Yet Another Holiday Has Passed
It seems that I haven’t written for almost a month already, time really did go fast this time. So, I have started at university again today, holiday is most definitely over. This must have been the holiday that went completely by me ever, what holiday? So, what have I been doing these past two months then?
Work
As mentioned in an earlier post I have been working at Spacelabs for a few weeks. We were able to almost finish VideBabilo until the point that we’d have to think about protocol. Also the DV Router D-BUS service kind of works. It would be nice to move this to GStreamer 0.10 in the future though. How finished are we really? Well, documentation is lacking and there are some problems with the embedded video and the much hated thread(s)(violations).
Study
Not as I hoped but as I expected I didn’t get around much to do some stuff for my study. However, I have finished the planning for the coming year and got the approval. I now know for sure that my Bachelor program is OK and that I will get my Bachelor degree this year. Also will I be finishing all my Master subjects for the end of this academic year and hopefully will have completed an internship.
This trimester I have one Master course, some assignments to finish and will have to look for internships, if possible abroad, in the area of Computer Science and Engineering/Formal methods & verification.
(If you have/know of any available internships for me, please let me know. :-))
LaTeX
Here at the department of Mathematics and Computer Science we use a specific notation for doing mathematical derivations. It’s called a “flag proof” (vlaggenbewijs). It places assumptions and variable introductions in flags and uses flag poles to signify the scope of the assumption/introduction. Certain proof rules hold for the derivation system, for example, closing a flag leads to the introduction of an implication. Since the first grade I always found this system to be much clearer than the more regular notations.
When I had to work out lecture notes last year, I searched for a LaTeX
package for this notation. I got one via via, but it was really crappy
one, just a bunch of macros jumbled together. So I decided to dive
deeper than normal in LaTeX styles and packages and wrote a cleaner
version with more features (style customization, multi-page-spanning,
etc.) called “flagderiv”. I want to thank Mark,
professor Nederpelt and others for
their feedback and ideas, also David Carlisle
for his help. A few days ago version 0.10 got accepted in
CTAN, yay!
Debian/Ruby
With the announcement
of the libruby-extras package to bundle some libraries that are small and
nice, but not part of standard lib, stuff (slowly) started to happen. I
am glad a team is forming now and tools are being developed. This may be a
very good thing for Debian/Ruby quality. So my plans for the coming few
weeks are to improve the ruby-pkg-tools package, transform my ITPed
libs to use the CDBS class from the tools,
make them all consistent, upload them and start working on new Debian Ruby
policy drafts to fill in the blanks. I hope
Esteban can add documentation generation to
the class and that Antonio can construct a dh-make-ruby so that the
result of it all will make Ruby library and application packaging a
piece of cake, less error-prone and messy.