Deep Thoughts by Robert Felty

Finally getting around to releasing some more plugins. I started using the Fancy Archives plugin by Andrew Rader about the same time I started using his Fancy Categories plugin (maybe in the reverse order actually). I have been modifying it for some time now, and it seems appropriate to release it as a new plugin. The functionality is best described by simply looking at my archives list on this blog. The default wordpress archives list is a simple unordered list. This plugin gives it some dynamic capabilities, similar to the default on Blogger. I have decided to keep increasing the version number from what Andrew was using, so I am calling this version 0.6. Here are the main highlights:

• Changed name from Fancy Archives to Collapsing Archives
• Changed author from Andrew Rader to Robert Felty
• Added option to link to archives.php
• Added option to list in chronological or reverse chronological order
• Added triangles which mark the collapsing and expanding features
  That is, clicking on the triangle collapses or expands, while clicking
  on a month or year links to the archives for the said month or year
• Changed behavior from starting all expanded and then collapsing on page
  load to the opposite
• Removed the rel=’hide’ and rel=’show’ tags, because they are not xhtml
  1.0 compliant. Now uses the CSS classes instead

You can download it from the Wordpress plugin repository.

I started using the Fancy Categories plugin by Andrew Rader about 6 or 8 months ago. I have been slowly modifying it for some time now, and it seems appropriate to release it as a new plugin. (Note that I thought that Andrew Rader disappeared as well, but I now have found him at his new home at void*. The functionality is best described by simply looking at my categories list on this blog. The default wordpress categories list is a simple unordered list. This plugin gives it some dynamic capabilities, similar to the default on Blogger. I have decided to keep increasing the version number from what Andrew was using, so I am calling this version 0.2. Here are the main highlights:

• Changed name from Fancy Archives to Collapsing Archives
• Changed author from Andrew Rader to Robert Felty
• Added triangles which mark the collapsing and expanding features That is, clicking on the triangle collapses or expands, while clicking on a month or year links to the archives for the said category. This uses html entities (dings) instead of images, for a variety of reasons
• Lists the titles of posts, instead of just listing subcategories
• Removed the rel=’hide’ and rel=’show’ tags, because they are not xhtml 1.0 compliant. Now uses the CSS classes instead
• MOST IMPORTANTLY — it is compatible with both the pre 2.3 database which uses categories, and the 2.3+ database structure which uses the tag taxonomy

You can download it from the Wordpress plugin repository.

I am working on learning R. For those that don’t know, R is a programming language and program a bit similar to Matlab, but is particularly designed for statistics. It is free and open source, and pretty fast and flexible. It has a pretty nice library interface, with lots of user contributed libraries at CRAN (The comprehensive R archive network — modeled after CTAN and CPAN (Tex and Perl respectively)).

On *nix systems, R uses the readline library to give a command history. So I can simply type the up arrow, and find the last command I used. I just discovered that it can also search the command history in the same way as in my BASH shell. Since I like vi, I use vi key bindings in bash. I was pleasantly surprised when R automatically used these as well. I am not sure if it gets them from my .bashrc file or my .inputrc file, since I have vi keymaps set in both.
.bashrc:

.inputrc

So when I am using R, I can search the history for “foo” by typing:
<esc> /foo

and then use ‘n’ and ‘N’ to go to the next or previous match.

What fun!!

I upgraded my home computer from kubuntu Feisty to Gutsy yesterday. This was actually my second attempt. I tried once a couple weeks ago, but my satellite internet connection crapped out after downloading about 95% of the packages, and the upgrade process quit. So I decided to download a .iso at work and burn it. The first thing I tried was putting in the DVD and booting the computer. After playing around with the install a bit, it became clear that upgrading was not going to be an option. It was going to reformat my root partition. I figured there had to be another way, so I exited the installer and searched on the internet. It turns out all I had to do was boot up normally in Feisty, and then insert the DVD. There was an upgrade shell script on the DVD which I ran with sudo, and about 40 minutes later, my system was upgraded.

screenshot using compiz with the following plugins: desktop cube (with skydome), cube gears, cube reflection, rotate cube

One thing that keeps getting better and easier in the Linux world, and especially in the Ubuntu world is OpenGL graphics. There are a couple different alternate window managers that take advantage of this, including beryl, compiz, compiz-fusion, kwin. I have tried beryl a couple times, but have never gotten it to work correctly. And when it doesn’t work correctly, Xwindows crashes, so you have to hit “ctrl-alt-f2″ to get to a command line, kill X, and then login again. Not too fun, and probably pretty scary to many linux newbies. Compiz seems a bit more stable than beryl, and is actually included in the Ubuntu distribution, and can be enabled very easily. Kubuntu seems to lag behind Ubuntu in some respects, and compiz (desktop-effects) is not included by default, but is now included in the repositories, and is very easy to install. I simply did:

Then to start compiz I simply did

And then I suddenly had all sorts of neat eye candy to play with. To configure different settings, one must look in the Settings menu from the KMenu. The first thing that most people will want to enable is the desktop cube. For this to work correctly, you should set the number of desktops in the KDE control center to 1, and then set the number of workspaces in the compiz settings to 4. This is a bit confusing at first, but is a pretty cool. From there, it just seems fun to play around with the different settings.

Desktop effects are not practical by any means, but they are fun, and I agree with others who say that people promoting linux should be showing all the “cool” things that linux offers, besides a free operating system with all sorts of built in programming tools, and a stable and secure environment. With that mind, I have also included a screenshot for others to enjoy.

The new lab I work in at Indiana University has an annual progress report, with its own stylesheet. There is a template available for Microsoft Word, but I much prefer LaTeX, so I am trying to write my own class file for that. One of the quirks of the stylesheet is that footnotes from the title are numbered. To clarify what I mean, consider the fact that many journal articles include a footnote or two in the title or author listing which may be an acknowledgment or a clarification of what institutions the authors are working at. These footnotes are usually not numbered, but instead are marked with a symbol such as an asterisk or a dagger, and this is what LaTeX does by default, when one uses the thanks command. Since the reports I will be writing are very similar to articles, I decided to try to just hack the article.cls file into srl.cls. After some experimenting, I found the line in the maketitle declaration which gives the symbols instead of numbers.

I simply commented this line out.

I also commented out the line which sets the footnote numbers to 0 after maketitle is finished typesetting the title

Presto! One part of the stylesheet is done.