. In his book, Andre Bogus, tries ease the process for those that decided to move to Lighttpd.
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I believe LyX is a great tool for writing LaTeX document. It makes writing formulas very easy and it allows you to see the formula as you are writing, as opposed to seeing only LaTeX code. However LyX doesn’t support every LaTeX package and the macros it defines. Sure it doesn’t stop you from using these macros in your formulas, but it doesn’t display nicely, you see the name of the macro instead of a schematic preview.

While LyX doesn’t support many of the great packages out there like mathtools (which I really hope it will someday), you can add some support to your documents. At the beginning of the document insert a comment, via Insert->Note->Comment. Inside the newly created comment insert a math-macro via Insert->Math->Macro. In the name part, put the name of the command you want to add support for. In the second box (caption LyX), use existing LyX commands to mimic how the macro will look like. For example, this is what it looks like for the \coloneqq macro (from the great mathtools package):

After adding the math macro in the comment, when you will use the macro inside formulas it will display nicely:

A little explanation how things work. When you define a math macro in LyX, LyX does two things:

1. Inserts LaTeX code to create the macro.
2. Displays the macro nicely when editing the document.

While the latter is desirable, the former is problematic. If LyX inserts LaTeX code to define the existing macro, it will cause errors. So when you put the LyX macro in the comment environment, the code LyX generates gets ignored and only the second, desirable, outcome is achieved.

This is a little code snippet from Open Yahtzee’s code base that converts all the built-in types and many custom classes (ones that override the << operator) to string.

template <class T> inline std::string stringify(T x)
{
	std::ostringstream o;
	o << x;
	return o.str();
}

I first wrote it to convert ints to string, but later I templatized it so it would work with other types as well. It’s a clean elegant snippet that I thought other might find useful too.

When I first scratched the itch of calculating checksums for every file in a tar archive, this was my original intention. When I decided I want the script in bash for simplicity, I forfeited the idea and settled for extracting the files and then going over all the files to calculate their checksum value.

So when Jon Flowers asked in the comments of the original tarsum post about the possibility of getting the checksums of files in the tar file without extracting all the archive, I’ve decided to re-tackle the problem.

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