Earlier today, I went to a local copy shop and had my diploma thesis printed. This afternoon, I will hand it in. The title is
Loop subgroups of Fr and the images of their stabilizer subgroups in GLr( ) and discusses a group-theoretical result. I assume that very few readers care about the content of the thesis, but maybe some are interested in a few assorted LaTeX hints. I m also publishing the
full TeX source code, maybe someone can make use of it.
Less chatty varioref
I m using the
varioref package, in conjunction with the
cleveref package. This provides a command
\vref fig:S3S4l which will expand to, for example, to Figure 1 on page 11 . But if the referenced figure is actually on the current page, the next page, the previous page or the facing page (in two-side layouts), it will say so: Figure 1 on this page.
This is very nice, but I assume that the reader of my thesis is able to find Figure 1 when it is visible, i.e. on the current or facing page. One can remove the referencing texts with the commands
\def\reftextfaceafter ,
\def\reftextfacebefore and
\def\reftextcurrent . But because
varioref puts a space between Figure 1 and this text, we will get a superfluous space even before punctuation.
The remedy is the command
\unskip, which removes this space again. So I use in my preamble:
\def\reftextfaceafter \unskip %
\def\reftextfacebefore \unskip %
\def\reftextcurrent \unskip %
Palatino and extra leading
I chose the Palatino font for my thesis, using the
mathpazo package. Various sources (such as the
KOMA-Script manual) suggest to use 5% extra leading:
\linespread 1.05
Counting figures independently from chapters
I don t have too many figures and tables in my thesis, and I want them to be numbered simple 1, 2, ... By default, LaTeX would say 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, ... This can be fixed using the
remreset package and these commands:
\makeatletter
\@removefromreset figure chapter
\renewcommand \thefigure \arabic figure
\@removefromreset table chapter
\renewcommand \thetable \arabic table
\makeatother
No widows and club lines
LaTeX already avoids these, but I wanted to get rid of them completely. This can be done with:
% Disable single lines at the start of a paragraph (Schusterjungen)
\clubpenalty = 10000
% Disable single lines at the end of a paragraph (Hurenkinder)
\widowpenalty = 10000 \displaywidowpenalty = 1000
Struck table lines
I had to typeset tables with some lines struck, and I could not find a ready command for that. I used the following definition, based on the code for
\hline. Note that it probably does not adjust well to other font sizes and needs to be adjusted manually:
\makeatletter
\def\stline %
\noalign \vskip-.7em\vskip-\arrayrulewidth\hrule \@height \arrayrulewidth\vskip.7em
\makeatother
Title page in one-sided layout
According to the KOMA manual, the title page as set by LaTeX is not meant to be the cover of a publication, and therefore has to be set with the margins of a right page i.e. a larger right margin and a smaller left margin. But when printing cheaply, one often just put a transparent sheet on top of the print, so the title page
is the cover. You can convince KOMA that you are right by using
\KOMAoptions twoside=false
\begin titlepage
...
\end titlepage
\KOMAoptions twoside=true
Not flushing the page for chapter heads
LaTeX would put the list of algorithms on a new right page. I found this a waste of paper for my few algorithms, and preferred to put the list right after the table of contents. You can override the LaTeX behavior using:
\tableofcontents
\let\cleardoublepage\relax % book
\let\clearpage\relax % report
\let\chapter\section
\listofalgorithms
This code also reduces the size of the heading to that of a section. The same trick also works with
\chapter.
Math in headings vs. PDF bookmarks
LaTeX with the
hyperref package creates nice PDF bookmarks from your chapter and section titles. Unfortunately, PDF bookmark names can only be plain strings, while the titles in the document might contain some math symbols. You can make both happy with
\texorpdfstring:
\section Stabilizer subgroups in \texorpdfstring $\GL_r(\Z/2\Z)$ GL\_r(Z/2Z)
Setting lines for the signature
The diploma thesis contains a small note which I have to sign, saying that I created it on my own etc. Below that, I put two labeled lines for date and signature, using the tabbing environment:
\begin tabbing
\rule 4cm .4pt \hspace 1cm \= \rule 7cm .4pt \\
Ort, Datum \> Unterschrift
\end tabbing
Another attempt to shorten my list of movies where not having seen them makes me an absolute philistine, according to various friends: Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffmann. Ignoring the tragic history behind it (the French penal system in French Guiana during the colonial era I didn't know about this from school), it's great entertainment. There is a kind of happy end, but nowhere close to what Hollywood does to its stories these days...
A long time on the to watch list: The Fifth Element by Luc Besson. I don't know why but I had always been sceptical if I'd enjoy this one, but my feeling was completely wrong. Real fun.
While I think the basic idea of superheroes getting older and having a midlife crisis, or a daughter, (and of course during the film, getting back into action) could make a wonderful film, the ending of Watchmen left me with a bad feeling about the whole film. But then I never read or watched superhero cartoons anyway, so maybe it's just that I'm not the intended audience for this one.
Finally, V for Vendetta is another interpretation of the 1984 theme (actually, it's the interpretation of a graphic novel, but I've not read that), with a very well chosen John Hurt as Big Brother (or, I should say, High Chancellor Adam Sutler.) With quite a few slapstick moments, this isn't really as dark as the theme might suggest.
by Jared Diamond has a really interesting analysis of how human history was determined by geography and the availability of plants and animals suitable for domestication. Part of the explanation for the apparent lack of intelligent aliens could be planets where the dominant species was stuck in a situation like that of the people of New Guinea, the lack of plants and animals suitable for domestication prevented their society from developing. A stone-age human civilisation could potentially be stable for millions of years.
The article says Extra-terrestrials might not only resemble us but have our foibles, such as greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others resources . Well for starters a species that can displace all other contenders to become the dominant species in their planet would have to be capable of greed and violence. So that is probably correct but is not really going out on a limb.
by Stephen Baxter (and more briefly in the sequels).
Probability
The universe is a large place. Making a specific prediction about the first alien species that we might encounter might make some sense. But given the potentially billions of species that might be out there we should assume that some of the more improbable forms are represented. Claiming that anything in particular is impossible seems very rash.
Also anyone who makes claims about what evolution should do seems to have missed the point. What evolution does is to give rise to species that tend to be a better fit for the environment. Different environments result in different creatures. We can try and predict what creatures might evolve, but we don t get to say that things should happen.
On Saturday, I joined 
Version 0.7.7, a shiny new bug fix release of 
Right now, your government is probably engaged in the discussion
of the 
A few months ago I did an interesting discovery about using my cellphone to go on the internet via bluetooth. I had this strange situation before where it just stopped working, and after revisiting all configs it worked again.
What really happens is that my cellphone somehow crashes, after which I power cycle it by removing the batteries. The phone then boots again, but here is the twist: the service channels in the phone are re-allocated and apparently in a random order!
This implies that the RFCOMM channel configured in the /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf file is possible wrong now!
Solution: just browse the services again with sdptool browse, adapt the file and it should work again!
Yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting and broken behaviour of Django: Running 
This year, at DebConf 10, I'll very probably have the pride to attend the conference
along with my 22 y.o. son, Jean-Baptiste.
JB began a 3 year cycle to graduate in electronics and industrial
computing at 
This has robbed me of several days of my life, so I want to bring Google juice this this problem.
IF you have a Pylons or TurboGears application or anything else that uses the fantastic EvalException WSGI middleware for web debugging of you web program and have the following symptom:
* on a crash the traceback page shows up, but it has no css style and no images
(I know, I suck).
Among the main highlights of the week, I just want to cite
Welcome on board,
Mehdi! (now you're doomed: you must continue
doing that!)
):
