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MyLife@300dpi

Published March 20, 2006 by lieven

Three years ago I did spend three weeks next to my Canonscan, painstakingly scanning all individual pages of every preprint I ever wrote. Next, I converted every page to PDF, resized it (in order to control the size) and bundled them into PDF-files. A typical preprint would take me roughly three quarters of an hour and the final result was mediocre. For example, here a blown-up sample from the original 1992 ‘Moduli
spaces of right ideals of the Weyl algebra’ -preprint, resulting in a 1.7Mb PDF-file

Recentlty, the department bought a Ricoh-copier which makes scanning a lot more fun. To scan a preprint at 300dpi and convert it into a single PDF-file takes under a minute (actually, downloading the file using a web-interface takes longer…). For this particular preprint, the resulting PDF-file took up 1.2Mb and looks a lot nicer

Still, 1.2Mb is a huge file but converting it to a DjVu-file (DjVu=deja vu) using the handy Any2DjVu Service gives us a mere 236Kb file which comes a lot closer to the filesize of a PDFLaTeX-file and the output is still very legible

So, I decided to rescan my entire life at 300dpi and convert it into DjVu. Next, I got the MOPP-package (MOPP = My Online Publications Page) working using the instructions from this page and some obvious MacOSX-modifications (if I can do it, so can you but perhaps I’ll write up the details in another post, just to remind myself). You can see the result at my homepage. I’ll update the latter one regularly (there are still some preprints missing, as are all my courses etc. and cross-references) and only afterwards I’ll update my homepage again. So far there is 250Mb to download (including all versions of the noncommutative geometry@n book, including the published ones…) so this should keep you busy for a while…

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arXiv trackback wars

Published March 7, 2006 by lieven

If you happen to have a couple of hours to kill, you might have a look at the
arXiv trackback policy debate over at Jacques Distler’s blog Musings. But before you dive into this it is perhaps useful to glance at what went before. Distler did pester (his wording, not mine) the arXiv to add trackbacks from certain weblogs to hep-th postings (i’m not aware of math-papers having trackbacks). So far so good, the more information about a paper the better i’d say, but it seems that not all weblogs’ trackbacks are allowed… A small commitee has the power to divide hep-th people into ‘crackpots’ or ‘active researchers’
(mother nature may very well decide to add all stringtheorists from the second category to the first in a couple of years… but, i’m digressing) and accordingly censor specific blogs and frustrate their authors, Peter Woit’s blog Not Even Wrong being the main victim. The whole trackback-policy is yet another futile academics power-game. Futile because there is an obvious way around it : type into Technorati either the arXiv-number or title or author and you will get all (!) weblog postings mentioning the paper (Technorati even has a slider if you only want to read postings with ‘authority’ rather than all). Perhaps one of the more tech-abled stringtheorists should spend an afternoon to write a
bookmarklet to perform this trick from any arXiv abstract page…

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Inform

Published February 10, 2006 by lieven

Once
upon a time, not so long before the video-games era, people needed the
command-line and knowledge of esoteric commands like _examine_,
_look_, _take_, _drop_, _go south_ etc. to
get into the mysterious worlds of dungeons &
dragons. If you have nostalgia to the heroic times of text-based
adventure games (nowadays called IF for _interactive fiction_),
there is a short message : get Inform(ed)! Here’s a
slightly longer message for those who have a mac running OSX and want to
know the quickest way to get to a screen like and start
playing Christminster (or another of 300 IF-games) (if you’re on a
different system, things will be just as simple but you’ll have to find
it out yourself starting from the Inform-Z
machine page). step 1 : Get a
copy of an inform installation and expand it to get an
Inform-folder and place this in your Home-folder. step 2
: Go in the Finder to Inform/Games/MyGame1 and double click on
the _MyGame1.command_ file. A Terminal window will open and exit
and you will see that a new file appeared in the Folder :
_MyGame1.z5_. Double click it and a warning message will appear
that this is the first time you will open _Zoom_, tell it’s ok
and Zoom will launch and you can play your first (though primitive)
Inform game! step 3 : If you want to play other
games (such as Christminster), go to the Z-
code archive and pick one of the 346 games. For example, click on
the minster.z5 link and the file will download to your
Desktop. Place it in the Inform/Games folder (not necessary) double
click it and you should see the above wellcoming message. That’s it,
start playing. step 4 : If you don’t know how to
play such games, there are excellent tutorials
available on the Inform site.

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