Recent Changes

2016-07-04

• 20:44 UTC (new) (history) 2016-07-04 Compiling a single Beamer frame in AUCTeX . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I basically stopped using Beamer. I turned to reveal.js, and did a few presentation in it, using Org-mode’s exporter. That was nice, my slides were not “like anyone else’s” (since everyone and their mother uses Beamer), and even equations worked great thanks to MathJax. Some time ago, I taught a Calculus course (which is a challenge on its own, probably worth a blog post or two, especially that it is not aimed at mathematicians, but geographers – but that’s another story). The slides are very diagram-heavy – you know, all sorts of stuff like tangent lines (since we’re doing derivatives), approximations of arc length or areas (since we’re doing integrals), and occasional cute pictures (since we’re also having fun, or so I hope at least). And it turned out that reveal.js (or at least the Org reveal exporter) really doesn’t like images. And it didn’t let me zoom them. Maybe if I were a CSS wizard, I could make it play nice. But I’m not, and I started missing Beamer, with its very precise control of what goes where. So I came back.

2016-06-27

• 12:02 UTC (new) (history) 2016-06-27 Make yourself known – results . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Now that the dust has settled, let me write a few words about the results of the Make yourself known contest. Let me break the bad news first: I didn’t win. Not that I expected that (though I had a faint hope), but I have to say that I’m just a little bit disappointed. Here’s why. There was just short of 300 contestants at the beginning; it turned out that only 70 of them lasted to the end. I was one of them, so I may officially call myself a “finalist” (though “semifinals” would probably fit better). Out of these 70 people, sixteen were chosen for the finals – and here’s where my (slight) disappointment comes from: I was not one of them. But there are plenty of good news.

2016-06-20

• 19:52 UTC (new) (history) 2016-06-20 Easy Javascript logging . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I’ve been doing some JavaScript coding recently. Before you run off screaming, let me tell you that JavaScript is not that bad. Yes, it has C-like, unlispy syntax, but at its heart it is quite a nice language. Today, though, I didn’t want to write about JS in general, but about one small detail. While debugging JavaScript code, it is often useful to sprinkle console.log statements in your code. Also, if you want to check the value of some more complicated variable, you need to JSON.stringify it first. Of course, writing repetitive pieces of code is not what an Emacs user would like to do, so I hacked this:

2016-06-13

• 20:14 UTC (new) (history) 2016-06-13 Displaying pdfs on the right . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I decided that I’ll give PDF tools a shot. Wow. Just wow. Never going back to Evince. (Well, almost never – Evince does have one or two options not present in PDF Tools, but I hardly ever use them). If you are an Emacs user on GNU+Linux, I strongly advice you to try PDF Tools out. Especially if you do a lot of LaTeX work in AUCTeX (like I do) and/or if you need to read or create PDF annotations (highlighting and/or notes) – it’s really great. (I did once experience some problems with said annotations, though.) I was a bit afraid about the efficiency – but man, it’s really fast! A great piece of work indeed. I have a few problems with it, though.

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