Convert all the images of a format into another format

So, you have a lot of images to be converted into EPS format in order to be included in you LaTeX file, don't you? OK, then the following is right for you

mogrify -format eps *.png

Once again, thanks, ImageMagick!

Useful notes about writing properly technical documents n LaTeX

For you guys out there that, for passion or just for work, write technical papers in LaTeX, I just found a page that points out common mistakes in (LaTeX) technical writing. Even though I discovered I was already complying with some of the guidances, it has been useful to me, so I share.

(from http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~jowens/commonerrors.html)

mloss

At http://mloss.org/software/ it is possible to find a good collection of Open Source Machine Learning software. In my experience, this kind of resource is very valuable since the availability of good software is fundamental both not to "reinvent the wheel", and to have a quick "bootstrap" into the real problems of machine learning that are not connected with implementation of algorithms that are, by themselves, quite complex both in theory and for numerical considerations.

I gave a look quickly since I'm not needing any new algorithm now, and I saw some good projects that I had the opportunity to use in my past work:

• OpenCV for image processing;
• LibDAI for graph inference;

in addition to other things that I didn't use but I know by fame.

oh shit, the Pope...

I've been lucky to come back to London recently. Sure, Im under the rain while down there there are 30 degrees and people is laying on the beach, but at least I avoided the Pope visit in Cagliari! What a curse. And apparently, pope Benedict "Palpatine" XVI, going up and down by the city with his "papa-mobile" (not quite a bat-mobile, but still...) has been warmly greeted. For the event, also Berlusconi was there (plagues never come alone). Some facts:

• the Pope arrived this morning with a personal Italian Army airplane: guess who's paying the fuel bill?
• according to the newspaper: "three girls, Chiara, Valeria, and Giorgia, gave to the Pope a bunch of flowers, receiving in return a wide smile and a caress." Then I ask to myself... WHO IN THE HELL GIVES A FUCK?!? ARE THESE ONES THE FUCKING NEWS FROM THE COUNTRY?
  

I'm disconcerted, I don't know what's going on here. Depression.

I can hear Righeira in the background...

For those who didn't have the luck of being born and grown in Italy in my times, I'm referring to "L'estate sta finendo" (the summer is ending, yes Zuppa, that was AFTER our performance at the beach), historical hit of our 80s charts. It's a bit sad, but I really enjoyed these holidays (long ones, something more than three weeks) in town. Nothing too complex, I simply stayed in the city seeing friends and spending a bit of time at the beach and with my family.

Anyway, I relly couldn't stand anymore that old post "Adieu my crappy bike", I bought a new one after two weeks, that is twenty times better! See the picture on the side. Yes, it's a racing one, and I like it! Of course, you cannot quite jump on the footpaths and do things like that, but it's very fast and light. Very good to go to school in the morning (at least during summer, I'm afraid I'm about to end this nice habit for this year).

In London, I started doing skateboarding (no pics, I'm afraid) a couple of times with Paulo, with disastrous results for my body, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it, compatibly with my skills (I'm a public threat basically). Here in Cagliari I had to stop but I made up for it by windsurfing, activity that I love. I'm also a bit envious of Marco's new board (F2 Xantos 08 124L) and sail (Naish Sprint 2008), that is an amazing equip that I used a couple of times this year with great fun.

Well that's it. I was staying in Castello in these holiday days and I have to say when you cycle via Buoncammino at around half-past-eight in the summer you cannot avoid falling in love with the place (well, I cannot). Let's see what is going to happen in the future. OK, now I'm satisfied since for a while I'll have a nice memory of this summer looking at the home of my blog, instead that reminding the stealth of my old, crappy bike!

Adieu, my crappy bike

This last days haven't been plenty of good news. Nothing horrible, fortunately! At first, I had my £80-worth dodgy bike stolen. Not a big loss, for the bike itself was a failure, but it hurts having something unfairly taken away. It hurts less than the first time, though. Now, I already bought on-line a proper lock, for it was partially my bad, and my toy-lock one's, if the thief considered it was so straightforward to steal the bike that it was worth doing within the college premises, under the eye of a (useless) CCTV. As soon as it arrives, I'll decide which bike to buy next (possibly new, since now I fear to aliment the stolen bike market by buying a used one).

Second thing, we are yet other victims of the house market, because the landlady decided to sell, fearing the plummeting house prices, and the mortgage market turmoil (I noticed that scattering here and there terms like plummeting and turmoil makes my sentence sound like the Economist!). Moral: we may be kicked out in a couple of months, and no similar houses are available in this gloomy period on the market. Who knows... Anyway, the perspective buyers that came yesterday seemed very nice and I'd be relatively happy for them to buy the house.

Embedding fonts in PDF with GhostScript

In a period in which I hardly have the time to breath, after having spent my birthday working, the only thing I have to annotate here is a very useful link to solve a bad problem of conference organisers: font embedding in pdfs.

http://colinm.org/tips/latex

In practice, the command to embed fonts is:

gs -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=figures/Mprime-new.pdf -f figures/Mprime.pdf

and it works perfectly.