Some things that I keep having to look up about the Z-shell.

See more ...

I've decided to start using a document revision system for my papers. My current ad hoc method is getting seriously strained; exchanging copies with collaborators, merging their comments with my revisions, preparing different versions for different places (archives, journals, home pages); it was all getting too confusing.

So I had a look around on the web and found a paper (also available as a wikibook) promoting the use of subversion. This is actually a software revision system. However, the general principle is the same: a typical LaTeX paper consists of several text files and this is exactly what a typical piece of software consists of and thus what software revision systems are designed to track.

There are several different systems around and it's not clear which is the "right" one. Subversion certainly seems better than CVS, but there's also GNU Arch and its variants. I had a quick play with subversion, but am going to give bazaar a serious go.

See more ...

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.

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.

See more ...

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.

See more ...

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.

See more ...

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.

See more ...