DHReutter

I recently acquired a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook for my more basic mobile computing needs - For things my iPod Touch is too small and my iBook is too big (and the iPad is too expensive). And because I despise Windows I wanted to go with Linux. And not just any Linux. There is a plethora of netbook distros in the wild, but I decided to give my second Linux distribution ever a try, namely Debian (which I still pronounce DE-bee-an, sue me). And boy, it has changed since the last time I used it.

After officially entering my contract with the Chair of General and Experimental Psychology at the LMU for my doctorate's degree, I think it's time to publish my diploma thesis on my web site. (A small information for all the British readers: diploma here in Germany doesn't mean the same as it does in GB. This piece of work is equivalent to a master thesis (and yes, obviously some British looked funny at me when I first mentioned I'd be doing my diploma).)

If I had known that googling for Daniel Reutter would firstly come up (as by Feb 2nd, 2009) with a seven year old entry into an online signature list, complete with that stupid sentence I put there out of boredom - I would have chosen another sentence.

I just stumbled over the following problem: I received a PDF file with a graph inside. I want to include the graph into my thesis, but I don't want to use pdflatex. I also don't want to debate this decision, I just want to extract the vector data from the PDF file into an EPS to include it into my latex file.

Today a new version of the great MacPorts tool has been released. MacPorts is a package system for MacOS X, as fink or apt of Debian fame. In other words, it opens the path to tons (5247 ports, to be precise) of open source software in a convenient and yet configurable way. It is very actively developed and most ports compile on my MacBook without further ado.

My blog is since quite a time now licensed as BY-SA, as opposed to the BY-NC-SA (if you have no idea what I am talking about, look at the bottom of the website to find a link, or find out more at creativecommons.org). And even though I stated the reasons for my decision, I still deem the other licensing scheme BY-NC-SA, which prohibits noncommercial use, valuable for several reasons.

Anyhow, it seems many people don't know about the difference between NC and non-NC licenses.

This is the first version of my identi.ca client for Mac OS X. It's under construction right now so it can be subject to change, but the UI stands mostly.

I am currently trying to get MATLAB (a high-level language and interactive environment for computational problems) to work properly with some piece of visualizing hardware and ever so often I find small pieces of MATLAB terribly annoying, to say the least.

Personally, I think I could last longer, but on the other hand I will quite possibly never find out.

(via Bad Astronomy.)

I'm in the middle of a heap of work, so I don't really have time for blogging.