Archive for November, 02007
Awesome HTML Validator Extension for Firefox
Monday, November 12th, 02007This morning I had need for an in-browser HTML validation tool. I quickly found the Firefox HTML Validator Extension and it's even more than hoped for. It is an awesome tool! If you're doing web development and care about creating standards compliant HTML, you need this tool.
I'll have to fix those 69 warnings that show up on this blog's front page sometime soon.
Gnuplot’s epslatex terminal for PDF LaTeX plots
Sunday, November 11th, 02007As I mentioned in Fun with Gnuplot, you can use Gnuplot's epslatex terminal to create really nice vector graphics having fonts that exactly match your LaTeX documents. This post describes the general process I follow to accomplish this.
Employment Update
Saturday, November 10th, 02007
I left Sandia and CDS last month after almost five years of service to take a new position. For two weeks now, I've been serving as Vice President of Development and Implementation for Pay Lynxs, Inc. - a software startup in headquartered in Albuquerque, with an exciting product and business model centered around banking money transfers for international remittance. That is, immigrants electronically sending money to their home countries.
In this role, I'll be concentrating on scalable software development and quality assurance processes to ensure that the company's products get to market correctly and quickly. In addition, I'll be working on system architecture, feature development, and project management. It's a very challenging and exciting opportunity for me.
I'm still riding my bike to work, except for Fridays when Elisa drops me off and picks me up so we can more efficiently execute our weekly go-out-to-eat night. The ride is ~ 23 miles round trip or about twice the distance it was to Sandia and back, but I'm very much enjoying the extra distance, as it gives me time to contemplate the challenges that face me in my new position and much of the route is either on bike paths or passes through beautiful neighborhoods that I normally don't get the chance to see. I'm very happy that Albuquerque has done such an excellent job making the city bicycle accessible.
Fun with Gnuplot
Thursday, November 8th, 02007I've created a few plots with Gnuplot this semester that I'm fairly proud of. Three examples are shown below. The inline thumbnails are screen shots of PDF plots. If you click on the image, you'll be taken to the PDF file in all its vector glory.
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| The mathpazo (Palatino) LaTeX fonts are shown above, but I've also created PDF versions with txfonts (Times) and the the default LaTeX font (Computer Modern) for comparison. |
There are two really great things about these plots:
- They were created with a completely free / opensource tool chain, and they look quite good.
- Using Gnuplot's epslatex color terminal allows me to combine vector EPS output with custom LaTeX post-processing so that, for example, the fonts of the plots exactly match those of my LaTeX documents, including all of the fancy math and other special symbols I can imagine.
The ability to create publication-quality plots like this will be a great benefit when I start working on my MS Thesis in earnest next semester. The process of creating these plots is admittedly somewhat arcane (the subject of an upcoming blog post), but this can be automated with a Makefile, and I think the results are worth the effort.
