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-

Special Holiday Episode and a Poem

Hello Readers!
This is a special holiday episode of the podcast. It is a discussion about software distribution and the pros/cons of having an app-store type method of distribution. I have also written a short poem for the holidays, which can be found below.

Twas the night before Christmas, some people say,

When old Steve Jobs took the holidays away.

You opened your gift; A laptop, alright!

But as you read the manual you shuddered in fright.

Although you had payed for the best laptop there is,

You found that your new macbook was actually his.

No freedom here, as in beer or in speech,

Step out of line, and a contract you'll breach.

But then out of nowhere you see a large sleigh,

With a penguin at the reins, here to save Christmas Day.

You say to the penguin, "This macbook, it sucks",

The penguin looks up and replies, "Hi, I'm Tux".

He hopped from his sled, with a "HeHeHe"
and whipped out a Linux live CD.

Your eyes light up, could it be true?
So many choices, like Arch or Gentoo

There's Red hat, and Suse, and quite a few more
Such as CentOS, Mandriva and Tiny Core

With a tip of his Fedora and a quick wave goodbye,
Tux jumped into his sledge and flew into the sky

So try a new distro, there is nothing to fear
And from GuysOnFOSS have a fantastic New Year!

Music credit: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Humble indie

Well a couple of exciting things has happened with the Humble indie bundle. First of all, all of the people who purchased it now have a code which they can use on steam to get another way to download them. Secondly there running it for the second time. I would personally say that its a great thing to purchase the games from as you can choose what you wish to pay and can dedicate how ever much you want to different thins like the developers or to the charity they have selected. The games are also released for all major os's meaning Windows, Linux and Mac.

Heres the link and if I don't post again have a great Christmas.

An Update

Hello,

Sorry about the long gap between posts. It seems like things pile up all at once.

So whats new with the GuysOnFOSS? We've all been involved at some level with a website design project, which has taken up much of our time. In addition, it is that time of year when things really get busy in the tangible world with exams and the holidays. I will make a greater attempt to update my Twitter feed more often when I come across things that I find interesting, and perhaps just to let you know what we're working on. If you haven't followed me on twitter yet, you can do so by following this link: http://twitter.com/the_thoth.

As for the podcasts, those seem to have been put on hold as well. We'd like to start them up again, but don't hold your breath, at least until the new year. We still have one episode that was recorded several weeks ago, but the news is outdated by now. The reason I bring it up is that it contains an excellent debate between Mekapaedia and Crazy2be. Perhaps I will release that as a bonus.

Stay tuned!

-The Thoth-

Why webcomics hate Woofy

Awhile ago we had some one who came across the blog through a search for why Web comics hate Woofy so I figured I would give a fairly basic explanation why. The most basic reason for the upkeep of the server. If you had every one just download the web comics through Woofy or some other script you would have a serious drain on a server but method to pay for the bandwidth. The only way most web comics are able to continue there hosting of the comics they need ads to earn them revenue so that they can afford the server hosting. While this issue does arise most people still often complain that people are leeching the bandwidth from the people who read the comic through the site and not through a separate download method. I personally have to disagree with people who complain about web comic downloaders because I use it purely for the purpose of having a backlog of comics so if I go some were with out wi-fi I can simply enjoy a whole bunch of comics and even make up for ones I might not have read. Any ways the next reason why people do not like Woofy is copyright concerns. Some artist's I assume believe that when people download there web comic through something like Woofy there work is being pirated like people pirate games. These claims I find less legitimate as they can just as easily add were to find the site and who the author is under the strip with an extra 10 pixels to the border. Any ways I hope you guys enjoyed my tired rant that should have been written like 3 weeks ago. Also I'm sorry if my writing wanders a lot if you have any questions leave a comment and I'll reply to the best of my ability.

No Podcast This Week

Hello readers,

Just thought I'd do a quick post to let you all know that there will not be an episode this week due to all of us having commitments. You can stop staring eagerly at your computer monitor waiting for the podcast. We will be back (I hope) next week with episode 9.

Happy Halloween from all of us at GuysOnFOSS!

A Quick Primer to SSH

A quick guide to SSH:

Have you been at work and think "Hey I can do this so much faster with x on my computer at home!" Well, SSH will solve your problem. SSH - Secure SHell - is a protocol for calling a remote system and controlling it via the shell. Designed in 1995, it has been put through the tests of time and now in version 2 it is one of the best ways of remote shell access.


"Wait. I want to use Firefox (or any other graphical program). This only gives me shell"

SSH offers x forwarding, enabling you to use programs with GUI.


"The Internet says that remote control is insecure"

SSH is secured by a public key system with a choice of another symmetric cipher (invoked by -c)


"Ok, it seems cool, how do I use it?"

Setting up the client is easy. For Linux and Mac users this is already built in. For Windows users, there are many clients available such as PuTTY, KiTTY, etc.

Linux/Mac:

0. Make sure that you have an account on a remote system with SSHd running.
1. Open a shell session.
2. Type: ssh user@ip
(replace user with your username on the remote system and ip with remote ip)
3. It will prompt for a password, type it in
4. Use normally, but remember, you are in the remote system.


Windows:

0. Get PuTTY
1. Type in your credentials
2. Login!


For more info, use man ssh

The Eighth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

Inerg and The Thoth fly solo... For about 8 minutes. The show is shorter this week due to audio problems, hopefully these will be fixed by next week. Enjoy the 8th episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast!

News:

Gene Simmons gets ddos'd

Pirate Bay Going to Space?

Google Chrome 7

Radon 6800 series

Officer Bubbles

Officer Bubbles Original Video

Laptop Thief Returns Data

WD 3 Terabyte hardrive

Restraining Order Served Over Facebook

NASA 100 Year Spaceship Program

Topics:

Learn how to use man

MenuetOS

Program For The TI-8x Series Calculators

Novell For Sale

Troll Physics - Just for fun

Try it For A Week: Peppermint

Due to audio problems, Inerg will be publishing his 'Try it for a week' on a separate occasion.

Music credit: 'Killing Time' and 'Enter The Party' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)