Homo Sapiens Abstractus

Since I am stuck with Windows, I guess the viable solution for LaTeX is MikTeX. It had served its purpose well, untill recently, when out of a sudden, a XeLaTeX-based project I am working on either could not compile or the resulting PDF was partly unreadable. I reinstalled the whole thing, tried a few quirks but alas!

Then I thought to give TeXLive a try. The documentation, especially as far as installation is concerned, is not good to my taste, but everything went smoothly. As a developer who respects oneself, I already had Perl+Tk installed in my machine, so the GUI installer popped up with no problem and did its job well.

The good news is that now my XeLaTeX project is functional again, out-of-the-box. Good work people of TeXLive!!!

I have been making software for a living for the past decade. But I am just a plain user too. Users demand solutions, meaning things that work; and TeXLive works. This makes me a happy user

For several reasons, I have been stuck with a Windows environment for the past two years. I am trully missing Linux… I recently tried VirtualBox but it crashed a few times and after that suddenly my network settings in the Linux Guest went bad. Since I was out of touch, I tried to re-read some man-pages and figure out how to resolve the issues, but with no luck. The worse is that it drained half of my day and my time is really precious now.

So I am back to Windows only, with cygwin, gnuwin32, console2 and some other handly stuff…

It is a few days ago that I volunteered to maintain scalap. Writing with Scala has been more than fun and I decided it was time to write for Scala. My time is limited, but the barrier has been, at some percentage, a psychological one. Dealing with the very stuff itself, is something to be taken seriously.

Yesterday, I was glad to read, Scala Team’s open request for maintainers from the community. The Scala community has already been very energetic and passionate: No egoisms, eager to provide help in its members, active at reporting bugs and even patches or new implementations. David R. McIver quickly responded and is now probably washing his hands before diving into the pattern matcher.

At these very moments, we are experiencing a new rise of the community!