Blogger clients for Linux

Since Blogger is so annoying, I gave a couple of dedicated blogging clients a try. Here is a short summary of my findings. An important requirement for me is that the client runs on Linux (Windows is optional, but not required). WYSIWIG editing is not important to me, as long as there's some kind of preview feature. And there must be a way to post images.

BloGTK

A GTK program, written in Python. Last updated in 2005. Couldn't get it to work, obviously.

Drivel

Another Gnome program. It is not in the Ubuntu repositories and the most recent Ubuntu package is for Dapper, which is ancient and fails to work. Then I noticed that image upload is not supported, so I didn't bother trying to build from source.

Bleezer

A Java program, runnable from the web via Java Web Start. The password that you type into the program is shown in plain text on the screen so at that point I gave up. I do not want to use a program with such disregard for basic security and user interface conventions.

Gnome Blog

Sits in the way in your system tray. Not what I was looking for.

ScribeFire

A Firefox plugin. Ironically much better than all the standalone applications. For now this is my program of choice. The image upload does not work for me, however, so I filed a bug about that. ScribeFire seems to be pretty well maintained so I expect that they'll get back to me soon.

News flash: Blogger still sucks

Just need to rant again. Sorry. Some more things that are wrong with Blogger and have been around for ages:

• When inserting an image, the <img> code is inserted at the top of the post, not in the place where the cursor is. You need to scroll all the way back up, cut the code, then find the place where you were typing in the annoyingly small box, and paste it there.
• The following crap is Blogger's idea of good image code: <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://…"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://…" border="0" alt=""id="…" /></a> The part where the cursor is specified and then immediately overridden is my favourite. I haven't looked at the “deselect gracefully” bit but I suspect it is equally awful. And don't these guys know that you can specify CSS in a separate file instead of repeating it on each and every element?
• The preview does not use the actual CSS from the blog, so the formatting will come out all different from the preview.
• When toggling to preview mode and back, you are thrown back to the beginning of the post, and you'll have to scroll back to the place where you were typing. Did I mention that that box is annoyingly small?

A picture on the title page in LaTeX

In LaTeX, there is by default no way to put a picture on the title page or cover page that is produced by \maketitle. Surprisingly, no package seemed to exist for this either. Until now, because I wrote it.

The package titlepic.sty, which can be downloaded from CTAN, is very simple and easy to use. Install it by putting it in your texmf tree and rehashing, or simply drop titlepic.sty in the same directory as your .tex source document. It works with the default document classes article, report and book.

Include it as normal, with \usepackage{titlepic}. Then, along with the usual \title, \author and \date, put a command like the following:
\titlepic{\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{cover.jpg}}
The argument to \titlepic will usually be an \includegraphics command, but it can actually be pretty much anything. The output produced by this argument will be typeset centered on the title page when you invoke \maketitle. (When you use the article document class, be sure to pass it the titlepage option, because articles do not have a title page by default.)

There are three optional arguments that control the vertical layout of the title page:

tt

Put both the title (and author, and date) and the picture at the top of the page, separated by a fixed amount of space.

tc

Put the title at the top of the page as with tt, but center the picture vertically on the page.

cc

Separate the title and the picture by a fixed amount of space, and center both together vertically on the page.

A full manual is also available. I hope this is of some use to someone. Enjoy!

Note: titlepic only works with the “standard” document classes article, report and book!. You may have some luck with other classes such as AMS, but no promises.

LaTeX clever references

When you're referencing a section in LaTeX, you'd usually write something like
… as we saw in section \ref{sec:cake}.
But this is somewhat inconvenient. LaTeX knows that it's a section, right? So why the need to specify this? Worse, if you ever change it into a subsection, your reference will be wrong.

Luckily there's the command \autoref from the hyperref package. However, this too has some drawbacks, mainly that it does not provide a capitalised version. A better alternative is to use the package cleveref. It is not in the Ubuntu repositories, but you can simply download and extract the archive, then run latex cleveref.ins to obtain cleveref.sty and dump it in the directory along with your document.

Load the package with
\usepackage{cleveref}
and make sure it's the last package to load; that is, even laster that hyperref.

Using \cref the previous example becomes:
… as we saw in \cref{sec:cake}.
This will produce the text “… as we saw in section 3.”. At the start of a sentence you'd use the capitalised version \Cref:
\Cref{sec:cake} gives the recipe …
You can even write:
See also \cref{sec:cake,sec:lie,eq:recipe,thm:delicious}.
This produces “See also sections 2 and 3, eq. 5 and theorem 1.” Although I doubt that anyone would use this very often, it's still pretty cool.

You can customize the word that is printed before the number. For example, some people like them to be always capitalised. (I don't, but my supervisor does, and who am I to argue?)
\crefname{chapter}{Chapter}{Chapters}
\crefname{section}{Section}{Sections}
\crefname{subsection}{Section}{Sections}
\crefname{subsubsection}{Section}{Sections}
\crefname{figure}{Figure}{Figures}
\crefname{table}{Table}{Tables}
Etcetera. Note that subsections and subsubsections are usually all referenced to as sections.

Finally, as a bonus, here's how you make it work with references to \subfloats from the subfig package:
\crefname{subfigure}{Figure}{Figures}
(Capitalise according to taste, or even write “subfigure” if you like.)

For more options, see the cleveref documentation.

mplayer tricks

mplayer is my favourite movie player for Linux by far, but the thousands-of-lines long manual page can be a little daunting. Here I've compiled a list of some options that you may or may not know, that I find useful in day-to-day movie playing.

-cache 8192

Sets the cache (buffer) size to 8192 kilobytes. Useful when playing over a network connection that occasionally hiccups, like mine.

-fs

Start fullscreen playback right away. Especially useful when playing multiple movies in a single command, to prevent dropping back to windowed mode at each new movie.

-monitoraspect 16:10

If your monitor has non-sqare pixels (e.g. 1280 by 1024 on a 4:3 monitor), you can specify the physical aspect ratio of your monitor in this way.

-ao alsa

Use ALSA for sound playback. Should be the default in any decent distro, but in case it doesn't work, try this (or, heaven forbid, -ao oss).

-nolirc

Disable LIRC support. Gets rid of the annoying “Failed to open LIRC support.” message.

-subfont-text-scale 3

The default subtitle size is 5, but I prefer mine to be a little smaller.

-aspect 4:3

Overrides the aspect ratio of the movie. Some useful values are 4:3, 16:9 and 2.35.

-vf cropdetect

For movies with black bars around them. This detects the black bars in the image and prints out the correct argument to crop them off, such as-vf crop=656:288:0:0. One of mplayer's coolest features.

Options can also be put into a file ~/.mplayer/config if you leave out the initial - and replace spaces by = characters (e.g. monitoraspect=16:9). Saves a lot of typing!

Integrating Inkscape graphics in LaTeX

Getting good-looking diagrams and figures into a LaTeX document can be tricky. My favourite software (and I think it ought to be anyone's favourite) for drawing such figures is Inkscape. This post explains how to get text in the proper font into Inkscape, how to put equations into Inkscape drawings, and how to get those drawings out of Inkscape and into your LaTeX document.

It is a good idea to use the latest version of Inkscape, because the program is rapidly being improved all the time.

LaTeX font in Inkscape

To make your figure look good in its environment, you can use the same font family that the surrounding body text uses. In LaTeX's case: Computer Modern.

Installing fonts

As Computer Modern is written in the METAFONT format, it cannot be directly used in Inkscape. For that, we need the font in OpenType (OTF) format, preferred for Linux (and MacOS?) systems, or in TrueType (TTF) on Windows. (Side note: here's an interesting article on the differences between all the font formats.)

The BaKoMa font bundle provides the Computer Modern font in these and some more formats. Download it here, then extract to a temporary directory. Installation is as follows:

Windows

Open up Fonts in the Control Panel and drag-and-drop all files from the ttf directory into here.

Ubuntu Linux

Open a file browser (Nautilus) and navigate to fonts://, then drop the fonts from the otf directory here. You may need to run Nautilus as root using the command gksudo nautilus.

Non-Ubuntu Linux (and Ubuntu Hardy, because they broke it)

Copy the files (as root) from the otf directory to anywhere you like inside /usr/share/fonts, then run sudo fc-cache -fv. (For a single-user installation, ~/.fonts might work, but no guarantees!)

Creating the figure

If you start Inkscape, new fonts with names like BKM-cmr10 should be available. Here, cm stands for Computer Modern, r means roman (normal body-text font) and 10 is the point size. Simply use this font for all the text in your illustrations to make them integrate seamlessly with the text in LaTeX.

Or, almost seamlessly. It seems that Inkscape (version 0.46) does something strange with the font size, or the BaKoMa fonts are too small to begin with. In any case, I find that using BKM-cmr10 at 12 points in Inkscape provides the best match to the default 10-point LaTeX body font. I personally prefer BKM-cmss10, the sans-serif version of Computer Modern, because it integrates nicely with abstract line drawings and with the surrounding serif body text, but if you use mathematics in you figures this is probably not an option.

LaTeX equations into Inkscape

Yes, it is possible to add mathematical symbols and equations to your Inkscape drawing! You can also use this for normal text, but it is more cumbersome than the font approach detailed above.

Installing textext

First, you need textext. Simply extract the two files from the archive into /usr/share/inkscape/extensions for a systemwide installation, and fix the permissions:
sudo chmod 644 textext.inx
sudo chmod 755 textext.py
(For a single-user installation, ~/.inkscape/extensions should work.)

You'll need some extra packages for the script to work. On Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python-lxml
sudo apt-get install pstoedit
On non-Debian based Linux distributions, install pstoedit and the Python lxml package in some other way. On Windows, see the textext web page for details.

Using textext

Now (re)start Inkscape, click Effects, Tex Text and type your LaTeX code! You can even load a preamble from a file to include additional packages such as amsmath. (Unfortunately the file must contain only the preamble, not an entire document.) The same problem occurs as with the previous approach: you need to set a scale factor of 1.25 to (approximately) match the font size of the LaTeX document. Close the dialog with the OK button or with Ctrl+Enter.

The equation (or other LaTeX text) is then placed as a group of shapes into Inkscape. To edit it (yes, that is possible!), select it and click Effects, Tex Text again. This feature is a little feeble, however: do not ungroup the text object, or else it will become uneditable.

From Inkscape to LaTeX

Exporting from Inkscape

When the figure is done, deselect all objects, then go to Document Properties and click Fit page to selection. This will adjust the page boundaries to fit exactly around all objects. Then save the figure to Inkscape SVG format (for later editing), but also save a copy as “PDF via Cairo”. Check the box to Convert text to paths, because otherwise the kerning seems to be messed up in the export.

Including in LaTeX

This is a simple matter of
\usepackage{graphicx}
in the preamble, and then placing the figure using
\includegraphics{diagram.pdf}
as usual. Do not use any of the scaling options of \includegraphics, since they will cause the text in the figure to scale as well, and it will no longer match the size of the surrounding body text.

Compile your LaTeX document using pdflatex (not normal latex, since that only handles inclusion of EPS files), and there you go!

How to choose secure passwords

In response to the Debian ssh fiasco, I've decided to take a closer look at all my passwords and keys. There are six machines on which I regularly log in, probably about a dozen accounts on these in total, and of course around fifty web services that I have at some point registered with. All this has become quite a mess, and I'll try to clear it up as well as I can. This post may be the first in a series of hands-on security-related posts; but it may not.

Here's a recommendation on passwords that you hear often: “take a sentence that you remember easily, like a song lyric, then take the first letter of each word, and there's your password.” Works pretty well, as long as your sentence is long enough and you mix in some digits (like ‘4’ instead of ‘for’). However, if someone happens to know your taste in music (from, for example, Last.fm), a little patience and some brute force can still recover your password.

I think I can do better. I, too, start with a sentence, sometimes even a song lyric. But instead of replacing each word with its first letter, I replace it with something that, in my mind, is connected to that word, and is the first thing that comes to mind. If nothing comes to mind, I just take the first letter of the word.

For example, let's say my sentence is ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer's day’. ‘Shall’ reminds me of ‘shallow’ and therefore becomes ‘_’. ‘I’ remains ‘I’. ‘Compare’ reminds me of Perl's spaceship operator and thus becomes ‘<=>’. ‘Thee’ is the Dutch word for tea (although pronounced differently) and becomes ‘cU’ since that looks somewhat like a cup of tea. ‘to’ becomes ‘2’. ‘a’ remains ‘a’. ‘Summer's’ could be ‘^o's’ because in summer the sun (‘o’) is high (‘^’) in the sky. At ‘day’ I ran out of inspiration, so this becomes ‘d’, and I add a trailing ‘,’ for good measure. Hence a secure password, that I could remember (and, if necessary, reconstruct): ‘_I<=>cU2a^o'sd,’.

The reason why this is (hopefully) a little bit more secure than the naïve version is that it uses information that is only in my strange, illogical, twisted brain, and nowhere else. That, combined with a broad taste in music, should make brute force over song lyrics a lot tougher.