LaTeX Part 1 - History

Throughout history there have been people who identify a problem, and instead of idly accepting the situation, they produce a solution. These are people like Henry Ford who noticed the inefficiency of automobile production and invented the assembly line, a standard in modern manufacturing. Or perhaps we consider Bette Nesmith Graham, painter and more importantly white out inventor. She saw a common problem and instead of just chucking out entire sheets of typing she set out to fix the problem. Often these innovators do not realize the full potential of their solution to one problem. Who doesn't have a can or two of WD-40 in their house? This was originally a product to solve a specific space related problem, but it is now used on everything from zippers to distributer caps.
There is another case in which a project was designed due to solve a daily irritation which took off quite dramatically. Of course I am talking about the subject of this article: TeX and more specifically LaTeX.

To understand where LaTeX came from we must first examine it's foundation, TeX (pronounced tɛk). TeX was invented by a man by the name of Donald E. Knuth. Donald was growing frustrated with the current typesetting practices in the 70's. In fact his own book, The Art of Computer Programming, was re-pu

blished in the 70's he found the typesetting to be hideous. A few months later Knuth decided that he would not accept the situation idly and set out to produce TeX. The project was started in 1977 and Knuth

predicted that he'd be able to finish it in one year. His estimate was off by about 10 years.

However, Knuth's system did not really take off until the invention of a macro package called LaTeX. LaTeX was invented by a man named Lamport as a way for the user to concentrate on the writing instead of the formatting. Think C instead of Assembly. Today if you were to start writing a book in TeX, you'd most likely use LaTeX. It does a bunch of automatic formatting by section, chapter, etc. in order to make the document as readable as possible. This system really lets the author focus on the content, and then make stylistic changes later.

Next article: Plain TeX vs LaTeX

Very Useful Links:

Big Online LaTeX Beginner's guide

Nice PDF for LaTeX Beginners

Nice PDF for Plain TeX Beginners

WikiBook on LaTeX

History

Wiki pages: LaTeX TeX

-The Thoth-

A Minecraft diary thing

So i've been gone awhile and the Thoth has been bugging me to do some posting so ill be doing a day by day type thing of Minecraft. Similar to what PC gamer is but im doing this on my server which about half of the blog team plays. Those who do play are me Inerg, Crazy2be and Mekapedia and then the odd friend that does join. Any who here goes for day 1.

So the first thing I would like to state is that I started this in a world were me and

Crazy2be

created a house like thing already. I'll do a walk through it sometime later maybe day 3 any

ways. Lastly the reason why I have glow stone is due to a mod that lets us set spawn rates so we set stone to have a .05% chance of dropping glow stone since you cant get it in multiplayer.

So I started off my day deciding ill go and look in Crazy2be's collecting hole thing to come across this.

Due to issues with the image's im merely making them links for now.

Luckily for me the 2 creepers got caught on each other and couldn't walk up the stairs so I was able to easily dispatch them with my bow. Also to any readers who play on server I highly suggest using a bow as a weapon as the combat system is pretty rough if you try and stab your enemies.

Any ways later in my day I decided to go and look in a cave that I had found earlier that was huge. So as I was exploring this cave I found this.

Due to issues with the images I'm making them links for now.

Thats right a single yellow flower cooking by some lava. This is the first time I've found a flower underground or even so close to lava so I decided to include it in my daily log. Lastly in my adventures in the cave I came across this.

Due to issues with the images I'm making them links for now.

Its not the easiest to see sadly and I wasn't able to disable my HUD do to being in combat but it was a worthy shot :). Its a picture were I had three skeletons and a zombie after luckily for me a Skeleton shot one of the zombies so I got to have a bit of a easier time killing them :). Actually that was the last I forgot to add I was working on a cart system as well.

Due to issues with the images I'm making them links for now.

And heres what I ended my day with creating a cart system to transport goods up and down from our mine. It didn't work great but I improved it on day 2 after Crazy2be broke it.

As a final not I would like to suggest that you at least try this game in single or multiplayer although I got really hooked once I started on multiplayer. Also Blogger get a better damn way to handle images while I can edit the HTML for placing them make it so that I don't I like being lazy :(. Also OH GOD THE PICTURES THEY RUIN EVERYTHING! I'll try and figure a way to make them small clickable links. Well for now I'm going to make them links later on ill make them better.

LibreOffice History

Wow Ladies and Gentlemen, it has been far too long. I doesn't seem like a month ago since I last posted. Anyways, the show must go on.

What have the GuysOnFOSS been up to lately? Not too much actually. Individual projects rumble onwards, and the new semester has brought more schoolwork... For most of us.

Recently I switched my office suite from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. Our readers will probably be familiar with the course of events which prompted the creation of LibreOffice, but if you missed it I will reiterate it here:

Sun Microsystems was the company which owned OpenOffice and it's closed source sibling StarOffice. When the data base giant Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, they also acquired StarOffice and OpenOffice, as well as OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris was killed and many feared that OpenOffice was going the same way. Fans of Sun were horrified. Oracle published this to the Sun Facebook page:

Hi, everyone! Just a quick heads-up: Now that the acquisition has gone through, we will be phasing out the Sun Facebook page over the coming weeks. Please join the official Oracle Facebook page to stay on top of Oracle/Sun-related news, connect with peers etc. Thanks!

Not surprisingly the comments went mostly like this:

"Do not want." -Jeff Dudley

"Im not joining Oracle anything... Sun Rulez. Oracle Sucks." -Anthony ' Alby' Williams

"PLEASE dont kill that name an Logo!! PLEASE!!!!! Im devasteted, its actually a part of my life just disappearing.Please!!!For have many years havent I stared at the beatiful blues and greys of SUN? Many! It allways felt so comforting, and now? BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! -Magnus Nystrom

The feeling of impending doom was so strong that several devs started "The Document Foundation" built from the code of OpenOffice. Origonally the plan was to include Oracle in the new buisness by contributing code back; however, Oracle wanted nothing to do with it and threatened to fire the devs. 33 devs left Oracle and in September 2010, LibreOffice was born.

Thats the story, it's a relevantly old story, but hey, we haven't posted in a couple months so just pretend we posted this in January and you missed it. Next time I'll go into what I've found so far with LibreOffice.

Until then,

-The Thoth-