About
Andrew Stacey
Information about my research, teaching, and other interests.
By: Andrew Stacey
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home :: HowDidIDoThat
About This Blog
Collected here are a load of hints, hacks, and howtos that I have used at some point to get my computers to behave the way I want them to (as opposed to me behaving the way they want me to). Often these only need to be done once, until I do something stupid like upgrading my system. By that time, however, I've usually forgotten the details of how I did whatever I did. So I've started keeping notes. I'm switching to keeping these notes in a blog as the most useful resource that I've found is other people's blogs explaining just how they got the text in their xterms to be mauve. So I've put these here just in case they are useful to someone else.
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 (HowDidIDoThat :: Hints)
Galeon Tab Position
The gconf-editor provides more configuration options than are otherwise
apparent, in particular the option for the position of the tab bar (located
under UI).
Atiyah's Genealogy: Hyperbolic by Construction
Here is a rendering of Atiyah's mathematical genealogy. It is currently woefully incomplete, in particular Hodge's supervisor is not known on the MGP.
This version uses GraphViz to render the graph
directly as a png and as a postscript file. The dot file originally
produced by the ggg program was heavily edited to create the hyperbolic
effect (the fonts didn't seem to scale correctly when I created a svg file,
and so a png seemed the best way to display the file). The picture is
rather large so I haven't embedded it in this page. You can download or view
it by clicking here for png, here for another
png, and here for postscript.
Generating a Genealogy Graph
On this entry I'll document what I did to generate a genealogy graph. I'm doing this after having done one for the department of pure mathematics in Sheffield whereas what I should have done is started documenting when I started doing that graph. Ah well, better late than never. This is the steps for generating the graph of an Important Mathematician.
About These Hints, Hacks, and Howtos
I am my primary audience for this section of the website so these hacks are written so that I can follow them. Therefore although I have tried to be helpful in how I write the entries, they probably assume a reasonable familiarity with the programs that I am familiar with. In particular, I am not a programmer but I have been using Linux for a decade now and have picked up the basics here and there. I figure I'm reasonably competent with perl and shell scripts and know my way around a typical system.
Updating Fink Offline
Having figured out how to keep a Ubuntu machine up to date without connecting it to the internet, I'd like to be able to do the same for the fink installation on my iBook. It's not too hard, but there doesn't seem to be a single set of instructions for how to do it so I've gathered together the necessary steps here.
MathGrep - Search and Replace in Mathematics
This is a Perl script which does either a search (known in the Unix world as a grep) or a search-and-replace on a LaTeX document looking only in sections of mathematics.
Updating Ubuntu Offline
I have two machines running Ubuntu. One runs Edgy but is not connected to
the internet. The other runs Dapper and has a fast connection. So to keep
the Edgy one up to date I want to download the software on the Dapper machine
and transfer it; but I want this to be as easy as possible so I want to use
the apt system as much as I can. The following does not depend on
the fact that the machine connected to the internet runs Dapper, though it
was useful for figuring out some of the information that I needed. It should
be simple to modify this process for another machine.