Archive for November, 2007

Crossloop

Monday, November 26th, 2007

An important addition for the non-local friendly administrator: CrossLoop. This is a piece of software I have long been looking for. Often I have to give computer support over the phone to friends and relatives. I have always wanted to set up a VNC or Remote Desktop connection but have feared either security or complexity issues (or both). With this tool, both problems have vanished. Just download, install and start. Let your friend tell you the security number displayed in large friendly letters and connect to his computer via an encrypted VNC channel that will find its way through NAT and firewalls.

On the the downside: It is “just” freeware (and not open source) and it is “just” VNC and not NX Server (NoMachine, FreeNX) or Remote Desktop but hey, its free its usable and its drop-dead easy to set up.

Posted in administration, network | No Comments »

Local Wikipedia Installation

Monday, November 26th, 2007

After reporting on how to obtain your offline installation of a great online dictionary, I want to point out how you can create an offline installation of a great online encyclopedia. I stumbled upon an article that describes just that. You have to download a Wikipedia dump. The rest is done by the package provided in the article. Be aware though that you will need around 9GB of storage during the preparation. Moreover, it took 24 hours to complete on my computer (1.7GHz Pentium-M Laptop). After that you you will just need the split dump files and the index. I put the index into a SquashFS container to save considerable space on in. I ended up with a compressed local Wikipedia installation (without images) that is relatively quick and inhabits around 4.1GB of HD real estate.

Posted in Misc. | No Comments »

dict.cc for Offline Use

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

Usually, I use either dict.cc or LEO as online dictionary or DING as offline dictionary. Both online dictionaries have the advantage of providing more information while the offline dictionary is, well, available offline and faster too. Recently, I discovered that dict.cc can be downloaded for personal use as well. As they have had some severe copyright infringement issues, where a company downloaded their dictionaries and claimed them their own, you will get a personal and traceable version of the current online database. The format of the file is exactly the same as the database of ding. (The database of dict.cc was originally based on ding’s database.)

This way, you can combine the best of two worlds: A comprehensive and current database and fast offline lookup.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

LaTeX and Graphviz

Monday, November 19th, 2007

Today, I had to create a few simple graphs to be included in a LaTeX document. As they were really simple I thought, I could probably produce them directly with LaTeX and would not have to switch back and forth between e.g. OpenOffice Draw (that I use for everything else, by the way). After some time I stumbled upon the combination of Graphviz, an extremly powerful graph generation toolkit and an apropriate way to plug it into LaTeX with the help of a simple macro
graphviz.tex.

It takes a graphviz description, writes it to an output file and includes the generated postscript file. Unfortunately, it ceased to work after processing 15 files. This is due to creating a new latex write channel for every file operation. While I have not found out yet how to free such a write channel (it remains active even after closing the file), I have changed the macro so it reuses the channel. Here is the Modified Graphviz Macro. Be cautious however, as the original macro does not state a license so I am not sure wheter I may change and redistribute it.

This macro provides a really powerfull and elegang combination of two outstanding pieces of open-source software. Now I can create simple graph descriptions right inside the LaTeX document that includes the rest of the Text.

Posted in LaTeX, Word Processing | No Comments »