Patrick's Blog

I changed the blog design to something that looks very similar to the other parts of my webpage.

While the WordPress theme code is not as ugly as I initially thought, I would still consider it as horrible code and I think software like wordpress would greatly profit from a switch to the beloved smarty template engine.

I hope this is my last website related post for 2008.

I just finished uploading a new version of my website. It’s tailored towards my new role as a PhD student at ETH Zurich. I started this position already back in September, but only now found the time and motivation to write about it.

I hope everything works as expected with the new website.

I often have to convert graphics etc. in a certain directory to some other format. The loop below shows how to do this. This is trivial, but as I don’t use it often enough, I keep forgetting the exact syntax and thus have to google for it each time, which sucks balls.

for f in $( find . -name '*.eps' ); do
epstopdf $f
done

Another very useful one-liner:

for f in $( find . -name '*.pdf' ); do ps2pdf14 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress $f temp.pdf; mv temp.pdf $f; done;

this will embed all the fonts in the PDFs.

The prices of memory are currently quite low, so I thought I upgrade my workstation (running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn) from 2GB to 4GB. However, after the memory-upgrade the orangish Ubuntu-progress bar would just stall at around 15%. Rebooting and switching to the verbose, non-graphical boot-up, I got an error saying something about “Bad page state in process ‘modprobe’”. I googled a little bit and found a page describing a similar problem. There the solution was blacklisting the module intel_agp. As my motherboard doesn’t feature an on-board graphics chip anyways, I thought it wouldn’t hurt blacklisting this module. Et voilà: the computer seems to work fine now, with 4GB of RAM (don’t really know what’s the actual explanation of this behavior).

Recently, I found this incredibly cool picture on digg: There are 74 bands supposed to be in the picture.

Solution can be found here.

I’m currently playing around with RoundCube Webmail. I followed the description in the support wiki on dreamhost in order to set it up on my account, this worked flawlessly. This seems to work great and looks beautiful, too; one thing that now bugs me: the connection is unencrypted!

I decided to finish with Swiss web hosters, who in my experience are bad (and pricy). This website is now hosted in the US on the servers of www.dreamhost.com. So far I’m really happy with their offering.

I will migrate my website in the next days, so expect some breakage.

Update: the migration seems to have been successful; if things still break I guess the most probable cause are DNS servers which haven’t updated their mappings, yet.

One of the funniest papers, I’ve ever read (when I come to think about it, I guess it’s actually the funniest): Ray Tracing Jell-O Brand Gelatin. Not that I would be particularly interested in graphics all of the sudden, but this is just too good, to deny it.

Paul Heckbert’s Jello site

Last Friday, early morning, I arrived back in Switzerland.

Below you can find a last picture of Boston, that I took late last year.

On August 7th I started an internship in Boston (more specific Cambridge), where I’m working for MERL. If all goes well, I will stay here for approximately half a year, i.e. I should be back in Switzerland at the end of January.
So far MERL is really a great place to work at: very smart people, interesting projects, interns and full-time employees from all around the world: I can highly recommend it.