Adventures with Computers
After some succesful lobbing by Thomas, Rune decided to start a blog (just writing “Rune” should be unambigious now that the other Rune has changed name to Evil Princess kirkebrand…). So he is now a (proud?) member of Planet DAIMI as well.
I also found and added Dan’s blog. If you guys know of any other blogs you want added, then send me a mail.
Mikkel writes that Planet DAIMI seems dead… so here’s just a small post from me saying that I’m not dead!
In fact I’ve just passed my exam in Formal Methods for Information Security, I got a final grade of 5.5, which I’m quite satisfied with. The course had a written midterm and was supposed to have a written final too, but they changed the final to an oral exam! In the midterm I only managed to bring in a very poor 4.25, so pulling the average up to 5.5 is very good, especially considering that the maximum grade in the Swiss system is 6.0… The lecturer called it “fancy math” and I have to agree with him! :-)
I’ll have the next exam in Randomisierte Algorithmen on Monday — it’s a written test, and I don’t like it…
I’m starting to get a bit tired of reading about the silly so-called Cartoon Crisis, so here’s something much more positive for you to read about: smiles! :-)
Stéphanie found this funny little test at the BBC homepage where you have to look at 20 videos of people smiling — but some of the smiles are fake. You can only see each video once, so you have to pay attention, much like in real life when people smile at you. And don’t worry, the test is fairly quick, I guess it took 15 minutes or so.
I was able to guess correctly 16 times out of 20, which apparently is fairly good since they write that most people are bad at distinguishing between real and fake smiles.
Janus reported on a strange thing that is happening right now: Danish dairy products are being boycotted by several Arab countries because Jyllands-Posten, a major Danish newspaper, printed twelve pictures of the prophet Muhammad.
As Stéphanie argues on his page, freedom of speech is not meant to be used to insult other people. The pictures can, for example, be found here and I can fully understand that they are insulting for a believing muslim since they depict Muhammad as a terrorist and oppressor of women.
But still, buycutting products from random Danish companies is not going to help — it is only going to get innocent people fired, the first 100 employees in Arla has already been laid off. If you must, then attack JP, write letters to your local newspapers and so, but don’t blame the Danish government or Danish companies for something they didn’t do.
It’s a common misunderstanding that when you typeset something with [LaTeX][], then you have to use the Computer Modern typeface, a beautiful font covering tons of characters designed by Donald E. Knuth.
Okay, that’s probably not entirely true — you might know that \usepackage{pxfonts} will give you Palatino (Garamond) instead, or that \usepackage{times} does the same for the insanely popular Times New Roman.
But did you know that there’s many more available? Palle Jørgensen from the Danish TeX User Group has made a cool site called the LaTeX Font Catalogue where you can check no less than 94 freely available fonts for use with TeX and LaTeX!
A whopping 21 comes with support for typesetting math. Most fonts simply have the characters needed to typeset letters and numbers plus the common pecial characters, but some fonts also have the glyphs needed for stuff line integrals, arrows, greek letters, etc. Using two different fonts (one for the body text and one for the math) is normally a bad idea because the fonts might have different weights (different blackness) and different height. Still, people often mix, say, Helvetica (a sans serif font!) with Computer Modern (a very “seriffed” font!)… it do that, it looks icky.
Here’s an example of some math typesat with a font called Kurier Light Condensed:
Even though I’ve used LaTeX for years now, and I’ve been interested in typography for some time, I was surpriced to see so many free fonts available for LaTeX. The problem is actually not the availability of fonts — I guess that most of us have a couple of hundred TrueType fonts on some CD somewhere, and TrueType fonts can be used with a modern version of (pdf)LaTeX. The problem is just that using an arbitrary TrueType font involves some converting and some configuring — it needs the right infrastructure.
But for those 94 fonts this has already been done by the nice people who make the TeX Live LaTeX distribution. I’m currently using the default LaTeX that comes with [Debian][], namely teTeX and it has always worked great for me. But now I’m looking forward to seeing TeX Live in Debian — the packages have now entered experimental, and that’s an important step on the way to be included with Etch, the next stable version of Debian.