For creating slides it is possible to use your normal latex environment with the beamer latex package. Like with normal latex code there is a strict division between design and content. In your normal tex file you will concentrate on the content and use a theme for the design with the \usepackage{beamerthemeHEREGOESNAME} command.
You can choose from a collection of predefined themes, but when it gets to creating your own one, you are stuck with the documentation.
When creating the slides for the presentation, I looked up anything I needed and created a own Neobotix beamer-latex theme.
These steps will get you started on creating your theme:
Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday I had a talk at the university in Magdeburg about reactive path planning algorithms. The (german) slides can be downloaded here.
The presentation was based on my path planning work at neobotix, where I implemented an elastic band planner for the mx500 mobile platform.

Looking out of my window the other day:

Since I wanted to have the feature of saved session in epiphany, too, I googled and found a bugzilla post with a patch to epiphany-extensions. After playing around with the autoconf tools I managed to get it working and wrote a little step-by-step guide.

• download sessionsaver.tar.gz from http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316245
• download epiphany-extensions.tar.gz from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/epiphany-extensions/2.16/
• extract both
• copy extension/sessionsaver from sessionsaver tarball to extension folder of epiphany-extension tarball
• install epiphany headers if needed (”sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser-dev” on debian/ubuntu)
• now everything happens in the epiphany-extensions folder
• add “sessionsaver” to ALL_EXTENSIONS (line 154) and DEFAULT_EXTENSIONS (line 156) in configure.ac and add “extensions/sessionsaver/Makefile” to AC_CONFIG_FILES starting at line 334 in configure.ac
• now use the command “./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/” to create the configure an Makefiles (you need the autotools installed for that)
• now change to the directory extensions/sessionsaver
• use “make” to compile and after that install with “sudo make install”
• now the sessionsaver was compiled and installed to /usr/lib/epiphany/2.16/extensions (you had the other plugins before)
• restart epiphany and activate the plugin in the usual place

Lets hope the patch is included in the next release, because thats not something I want [insert normal desktopuser here] to do

After updating to edgy a couple of weeks ago, firefox 2.0 wasn’t running very good because of the lack of plugins. So I used the opportunity to try epiphany again. The main reason to use it instead of firefox (it uses the firefox render engine) is the better gnome integration. Ask some apple people why they use Safari instead of firefox .

In the epiphany versions I tried before crucial (at least for me) plugins were missing. But now I’ve got everything I need. Here is a list of my installed firefox plugins/features and their epiphany counterpart.

• Adblock => Ad Blocker in epiphany-plugins
• Greasemonkey => Greasemonkey in epiphany-plugins (you have to install/copy the scripts by hand to ~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions/data/greasemonkey)
• RSS Support => also in epiphany-plugins with integration to your desktop rss reader (so no copy and pasting any more if not using live bookmarks)
• Searchfield => with the intelligent bookmark plugin you use the address bar for searching
• Sessionsaver => here it gets tricky, I will post a howto to install this extension later today

A good overview of available plugins can be found on the official homepage and on http://mike.depalatis.net/epiphany/extensions.html. After more plugins are available for firefox 2.0 now, the problems I described above are mostly solved. So it’s a question of believe what browser to use, I guess.

It seems there is another wave of “MacOS to Linux” switches coming. They seem to be pretty important mac community members and the reasons for their decisions are not features or designs. They are mostly tired of the mac community.
Since I’m not a mac user I can’t say anything bad about the mac community, but the open source communities are known to be helpful, friendly and really good organized.
But even if you consider features there isn’t a lot of things missing on a modern linux system.
Especially the podcast is interesting to hear.

So here are the links:

• Switching back
• Why I ditched my Mac for Linux
• The great experiment
• linuxactionshow (podcast)

Last night my domain cybernotic.org moved to a new vserver.

After some trouble with my old provider getting the transfer to work, I’m now switching my setup step by step.

As you can see the design changed, too. Internet Explorers will enjoy the layout soon (always the same problems :-/) .

There will be plenty of new things here, so be patient