Martin Geisler Online

I’ve been playing a lot with MetaPost lately. I really like the way you construct your figures — it’s clean, precise and mathematical.

But there’s one problem: I now have to first run mpost to generate the figures, and then dvips to put them into my document. I can’t just view the figures in xdvi together with the text, as there’s some problems with the fonts used in the figures. The only good way to view it is in gv, which means that I also have to run dvips.

But this Makefile solves that — I can now just run make, and then it will re-run all necessary programs:

#
# This Makefile re-runs all the necessary programs, so that the
# PostScript-file is updated whenever the LaTeX- or MetaPost-files
# change.
#
# Martin Geisler <[email protected]> — Just use it :-)
#
all: main.ps
.mpost: *.mp
    TEX=latex mpost -interaction nonstopmode $?
    touch .mpost
.gnuplot: *.gnuplotrc *.data
    gnuplot $?
    touch .gnuplot
%.dvi: %.tex
    latex ‘\nonstopmode\input $<’ && latex ‘\nonstopmode\input $<’
%.ps: .mpost %.dvi
    dvips $*.dvi -o

(Please remember that there should be a tab in front of the command-lines — those that does not start with a blue word.)

As I’ve never written a Makefile before, I’m pretty certain that there’s something in it, that can be done in a better way. But at least this one works for me :-)

If you can suggest some improvements, then please write me.

I’ve just finished my final written exam! I’ve spend five hours trying to write a Danish essay, and I think the result was pretty good.

I used my dads notebook with Windows and Word. I did this, just to remind myself of why it is, that I’ve spend countless hours reading manuals and books for LaTeX. Why have I spend entire evenings trying to achieve a particular effect in LaTeX? Now that I’ve started to use Metapost, I’ve also had to read the manual for that — it’s large but really good. The question remains: why do I do it.

The answer just occurred to me today: Word is full of bugs! It’s a faulty, PITA-program! It crashed on my today, even though I didn’t do anything fancy. I wasn’t playing with a lot of OLE-objects, nor was I trying to do anything else. I was just writing an essay with perhaps three different fontsizes. But when I tried to change the size of the skip after paragraphs, it just died. And it did this several times.

So, luckily there won’t be a next time, but if I ever have to write something important on a computer, I’ll use LaTeX. It’s the only program that I know of, that if reliable. It might be a little difficult to do some of the more advanced things, but if you’re just writing a plain essay, then it’ll never let you down. It was only because it was easier for me to transport the notebook that I used it instead of my normal machine.

Yesterday I helped Cookie build his new machine. After some initial problems with the jumpers, the machine now runs at 1050 MHz — 5% more that the specs :-)

We also tried to download Gnome from Ximian, but there were all sorts of problems with the packages. Now that he has a fast machine, I persuaded him into trying Nautilus… But then we discovered that Eazel is closed! (You’ll find the real link here: Eazel). What a shame — I was beginning to really like Nautilus, now that it’s stable and fast.

I’ve just downgraded my machine to a Matrox G400 instead of a Asus V7700. Strange, but true :-)

This morning my fathers Windows 2000 went crazy. The graphics was garbled, so we tried switching graphics-cards. He got my V7700 and I got his G400. So, now his machine works again, and so does Linux-installation (a very slick Redhat 7.1 Deluxe Workstation).

I really didn’t play all that much Quake after all, so I figured that I didn’t needed all the power of the V7700. But there’s another advantage of having a G400: the image is now much sharper. I run my monitor @ 1600×1200, so it’s important that the card is able to produce a sharp picture, even at that resolution. The V7700 gave me a slightly blurred image, but the G400 is just sharp.

Another nice “feature” of the G400 is the lack of a fan on the card. The V7700 had a fan that made an irritating noise. Now that’s gone too.

At first I thought about buying a G450, but it seams that it also got one of those fans… And with my 21″ monitor, I don’t really need the Dualhead-features of the G450. I once had a G400 with Dualhead, and although it was mighty cool, I think that I can live without it. (For now :-)

My new printer works beautifully! After I had recompiled my kernel with support for the parallel-port, it just worked. I started by writing echo 'Hello World! > /dev/lp0 — and it worked!

That’s very good I thought, lets see how it handles PostScript… So I tossed one of my physics reports at it. No problem — out came beautiful LaTeX with equations, graphs etc.

So it certainly works. Now I have to setup Cups, so that I have a spooler. I should also be able to share the printer, so that the rest of the family can benefit from the printer :-)