Karin van den Berg .nl

Today I set up my laptop in an office where a 15" TFT screen was available, so I decided to try dual screen setup on my laptop using the VGA connector on my laptop.

The standard Xinerama for dual head that I used in another setup did not work. I decided to search for laptop vga and finally for "xorg laptop sis xinerama", which lead me to a website dedicated to sis drivers and it's native "MergedFB" mode. This worked perfectly, although I haven't found a way to make the laptop screen the primary one, but it's a lot better than one screen :-)

Because my laptop's combo drive was giving trouble and hasn't burnt a proper cd for months, I bought an LG external dvd writer this weekend. The LG GSA-5163d can handle all formats, - + Ram and + dual layer, and has USB2 and Firewire. Great, right? Almost. I tested it in Ubuntu and saw it mounted disks with data on it fine, and I burned a DVD in windows (happened to be on at the time), all worked great. Until I tried to burn something in Ubuntu....

Last week the Open Source Content Management System Drupal, that is also used to built this site, got in trouble with their webserver due to several unfortunate circumstances. They had an offer from Oregon State University to place a server in their Open Source lab free of charge (free rackspace and bandwith), all they had to do was supply a server. They where planning to ask for donations to buy this server, needed $3000 for that.

When working on my thesis I decided to put all the chapters in seperate files. With the folding vim does on latex files with the vim-latexsuite this is a breeze because you can easily yank whole chapters. However sometimes some lines are included that didn't belong to the chapter, like the bibliography after the conclusion. So I tried to yank these back. No luck. When moving to the new files all I had to do was:
yy at the chapter folded line
:e nameofchapter.tex
p

but when going back to the Thesis.tex file it wouldn't paste anything yanked from another file.

Solution? Using named buffers, like so:

I had a little problem with the tocvsec2 solution to the contents' depth as presented in the previous story - the hyperref pdf bookmarks that I set up to show up when opening the pdf file appeared to use the last \settocdepth setting as it's guide, not the individual parts. Of course I wanted that it would at least show the subsections for everything, if not for those parts that also showed in the contents pages. After some trying I solved it by putting \settocdepth{subsection} after the last \section{} in the last appendix. Putting it at the end of the file didn't work - there had to be some text after the \settocdepth command (and \newpage and \vspace{} didn't cut it either).

I noticed today I had a contents four pages long. Too much, obviously. You can set the general depth of the contents listing using
\setcounter{tocdepth}{n} where n is the level, starting with 0 (chapters only)
However, this can only be done in the preamble (i.e. before \begin{document}) and goes for the whole document. I wanted to have the level up to subsection for the normal chapters but I wanted the appendixes listed only as chapters, so no sections.

I found the package tocvsec2 which allows you to change the depth level in different parts of the document. You can set the level up to sections in one part:

I did not have to look far to find a spell checker to use on LaTeX files, ispell -t filenamex.tex works fine, though it doesn't skip all things non-text, such as bibtex keys, but those are easily skipped.

I chose british english for now, might ask around and go for american if this is more appropriate.

I had a little trouble when I turned a bunch of urls in a table in my thesis into \url{http://...} url's, which are then clickable urls in PDF files. Because of the \url command, the font changed into the standard typewriter format. Though I don't mind this for the occasional url (it makes them better identfiable as urls), in this case, my nicely fitted table didn't fit the page anymore because the font was too big.

I searched around a while to find the \urlstyle{} command, for example in this pdf but it took me a little while before I got it. I finally defined a command "urlwofont" (url without font) that makes anything liek \urlwofont{http:///} a clickable url but without a font change - the font stays the same as the rest of the text:

I will quote myself on IRC at work to illustrate this week's events surrounding my thesis:

Monday, 11 Jul 2005:
15:52 < Kira> maar ik heb helaas geen tijd om me nog in LaTeX te verdiepen om het allemaal daar in te doen

Loosely translated: But unfortunately I don't have time to delve into LaTeX in order to do it (my Thesis) all in there.

Guess what? I was wrong

Monday afternoon I wasn't going to, Tuesday afternoon I had my Thesis all in LaTeX including contents, bibliography and pdf bookmarks, and today I'm continuing to customize it with growing enthousiasm and ready to lay the final hand on it contents-wise.

I gave a seminar on my graduation thesis last week. The sheets and some additional information can be found here. Now all I have to do is finish my Master Thesis......