Index

A domain for the Omega Research Foundation

Popko, my dad, has founded the Omega Research Foundation in 1984 (when I was two years old). The Foundation was to serve as a a vehicle for his research into cyclical changes within ecological and social systems. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on March 22, 2007, at 21:03 | No comments

eps2eps to the rescue when epstopdf complains of no bounding box

PDFLaTeX doesn't like encapsulated postscript images. If you want to use .eps files with pdflatex, you can convert these files to PDF using Sebastian Rahtz' epstopdf, and then remove all .eps file extensions from the image locations in your .tex source files. Then, the latex command will look for .eps file and the pdflatex command will look for .pdf, .jpg and .png files. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on March 02, 2007, at 23:03 | No comments

Making flash cards on-line

I'm learning Spanish from a Dutch method called Eso sí. Approaching chapter 10, I noticed that I would benefit from first learning the words introduced in each chapter before starting on the chapter's text and exercises. From doing some exercises on Spanish learning websites (especially www.studyspanish.com), I noticed that flash cards can be a great help. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on March 02, 2007, at 00:03 | 2 comments

Scaling bitmap graphics versus scaling vector graphics

Due to some organizational changes, past December, I had to remove the S.A. suffix from the Sicirec logo: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on February 27, 2007, at 17:02 | No comments

Apache’s ForceType directive overrides AddCharset directives

Yesterday, after uploading a refreshed www.sicirec.org, some character encoding issues popped up because I had converted the website's content from ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) to UTF-8. (I wanted to be able to type and paste special characters from PuTTY into VIM without worrying about the particular encoding of each file.) Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on February 26, 2007, at 23:02 | No comments

Replacing the trunk of a Subversion repository with a feature branch

For the Sicirec website, I use Subversion to track all changes. When working on big changes which take more than a day to implement, I follow the Feature Branches branching pattern. This pattern means that the trunk remains relatively stable and usable for everyday updates while I can climb in a feature branch whenever I want to work on the big new feature(s). Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on February 25, 2007, at 13:02 | 3 comments

Nested hashes derail Rails’ url_for helpers

While working on the Sicirec PostgreSQL database front-end today, I had to pass a lot of nested parameters to a link_to helper in Rails. Software being what it is, this didn't work. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on February 19, 2007, at 19:02 | No comments

Automatic resizing of an HTML <textarea> element

Today, while improving the Rails GUI for the Sicirec database, I was struck once again by how annoyingly small <textarea>s can be when having the user type lots of text. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on February 18, 2007, at 20:02 | 4 comments

Using an outgoing SSH tunnel from behind a NAT for incoming VNC

Laurelin is working as an Au Pair for a Greek family in—where else than Greece. Her hostess has arranged for an Internet connection through Vivodi Telecom to allow Laurelin to maintain some form of contact with her friends and family at home. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on February 17, 2007, at 23:02 | No comments

Using the standard HTML link colors

Occasionally, I have to foray into web design. From the look of this blog you can deduce that I'm not really into the design part of web design. First and foremostly this is because I suck at graphics and colors. But another reason is that I assume that people visit my blog to read some text and not to look at the fancy graphical borders and background of that text. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on February 02, 2007, at 23:02 | 1 comment