I just opened an old TeX file, which was still encoded in latin1. Now I wanted to re-save it as utf-8 in Emacs. This turns out to be very simple, as someone on #emacs at freenode told me. Just hit C-x RET f, and type utf-8 RET. On the next save (C-x C-s), the file will be written as utf-8.
Author: root42
Where to put a label on a LaTeX figure
I just found out that LaTeX is sensitive as to where you put the label command in a figure environment. For example if you do something like this:
begin{figure}
centering
includegraphics[width=0.95columnwidth]{sompic}
label{fig:some-pic}
caption{Some caption.}
end{figure}
if you now do a ref{fig:some-pic}, the reference will point to the parent element of the figure environment. For me, I got a reference to the subsection enclosing the figure. This was very irritating, because the text then said “see Figure 3.4.2.4 for details.”
Instead you need to place the label in or after the caption command. For some reason the ref will then point to the figure:
begin{figure}
centering
includegraphics[width=0.95columnwidth]{sompic}
caption{Some caption.}
label{fig:some-pic}
end{figure}
Update: And here is also the answer to the question why it is necessary to do it this way.
Another OS X git UI: SourceTree
Besides gitx, I now was shown another git user interface for OS X. It is called SourceTree:
It is more mature and feature-rich, compared to gitx. But it is closed source. However, it is free (as in beer) for the time being in the App Store. So far, the program seems really nice. Let’s see how long I will continue using it, and if I’ll go back to gitx at some point.
XCode 4 is incredibly slow
XCode 4 has always been incredibly slow for me. The first release, 4.0, was especially bad. But that was just a .0 version. The next release 4.1 is much better, but it has also severe drawbacks, concerning performance. Everytime I start it, and not even do much with it, my system gets incredibly slow. That is on both a C2D 2.8 GHz MBP and also on a quad-core i7 MBP. Both machines come with 4 GB of RAM, and after firing XCode up and loading a large project, still at least 500 MB of it remains free. However, speed is abysmal. I just found the tool vmmap in OS X, and it gives me this output:
==== Summary for process 32136
ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=265.8M resident=114.4M(43%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=151.5M(57%)
Writable regions: Total=16.2G written=149.6M(1%) resident=360.9M(2%) swapped_out=6156K(0%) unallocated=15.9G(98%)
REGION TYPE VIRTUAL
=========== =======
CG backing stores 19.4M
CG image 268K
CG raster data 2840K
CG shared images 3472K
CoreAnimation 180K
CoreGraphics 16K
CoreImage 108K
CoreServices 1704K
IOKit 61.2M
MALLOC 337.4M see MALLOC ZONE table below
MALLOC (reserved) 15.6G reserved VM address space (unallocated)
MALLOC freed, no zone 30.5M
MALLOC guard page 64K
MALLOC metadata 128.8M
Memory tag=240 4K
Memory tag=242 12K
Memory tag=243 4K
Memory tag=249 156K
Memory tag=251 64K
OpenCL 60K
OpenGL GLSL 1372K
OpenGL GLSL (reserved) 128K reserved VM address space (unallocated)
SQLite page cache 14.6M
STACK GUARD 56.1M
Stack 19.7M
VM_ALLOCATE 16.1M
__CI_BITMAP 80K
__DATA 33.9M
__IMAGE 1256K
__LINKEDIT 59.5M
__TEXT 206.4M
__UNICODE 544K
mapped file 72.9M
shared memory 13.6M
=========== =======
TOTAL 16.7G
TOTAL, minus reserved VM space 1.1G
So the virtual memory space that XCode takes is more than 16 GB! The actual memory taken is “only” 1.1 GB, which is still huge, but my Emacs also takes 500 MB with tons of C++, Python and LaTeX buffers open.
The question is: can the unallocated, but reserved 16 GB address space degrade the performance? I have too little knowledge of the workings of virtual memory on Intel CPUs under OS X. But this value seems incredibly huge.
Update: I have asked a question on Stackoverflow, and have gotten some useful answers. What did help was removing my build/ folder from the git. Accidentally, a colleague checked in four files in the build/ folder. This made Xcode very slow, since it was checking the git status during compilation all the time. Still, Xcode 4 is much slower than Xcode 3 after this. So I also upgraded our machines to have at least 8 GB of RAM. This was definitely much of an improvement. It seems that development machines using Xcode 4 should have 8 GB RAM minimum. The more, the better…
LaTeX formulas in gnuplot
As a reminder to myself: On the TeX Stackexchange, there is a nice question and discussion by me and some helpful people on how to use LaTeX code in gnuplot / how to embed LaTeX equations in a plot. A copy of my revised answer:
First, we set up a gnuplot called test.plt:
plot [-5:5] [-1.5:1.5] sin(x+pi) title "$\sin(x+\pi)$"
Then we also set up a small Makefile:
.SUFFIXES: .plt .tex .pdf
%.tex: %.plt
gnuplot -e "
set format '$%g$' ;
set terminal epslatex standalone color ;
set output '$@'
" $<
%.pdf: %.tex
pdflatex $<
all: test.pdf
Running “make all” will produce this plot:
Emacs other-window backwards
I am currently writing a lot of text in Emacs, and I need to work on multiple files in parallel. So I use the split window functionality a lot. With C-x o you can switch to the next split window. However, it would be nice to go backward as well. The solution is simple, and is given on Stackoverflow and some other blogs:
(defun prev-window ()
(interactive)
(other-window -1))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x p") 'prev-window)
Just put this in you init.el, and you can cycle backwards using C-x p.
SSL Everywhere for Safari
The EFF has published a Firefox extension to force HTTPS on as many websites as possible. This is a good idea(tm). But on OS X I use Safari, not Firefox. So I was wondering if there is a similar extension for Safari. It turns out there is. However, this extension is available in source only. The reason for this is given in a blog post by the developer. In short: The Safari extension API is limited, and the extension cannot guarantee that all your session cookies are transferred via HTTPS, making you vulnerable to stuff like Firesheep. And that is a bad thing(tm). But it is still useful, since it will redirect you to secure versions of the websites. One thing to note when following the build instructions: You need to enroll in the free Safari Dev program, and get a developer certificate. This is very well described over at Apple’s developer center. After that, you can enable the developer menu in Safari’s settings and just install the extension from the cloned git repository.
What are the best Web Galleries?
I am one of the few avid MobileMe users. I use the gallery and like it. Nice upload features, integration into iPhoto. Not perfect, but it does the work, plus I have lots of disk space. However, Apple makes the transition from MobileMe to iCloud. During this transition, several features of MobileMe will be dropped. Besides the very useful syncing of keychains between computers, the gallery will cease to function. Some strange photo stream service will be introduced, which does not seem to be a real gallery replacement, but more like a large cache of you last 1,000 pictures taken. Useful, but only to a limited extent. So what are my alternatives? I need (in order of importance):
- Share with other people (who are not signed in, a la Facebook)
- 5-10 GB space for pictures or more
- Able to make photo albums, user gets a nice web browser based viewer
- Option for users to download the photos
- Optional high resolution versions of photos (2048 pixels or more)
- Good integration with iPhone, iPhoto et al.
I would pay for that service, if it includes 10 GB space or more.
I already found out that Flickr and Picasa Web offer unlimited space, but in the free version there are quite the restrictions (limited image resolution, image usage by hoster, limited number of photos that can be controlled, advertisements, …). Plus for example the Picasa Web Uploader for the Mac is horribly outdated (iPhoto ’08…?).
So what other options are there? Which one is the best?
Even better gitx with push/pull support
Many moons ago, I posted a link to brotherbard’s fork of the GitX GUI for git. There is an even better fork, which is based partially on brotherbard’s work, and which is currently actively maintained. You can find it over at German Laullon’s website.
Switching the active branch in a bare git repository
If you ever need to delete the “active” branch in a git repository, you need to first switch the active branch. Because you cannot delete the branch you are sitting on… You cannot checkout a branch, as you would usually do. You have to change the symbolic reference called HEAD. You can do this with the symbolic-ref command:
$ git branch
* deletethis
somebranch
$ git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/somebranch
$ git branch
deletethis
* somebranch
$ git branch -d deletethis