[Linux] Bug in EPS export

When I try to export an OpenOffice.org drawing to EPS, the right and bottom parts of the drawing
are not shown, even though the bounding box seems right.
This bug started to occur when I upgraded to 2.2.1, although earlier versions
worked fine for me (I would guess the upgrade was from 2.2.0, but I am not
sure). Something definitely changed in recent versions regarding to EPS export
that caused things to stop working.

WORKAROUND 1) Select the whole drawing, then export. For some reason
it works like this.

WORKAROUND 2) Increase the margins by dragging
the margins to be far from the object. This screws-up the bounding box, but at
least the whole object is drawn. I then edit the eps file using a text
editor (vim),
and adjust the bounding box values according to the values I determine by
inspecting the drawing in ghostview ('gv'). The cursor in 'gv' shows the
bounding box value.

http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=76048

Keywords: cut-off, draw, impress, latex, bounding box, margins, eps, postscript

[Linux] Printing with CUPS

I was trying to use the KDE control pannel to add printers to my
system, but I would get:
"unable to create temporary printer"

I also had a perfectly working printer, which suddenly became "not
ready" from the acrobat printing menu. When I opened the KDE printing
control panel, and tried "start printer", I got
client-error-not-found

The solution was to add the printer through the CUPS web interface,
which is actually very good. The way to do it is to open the following
link in your browser (konqueror/firefox):

http://localhost:631/

And add the printer from there. The process was straightforward for my
Lexmark Optra T612.
For the record, my CUPS version is 1.2.10. Maybe I updated CUPS and
the KDE print manager got lost? Go figure.. at least I will only use
the CUPS web interface from now on.

Birthday photos / Fotos do aniversario!

Check out my Birthday photos are at:
Vejam as Fotos do meu aniversario em:

http://cortex.lems.brown.edu/~rfabbri/gallery

[Linux] Text encoding

I recently had a problem with special Portuguese characters and latex.
The problem is that the input must be in latin1 encoding, and I was
using utf-8 to edit an input file. It took me quite a while to figure
out why latex would not compile my recently edited file, but would
nicely compile my old files written in Portuguese. The error I was
getting was:

"Command \textcent unavailable in encoding T1"

Your command was ignored.

whenever a special symbol was found (for instance, the letter 'a'
circumflex). After studying encodings, unicode, ascii, latin1, and
also searching for similar errors, I found that Latex does not fully
support UTF-8 (as of this date), and that the input should be encoded
in latin1. The way to check the encoding of a file in VIM is to open
the file and type:

:set fileencoding

if it is utf-8 or anything other than 'latin1', you will get error
messages. So it really turned out that some recently edited files of
mine were in utf-8. My solution was then to type

:set fileencoding=latin1

inside GVIM, and save file, re-run latex and .... done.

PS: my latex preamble has the following:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[portuges]{babel}

I am using tetex-3.0_p1-r3

[Linux] Inkscape vector drawing program

I recently found this vector drawing program for Linux as a lightweight and libre alternative to Illustrator: http://www.inkscape.org

It looks very promising and it renders graphics and fonts very well with very nice effects (if properly installed). It can even render Latex math formulas using Effects->Render->Latex formula. And the nice thing is -- it converts the formulas to vectors, so no bitmaps are used, giving an amazing quality improvement to text in the drawings.

I am using Gentoo and I had to enable the plotutils use flag and re-emerge pstoedit in order for Latex rendering to work in Inkscape. The next thing I'd like to get working would be to have some easy way of specifying a Latex preamble so I could use my macros and commands when typing the formulas. A larger space for typing the formulas would also be part of my wish list.

Before Inkscape, I have been using OpenOffice.org draw, which is quite decent and has a good EPS export, although its rendering capabilities are far from Inkscape's, and it doesn't support reading SVG as of this time. OpenOffice.org can render Latex formulas if you use OOoLatex http://ooolatex.sourceforge.net - and it even supports a user-defined preamble. However, the formulas are in bitmap format only.

The main reason for my attempt to switch to Inkscape is that the effects (such as many options for stylized strokes) and rendering are way better than Open office draw. However, OOoLatex still is superior in certain features, for instance you can edit the formula and correct mistakes, something impossible with inkscape 0.45.1

New Photos

There are some new photos from last weekend:
http://cortex.lems.brown.edu/~rfabbri/gallery/
I went to Long Island with a Brazilian friend of mine.

Accepted paper

I just got a final notice of acceptance of my manuscript at ACM
Computing Surveys:

R. Fabbri, O. M. Bruno, J. C. Torelli, L. da F. Costa "2D Euclidean
Distance Transform Algorithms: A Comparative Survey", ACM Computing
Surveys, 2007 (Accepted)

Supplementary material will soon be available at:
http://distance.sf.net

I'd like to thank all my family, friends, and my current and previous
advisors for their enthusiastic support. I hope this research will
prove useful for the community.

Spring

More of my spring photos here

Angela's website

This is my girlfriend's website
www.guzdesign.com

Her name is Angela Guzman and she is a Graphic designer and Industrial designer. She crafted that
website Guz Design a long time ago but still looks cool. She will supposedly
update it soon with lots of interesting stuff she's been doing at her
master's program at Rhode Island School of Design. Angela loves making patterns, playing with typography, and combining 3D and 2D approaches to design.

photos!

I have been posting more photos at my album:

http://cortex.lems.brown.edu/~rfabbri/gallery

I will leave them public for a while, but after that you'll have to
ask me for password.
You also need a password in order to access my complete photo collection which includes a lot of older stuff.

Key Lime Pie

This is a nice & simple dessert from the Florida Keys.

6 egg yolks 1 can of condensed milk. (No evaporated milk!) 4oz of Key lime juice (maybe lemon or lime juice will work too)

Blend eggs and condensed milk, pour juice slowly while blending, then beat like a cake. The longer you beat, the puffier it gets.

Oven temperature at 325F, 15min. Let it cool, then freeze.

Shell World Florida Keys

Shell World Florida Keys
Originally uploaded by rfabbri.

This is a huge suvenir, home decor, and sea-shell store owned by my girlfriend's parents, take a look. They also have a website
www.shellworldflkeys.com

vxl vgui compilation workaround (and others)

In this post and the comments section below are various issues encountered while compiling VXL under Linux, and how I solved them.

To solve the following errors, put a blank "opengl_xmesa_include" in cmake. I have NVIDIA drivers and everything works fine after this.

make[1]: *** [core/vgui/tests/CMakeFiles/vgui_test_events.dir/all] Error 2 Linking CXX executable vgui_test_front_back /home/rfabbri/cprg/vxlprg/vxl-bin/lib/libvgui.a(vgui_accelerate_x11.o): In function `vgui_accelerate_x11::vgui_copy_back_to_aux()': /home/rfabbri/cprg/vxlprg/vxl/core/vgui/internals/vgui_accelerate_x11.cxx:426: undefined reference to `XMesaGetCurrentBuffer' /home/rfabbri/cprg/vxlprg/vxl/core/vgui/internals/vgui_accelerate_x11.cxx:435: undefined reference to `XMesaGetBackBuffer' /home/rfabbri/cprg/vxlprg/vxl-bin/lib/libvgui.a(vgui_accelerate_x11.o): In function `vgui_accelerate_x11::vgui_copy_aux_to_back()': /home/rfabbri/cprg/vxlprg/vxl/core/vgui/internals/vgui_accelerate_x11.cxx:458: undefined reference to `XMesaGetCurrentBuffer' /home/rfabbri/cprg/vxlprg/vxl/core/vgui/internals/vgui_accelerate_x11.cxx:467: undefined reference to `XMesaGetBackBuffer'

[Linux] Some NFS issues

I wanted to share partitions via NFS. I followed: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Share_Directories_via_NFS At first I got the errors:

* Error starting NFS daemon

and

clientmachinename:/directory/to/export: Function not implemented

The mistake was to skip the kernel compilation step. Simply build modules for NFS server and call modprobe nfsd. You don't even have to restart your machine.

Dinheiro :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OTkvn3zqeo&NR

A merda?

A felicidade pode estar contida na resposta `a seguinte pergunta: mando `a merda ou nao?

Valgrind for profiling

Valgrind is amazing. Not only it does memcheck, it also does code profiling without need to recompile everything. Use it with kcachegrind, and you can see a very nice visualization of the profiling data.

http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/cl-manual.html

Poperâ

1989: aos meus 9 anos, meus amigos mais velhos me chamaram para ir ao "Poperâ", a sensacao do momento:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lap_Nd6P0W4

Research Demo 1: Medusa

http://cortex.lems.brown.edu/~rfabbri/stuff/videos/medusa.mpg

Bottom-line: "Demo or die"

Stolen red schwinn sidewinder bike

I had my bike stolen between tuesday sept 5th and sept 6th. It was parked on 280 Benefit street, Providence, RI, with a coil-type lock wrapped around the frame and front wheel. It was bought on walmart: [Link]

If you have any notices of similar bikes, notices of similar thefts around this area, or any other information to give, please comment this post.