Rachel announced that she’d like to use LaTeX for her thesis, which (in my humble opinion) is a very good idea. So, given that the whole “typing commands” interface is a bit overwhelming, I thought that LyX would be a much better option.
I’ve been using LaTeX for years for all kinds of stuff and I find its much better than Word for doing stuff like equations, formatting, bringing together several documents (possibly by several authors) into a cohesive whole. LyX attempts to give a more Word-like interface to LaTeX and, in my experience, is a very nice bit of software. But I’ve only ever used it on Linux, where “apt-get install lyx” is all that is necessary to get it working.
Its significantly harder to get it working on Windows and Mac OS X.
Possibly, a lot of this is not due to LyX itself, but to do with the necessary prerequisites: a working TeX installation. The Mac OS X installation, gwTeX, was a breeze to install as it is based on the i-Installer.app stuff. LyX installed nicely on top of that, but the PDF support was a little lacking. To get nice fonts in Acrobat you have to install the CM-Super package as well and re-run updmap. That took me a while to figure out! Even then, you can’t use pdflatex, as any graphics in the document are defined as EPS by LyX… You can use dvipdfm, but then you don’t get the nice hyperlinking and document structure.
On Windows it seems that the installation is even harder, possibly as Windows doesn’t have many useful packages installed by default, e.g: Python, a shell, etc… So the installation of LyX bombs at the last stage. Mind you, MikTeX seems to be quite easy…
Now, I could probably figure this out, fix the installs, get it working. But wasn’t the point of LyX supposed to be that it is easier to use than plain LaTeX?
October 25th, 2005
So, about this time last week I was getting ready for the wonderful opportunity that is Travelling on Business. Having fun, drinking beer on the Company’s round, seeing the world… Oh, could I have been more misguided?
Obviously, I was wrong.
Nothing to do with the Company, though… but to do with some (possibly retarded) baggage handlers at Bristol “International” Airport. Basically, we were flying from a tiny speck of an airport (Bristol) to another insignificant regional airport (Bremen) and had to get a connecting flight through Amsterdam, or travel at 3am.
But there were “administrative errors with the paperwork”, or some other bollocks excuse (maybe that a large ‘X’, accepted as a signature across the West Country, isn’t good enough for international air travel) that meant we were delayed taking off for an hour and missed our connection. We were flying in a tiny little Fokker 70, I might add. Its true what Neal Stephenson says in Cryptonomicon (a book which everyone should own, read and re-read) about not dicking about with anything smaller than a 747…
So, we missed our connection and had the choice of a 4-hour drive to Bremen, getting there just after midnight, or staying in Amsterdam and getting on a plane at 6am to Hamburg and driving 2 hours from there. For some reason that I don’t remember, we stayed in Amsterdam.
The next morning, having got up at 4:30am local time (thats 3:30am UK time…) with just 3 hours of sleep, we were driving from Hamburg to Bremen. However, Bremen was having some sort of annual fair and the roads were a complete nightmare, so the 2-hour drive became a 3-hour drive. But at least I managed a nap in the back of the car…
I don’t blame the carrier for this, they helped as much as they could, but the damage had been done.
The moral of the story: always, always, always fly direct!
October 16th, 2005
So I signed up to the Telephone Preference Service in a (probably useless) attempt to stop the large number of spam telephone calls I’m getting. Its up to about one or two a day now, and always from the same set of numbers. Oh, and they hang up if you actually answer.
This is why we need SpamAssassin for mobile phones! Or at the very least a blacklist/whitelist feature to screen incoming calls. Of course, then they’d all just withhold their numbers or something…
I guess I’ll find out in 28 days whether it has done any good.
October 6th, 2005
It seems that e-ink have actually produced a product… But after so much time things have moved on a bit. And $3000 plus tax is a bit steep for my wallet.
I actually don’t care about colour that much, its the low power consumption and high resolution that are the exciting things.
For most common computing tasks (reading email, browsing the web) there is no need for animated, full colour displays. I’d prefer a computer with a 12″ screen and full QWERTY (or Dvorak) keyboard that folds up to fit in my pocket, with a wireless card and a Li-Ion battery that lasts a week every charge.
And it should be cheap 
October 2nd, 2005