May 2008 Archives

I have created a books section in my website. You can find it here:

http://leugim.com.mx/books

Right now you can only find the first chapter of Historias de Tristania, but soon I will publish the first chapter of Web Development With Seaside.

Enjoy.

The last two days I have been fighting with latex2html. I am writing my books in LaTeX, in a Debian GNU/Linux machine. The .tex source file has UTF8 encoding, as has any new text file I create under Debian. One of the books it is written in Spanish, so there are a lot of accented characters:

á, é, í, ó, ú.

When I used pdflatex to generate a PDF document, all was ok, but when I tried to generate HTML with latex2html, the accented characters were generated as:

á, é, Ã, ó, ú

By the way the preamble of my .tex file was like this:

documentclass[10pt,letterpaper]{book}

usepackage[spanish]{babel}

usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

usepackage{makeidx}

author{Miguel Cobá}

title{Historias de Tristania}

begin{document}

maketitle

include{ch1}

end{document}

latex2html -html_version 4.0,latin1,unicode book.tex

It appears that the problem affects all the systems that are related to Debian.

From Erich Schubert's blog:

"Any Linux/Unix/*BSD system is vulnerable that grants access to a key that was generated on an affected Debian or Ubuntu system"

Well, sysadmins, time to work! :)

Desde hace mucho tiempo había querido escribir historias fantásticas. El género fantástico, junto con la ciencia ficción son mis favoritos.

Cuando nació Tristán, supe que había llegado el momento. Escribiría para él  las historias que hasta entonces revoloteaban por mi cabeza. Ahora tienen una razón de ser. Son historias para mi hijo que crecerán conforme él crezca. Y las publicaré aquí en mi sitio, para que, si alguien tiene la paciencia y le interesan, pueda también seguirlas. Estas historias, al ser para mi hijo estarán escritas en español, nuestro idioma, nuestra lengua. El libro se llama "Leyendas de Tristania"

Por ahora tengo la primera parte de la primera historia. Se llama Torán. En unos días que la tenga completa (y corregida estilística y ortográficamente por mi amada esposa)  podrán leerla.

¡Estoy emocionado!

Last weekend I installed LaTeX and began to write my first book.

It is a book about Seaside.

I want to include, at least, the following topics:

• Seaside basics


• Advanced Seaside


• Ajax


• Announcements


• Persistance (GLORP, Magma, GemStone/S)


• Scalability (load balancing, static content caching)


• Deployment (big iron, VPS, Amazon EC2)


• Unit Testing


• Maintenance (monitoring, updating)


• Magritte (just a little)


• Data export (JSON/REXX)

I have read An introduction to Seaside by Michael Perscheid et al and I know about the book that Stéphane Ducasse and others are writing. Also I have read all I could from Ramon Leon's blog, Lukas Renggli's blog and the mailing lists. In spite of that I think that something else is necessary. This is my little contribution to the Seaside documentation.

I don't have idea how long this will take as I have never written a book (except my thesis). I have just finished the first chapter, but I hope that as the time pass I will write faster.

Wish me luck!

Today I updated the Debian GNU/Linux machines under my control in order to apply the fixes for DSA-1571 and DSA-1576.

I had to regenerate several keys in the servers but now it appears to be all safe again.

That was an error from a Debian package mantainer but, in spite of that, Debian remains my GNU/Linux distribution of choice.

Today I began to use LaTeX to write technical documents.

I learned that teTeX, the original default TeX distribution (LaTeX need TeX to work) on Debian is no longer maintained. The current default is TeXLive. So I installed it with:

# aptitude install texlive

This downloaded 338 MB of packages (when I tried to install texlive-full it offered to download 582MB, no thanks) .

I found this very helpful guide to LaTeX from Tobias Oetiker et al.

Now to write LaTeX documents.