In a country long ago and far away there lived the good King X the eleventh.
He had a lot of ministers, the most important of which had become the minister of Composition. His job was to have peoples houses painted. If you wanted your house painted, you would have to ask the King. Every day the king would spend long hours with the minister of Composition, who would know all the houses in the country, had an exact knowledge of the Royal Paint Budget, and could call in the painters.
Although almost everyone lived in the capital called Localhost the King would sometimes travel around the country and kindly hear peoples paint requests. Every night the King would return to his palace, talk to the minister of Composition, and then decide whether you could have your house painted, and when.
Then on a dark winter's night, a group of grumpy people thought how much more efficient it would be if everyone would talk to the minister of Composition directly. Thus the Wayland Conspiracy was born. The next day, at daybreak, they deposed the good King and made the minister of Composition the head of state: president Compositor. To cater for the few people in remote villages they re-appointed the King as secratary to the president: the Secretary for Remote Villages. He would still travel around the country (albeit in a suit, and without his crown). He would still talk to president Compositor every night, like in the old days.
The press in other counties, like Windonia and Applestan, were very positive: finally this backward country had a modern government. Now its poor inhabitants could have the same beautiful colored houses they had. Welcome to the modern world!
The people in the country itself didn't notice a lot of difference, however. In the old days things took a little longer, but not everyone needs his house painted every day. Many still called the Secretary for Remote Villages "King", especially in the countryside.
But the people in Windonia and Applestan were very satisfied: they always had felt that their geovernment was superior, and the Wayland revolution had proved their point.
I use asciidoc as a quick and easy way to take minutes of meetings. I usualy mail the participants a quite decent-looking pdf version of the minutes immediately after the end of the meeting.
I also use gitit as a personal wiki. I must admit that I sometimes confuse the syntax of the markdown used by gitit with the quite similar asciidoc. I could switch to pandoc for my minutes, of course, but the pdf produced by asciidoc looks a lot nicer than pandoc's
In a well-known story, when Carl Friedrich Gauss was a little boy, his schoolteacher asked the class to add up the numbers from 1 up to 100 (1 + 2 +... + 100). Like many programmers would have done nowadays, his classmates sharpended their pencils, sighed deeply and started adding up: 1 + 2 = 3, 3 + 3 = 6,.... To the teacher's surprise and annoyance, Gauss came up with the correct answer right away, by re-ordering the numbers like this: (1 + 100) + (2 + 99) +... + (49+ 52) + (50+51) = 50 * 101 = 5050
Gauss clearly made use of his budding math skills here, and would have been a superb programmer had he been born two centuries later. But he hardly used mathematical "theory" to create this 200-year old "programming pearl"
I use a Nokia N810 for reading. It is a true "mini-laptop", excellent for web browsing, always-on and readable in direct sunlight (of course, E-ink looks much better in sunlight but I can always find a viewing angle that works)
The question: is a pdf reader the best way to read a document, of even to read a pdf? My pocket devices have always had a small landscape format screen (first psion 5, then N810), and many pdf's use ample line spacing and have large margins which means that I have to zoom carefully to make the text fill the screen, and hope that the text still fits there when I turn the page. Even then only a small number of lines is visible. Moreover, with a 400Mhz processor, flipping pages takes time.
What I have always done: convert the pdf to a set of.png images and use a good image viewer to look at them. The (home-made) conversion script makes the lines fit snugly within the screen width and reduces line spacing somewhat. (Have a look at the same page, in a pdf viewer and as a converted png) Pages flip instantly, no fiddling with zoom settings. Of course, searching and hypertext features don't work.
This begs the question: should a pdf viewer always show a faithful represenatation of the printed page, especially on screens which look very different from a book page? As far as I know, no pdf viewer does what my little script does (identify the useful bits on the page, rearrange them a bit and make them fit the screen).
Of course, any markup language viewer (e.g. a web browser) will do this automatically. But very few books and articles have been published in HTML,and even then, hard line breaks and hard-coded page widths often spoil the fun
I would have expected a much narrower peak in the dust distribution - sounding rather like a short "swoosh" - given the thickness of the rings which is less than 1 km according to most estimates.
Could anyone explain why the observed dust cloud was so much wider?
As a professional musician I use lilypond a lot. Apart from the excellent output quality, lilypond has a couple of advantages that haven't been mentioned in the discussion so far:
Producing text mixed with music examples (large ones between paragraphs, tiny ones in-line) is tiresome with traditional music notation packages, involving a lot of copying and pasting between notation and text processing programs. Lilypond-book makes this easy (there is only one source file that contains both text and music) An example: source and output.
Automated production of different output files from one source file is easy (using a script or a makefile). I routinely produce a violin and a viola version of all my teaching materials. Whenever I change something, it is automatically re-done in both versions.
Even on a simple PDA one can create a lilypond file (all you need is a text editor and a few kB of memory). I am often away from home and I do a lot of my notation this way, in trains and between rehearsals.
Yes, it was a fair bit of work to set it all up (I even use m4 which may not be everyones cup of tea) But after that, producing a new piece of sheet music is really much faster and easier than with the traditional notation packages, and the result is a lot better.
Slashdot Mirror
More than a century ago, many people were scared to death by the smell of another comet
In a country long ago and far away there lived the good King X the eleventh.
He had a lot of ministers, the most important of which had become the minister of Composition. His job was to have peoples houses painted. If you wanted your house painted, you would have to ask the King. Every day the king would spend long hours with the minister of Composition, who would know all the houses in the country, had an exact knowledge of the Royal Paint Budget, and could call in the painters.
Although almost everyone lived in the capital called Localhost the King would sometimes travel around the country and kindly hear peoples paint requests. Every night the King would return to his palace, talk to the minister of Composition, and then decide whether you could have your house painted, and when.
Then on a dark winter's night, a group of grumpy people thought how much more efficient it would be if everyone would talk to the minister of Composition directly. Thus the Wayland Conspiracy was born. The next day, at daybreak, they deposed the good King and made the minister of Composition the head of state: president Compositor. To cater for the few people in remote villages they re-appointed the King as secratary to the president: the Secretary for Remote Villages. He would still travel around the country (albeit in a suit, and without his crown). He would still talk to president Compositor every night, like in the old days.
The press in other counties, like Windonia and Applestan, were very positive: finally this backward country had a modern government. Now its poor inhabitants could have the same beautiful colored houses they had. Welcome to the modern world!
The people in the country itself didn't notice a lot of difference, however. In the old days things took a little longer, but not everyone needs his house painted every day. Many still called the Secretary for Remote Villages "King", especially in the countryside.
But the people in Windonia and Applestan were very satisfied: they always had felt that their geovernment was superior, and the Wayland revolution had proved their point.
The King just smiled.
I use asciidoc as a quick and easy way to take minutes of meetings. I usualy mail the participants a quite decent-looking pdf version of the minutes immediately after the end of the meeting. I also use gitit as a personal wiki. I must admit that I sometimes confuse the syntax of the markdown used by gitit with the quite similar asciidoc. I could switch to pandoc for my minutes, of course, but the pdf produced by asciidoc looks a lot nicer than pandoc's
Epic leaks? For the better part of a decade?
In a well-known story, when Carl Friedrich Gauss was a little boy, his schoolteacher asked the class to add up the numbers from 1 up to 100 (1 + 2 + ... + 100). Like many programmers would have done nowadays, his classmates sharpended their pencils, sighed deeply and started adding up: 1 + 2 = 3, 3 + 3 = 6, .... To the teacher's surprise and annoyance, Gauss came up with the correct answer right away, by re-ordering the numbers like this: (1 + 100) + (2 + 99) + ... + (49+ 52) + (50+51) = 50 * 101 = 5050
Gauss clearly made use of his budding math skills here, and would have been a superb programmer had he been born two centuries later. But he hardly used mathematical "theory" to create this 200-year old "programming pearl"
I use a Nokia N810 for reading. It is a true "mini-laptop", excellent for web browsing, always-on and readable in direct sunlight (of course, E-ink looks much better in sunlight but I can always find a viewing angle that works)
The question: is a pdf reader the best way to read a document, of even to read a pdf? My pocket devices have always had a small landscape format screen (first psion 5, then N810), and many pdf's use ample line spacing and have large margins which means that I have to zoom carefully to make the text fill the screen, and hope that the text still fits there when I turn the page. Even then only a small number of lines is visible. Moreover, with a 400Mhz processor, flipping pages takes time.
What I have always done: convert the pdf to a set of .png images and use a good image viewer to look at them. The (home-made) conversion script makes the lines fit snugly within the screen width and reduces line spacing somewhat.
(Have a look at the same page, in a pdf viewer and as a converted png) Pages flip instantly, no fiddling with zoom settings. Of course, searching and hypertext features don't work.
This begs the question: should a pdf viewer always show a faithful represenatation of the printed page, especially on screens which look very different from a book page? As far as I know, no pdf viewer does what my little script does (identify the useful bits on the page, rearrange them a bit and make them fit the screen).
Of course, any markup language viewer (e.g. a web browser) will do this automatically. But very few books and articles have been published in HTML,and even then, hard line breaks and hard-coded page widths often spoil the fun
I would have expected a much narrower peak in the dust distribution - sounding rather like a short "swoosh" - given the thickness of the rings which is less than 1 km according to most estimates.
Could anyone explain why the observed dust cloud was so much wider?
excellent output quality, lilypond has a couple of advantages that
haven't been mentioned in the discussion so far:
Yes, it was a fair bit of work to set it all up (I even use m4 which may not be everyones cup of tea) But after that, producing a new piece of sheet music is really much faster and easier than with the traditional notation packages, and the result is a lot better.