I’ve been playing with (pdf)TeX lately, and I thought it might be a good thing (tm) to transfer some of the Project Gutenberg e-texts to pdf. So I did. And now what?

The Project Gutenberg website seems quite nice on the first sight… even on the second sight… the books are neatly organized and searchable and what not. Ok, now try to actively participate… Where’s their irc channel where I could ask questions? (they have none) Oh well, what about a usenet group or a web forum? Nothing like that, only a maillist (here I could include a long essay on why I hate maillists, let me skip it while just mentioning that maillists are generally unnavigatable).

Now I’m sick after having spent about an hour trying to find out how to submit the pdf files to Project Gutenberg. I learned all about how it should be formatted and what exactly I have to do and what I mustn’t do and all stuff I am not interested in. I have taken a .txt from Project Gutenberg, spent some time mostly playing with regular expressions and a bit of hand work (not everything can be done with regular expressions), and now I have a .pdf that I want to submit.

So… anyone knows how to submit it? I don’t and I’m not going to waste any more time searching for it. Later on, I might decide to publish the pdf’s elsewhere (prolly here).

Blah, lately I’ve been getting upset very easily… this morning, I responded to a hoax email that someone whom I don’t even know sent to about 200 people. I sent the response to all those 200 people and made it quite clear what I think about the sender. I think he deserved the public humiliation.

Is it even possible that I forgot to advertize my new project on my own blog?

So… here it goes: I created tsumego collections.

Some people obviously like it, as I can see some traffic from sources like something.mail.yahoo.com (someone sending emails with a link to my page?). I wonder if I should write an ad into rgg or godiscussions.

Well, repeating informations that you can find there seems useless, suddenly I don’t really know what to write… hmpfh…

Anyway, big thanks to toxygen for transferring the go fonts from metafont to type1 (in pdf, metafont fonts get included as bitmaps, which sucks big time, and type1 fonts get included as vectors, which rocks).

The other day I had an exam. It’s almost half of January, technically middle of winter, yet the temperature was around 10˚C in the morning. My one-hour walk to school was nice and helped me to relax before the exam. After seeing the test I was even happier, most of it was real easy. So I concentrated on the easy parts, and seeing that I already have more than 75 points (out of 100) and being sure that it’s completely correct, I decided not to try to write anything to the remaining two tasks (I prefer to write nothing than crap, I think it just looks better).

After getting out, I discussed the test with other students and one girl said that the prefessor doesn’t really care about most of the tasks and doesn’t really count the points… That the only important thing is that you get the derivative right. Crap… Shit… Why does this always happen to me? Why didn’t I know it earlier? Why did I decide to skip differentiations when learning for the exam?
Endless waiting in a corridor. The percentage of oxygen ten times less than usual. Fainting every while. Students disappearing from the row, and then coming out of the room either very happy or angry or just plain resigned. Finally, my turn… I find my papers and present them to the professor: “Hmmm, where’s the derivative?”, “umm, well, somehow, you know…”, “without the derivation I can’t let you pass… why didn’t you do the derivative…?” think, think, think, what can I tell him? Silence. “Ok, you’ll get another function to differentiate, last chance”. Crap.

Luckily, the one I got was rather easy, so I managed to do it and passed, but… it was close…

If I failed I would have to spend another whole day there (not to talk about also having to learn derivations), thank god…

There are three desirable things, pick any two:

• No orphans and widows (meaning single line of paragraph is not cut off on one page with the rest on another)
• “Řádkový rejstřík” (that’s Czech, I have no idea what it’s called in english, it means that the lines ((not only) on opposing pages) should be corresponding)
• Text area height stays the same.

It is impossible to have all three, if the lines are corresponding and the text area height stays the same, then you are sure to get some orphans and widows. If the text area height stays the same and there are no orphans nor widows, then you definitely have to break “řádkový rejstřík” (please, someone tell me what it’s called in english). And if there are no orphans nor widows and corresponding lines, then the text area height will vary.

As orphans and widows are definitely a no-no, and “řádkový rejstřík” seems important, I think it’s best to break the text area height, but I’m not sure… any (qualified) opinions?

Also, when you are typesetting verses, “řádkový rejstřík” usually gets fucked up, but still it would be nice for it to be at least partially ok. :-)

Hanging has been very popular recently… last week USA hanged Saddam, and now I am going to hang punctuation.

I have learned recently that pdfTeX supports hanging punctuation, which is pretty neat. An example:

=2
pcode enrm\-=300<br /> pcode enrm.=220
pcode enrm`,=200

I have made a test of hanging punctuation (open the file and read on). There are six pages, first three typeset in Toruńska Antykwa (a very beautiful font) and the other in Palatino. There are three versions: complete hanging punctuation, half hanging and not hanging.

I like Toruńska Antykwa with hanging punctuation, but I’m not sure which one. Maybe the best would be to hang the hyphens and leave dots and comas inside? (or hang them only partially)

On the other hand, hanging of Palatino seems to be a huge failure. Hanging comas and dots are awful (maybe if they were hanging just a very little bit it would be ok), and hanging hyphens are not particularly beautiful either (maybe if they were hanging less than a half…).

Now, what do you think?

2006 sucked. Sure, it could have been worse, but I think I wasn’t very lucky throughout the year 2006. Most of the things that could have gone wrong indeed did go wrong. I hope it will be better in 2007 (and I am quite sure it will).

Happy new year to everyone! :woot:

Winter is pretty quiet time of a year. Considering birds, crows sometimes caw, but there’s almost no beeping (except PC speaker (especially for vim beginners)) during winter.

However, on my way to school I walk past this bush, that is very, very loud. The beeping is particularly intensive during morning, my educated guess is that it keeps people living in radius of about one kilometer awake.

I have always wondered where all the birds disappear when it’s winter – and now I finally know…

I was really surprised when I was getting my system password at school. I got a paper with all the students’ names, and was told to rewrite mine. Noone would really care if I wrote down several others. Then I was required to sign the paper confirming that I got the password.

This whole process is so utterly ridiculous, I had to sign the paper, which makes it look like something important, but on the other hand I was shown passwords of dozens of other people (together with usernames, of course).

W00t!

I have finally reached rating 2000 in TwixT, my second favorite game. Although I used to be in top ten with rating around 1950, I am not in top ten (12th currently) with 2000 now… the times are a-changin’…

On a less positive note, I am currently playing twixt.ch.13.2.1 (13th championship, second league), and I need to finish second. Which basically means beating passenger, with whom the game is not looking really well after 11 moves.

Many people who have ever taught go have experienced it: someone comes and asks “is this move good or is that one better?”. You seriously don’t know but are pretty sure that the difference is not big, at least not on your level, even less on the level of the person who asked.

And you also notice that the person has made a totally catastrophical mistake just two moves ago. So you go ahead and tell them: “well, that move you had made before, it could have cost you 30 points”. But they don’t give a fuck, they just want to know the answer to their question.

You tell them that their question is irrelevant, that it doesn’t matter at their level, and that they had made a horrible mistake just before. They conclude that you are not strong enough to answer their question and go searching for someone stronger who could answer it…

A similar thing is someone not really strong showing a lot of rather deep variations very fast. They always make a horrible mistake around the second move, making all subsequent analysis useless. Yet they continue showing dozens and dozens of variations that have hundreds of mistakes…

These people can’t focus on the important things, they keep theorizing about things that are way beyond their ability and keep forgetting to keep their feet on the ground. I sincerely hope I’m not like that.