This says it all.
It would be excellent to get easy to produce hight temperature superconductors. High speed railways for everyone!!! :-)
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Debian release
Like Rafael I am becoming a bit frustraded in the release of Debian Lenny. But not because of how long it takes (well, partly of course) but more because of my lack of ability to help :-)
I like to help out in Debian, I have used this system for a looong time now and like to give back some of my time to make it a good distribution. So far I have been focusing on scientific packages like Octave through the Debian Octave Group but I also subscribe to the Debian Scientific Computing Project and Debian Science mailing list allthough I am not an active participant there.
Unfortunately since I began working here in Iceland I havn't given myself time to help out in the Octave group and I was hoping to be able to do some good over the hollidays but due to the Lenny freeze then not much is going on in Debian except bug squeezing and I don't have enough programming experience to do that. So I guess I will have to focus on something else (or perhaps I will begin to make some packages of debian science, lintian clean, that is allways usefull).
I like to help out in Debian, I have used this system for a looong time now and like to give back some of my time to make it a good distribution. So far I have been focusing on scientific packages like Octave through the Debian Octave Group but I also subscribe to the Debian Scientific Computing Project and Debian Science mailing list allthough I am not an active participant there.
Unfortunately since I began working here in Iceland I havn't given myself time to help out in the Octave group and I was hoping to be able to do some good over the hollidays but due to the Lenny freeze then not much is going on in Debian except bug squeezing and I don't have enough programming experience to do that. So I guess I will have to focus on something else (or perhaps I will begin to make some packages of debian science, lintian clean, that is allways usefull).
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Extracting images from pdf
During my studies I sometimes had to hold a lecture on a certain topic that was presented in a few published papers. When holding such lectures then you really should show some graphs and figures from those papers (don't worry, this falls under fair use of the copyrighted material ... I believe ;) ). An incredibly convenient tool to extract images from pdf files is the pdfimages tool that comes with poppler. All you have to do is issue the command
pdfimages paper.pdf some-prefix
where some-prefix is a name chosen by you and will be added in front of all the image names the command produces. After this your current directory will have all the images in the paper and theyr names will be some-prefix-000.ppm (or .pbm or .jpg but to get .jpg you have to give it the -j option and it won't work for all the images probably, pdfimages -j paper.pdf some-prefix). Then you can import the images into your Impress presentation (I use Impress to make my presentations and then export them to pdf) or use convert to switch between image formats if you are using a presentation software that doesn't support those formats pdfimages produces.
pdfimages paper.pdf some-prefix
where some-prefix is a name chosen by you and will be added in front of all the image names the command produces. After this your current directory will have all the images in the paper and theyr names will be some-prefix-000.ppm (or .pbm or .jpg but to get .jpg you have to give it the -j option and it won't work for all the images probably, pdfimages -j paper.pdf some-prefix). Then you can import the images into your Impress presentation (I use Impress to make my presentations and then export them to pdf) or use convert to switch between image formats if you are using a presentation software that doesn't support those formats pdfimages produces.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Christian tolerance
This just hurts my eyes, I just can't stop wetting them out of frustration of the stupidity behind this, whats more if you express your feeling of intolerance towards this then you better prepare for something like P.Z. Myers got in his mailbox, which he shows a few snippets of here, for posting his oppinion of the episode here.
I really do not have anything to add to this, just wanted to point this out to people.
N.B. All the christians that I know are tolerant and intelligent people, but of course its like the saying is, "the empty barrel makes the loudest noise" (which is perhaps why no one hears me ;-) ).
I really do not have anything to add to this, just wanted to point this out to people.
N.B. All the christians that I know are tolerant and intelligent people, but of course its like the saying is, "the empty barrel makes the loudest noise" (which is perhaps why no one hears me ;-) ).
Friday, July 4, 2008
News
Well, in coming August I am going to leave Denmark after 5 years of staying here. I got a job teaching at Háskólasetur Vestfjarða which is located in Ísafjörður but I will be staying with my syster to begin with. She lives in Hnífsdalur which is a small community 4 km north-west from Ísafjörður, a google maps image is available here.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief
Jonathan Miller made a very thought provoking 3 episode documentery about the history of disbelief in 2005.
This program can be seen on youtube but it is cut up into 19 small videos and so I am going to list the episodes (I don't like to embed videos here on the blog) here for better access for the reader and in hope that the videos will stay there and not be removed by copyright issues or some other reason:
Episode 1 (named Shadows of Doubt): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
Episode 2 (named Noughts and Crosses): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
Episode 3 (named The Final Hour): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
Enjoy this remarkable series.
This program can be seen on youtube but it is cut up into 19 small videos and so I am going to list the episodes (I don't like to embed videos here on the blog) here for better access for the reader and in hope that the videos will stay there and not be removed by copyright issues or some other reason:
Episode 1 (named Shadows of Doubt): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
Episode 2 (named Noughts and Crosses): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
Episode 3 (named The Final Hour): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
Enjoy this remarkable series.
The Enemies of Reason
Richard Dawkins of whom I am a great admirer hosted a two episode documentary about non-science things like astrology, alternative healing and the like called The Enemies of Reason. The shows are available on google video here: Part 1 and Part 2.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
