Unix was one of the first electronic typesetting platforms.
The innovative AT&T troff system allowed
researchers at Bell Labs to generate high quality camera-ready
proofs for their papers. Later, Donald Knuth invented a
typesetting system called TEX, which was far
superior to other typesetting systems in the 1980s. However,
it was still a typesetting language, where one had to specify
exactly how text was to be set.
LATEX
is a macro package for the TEX system that
allows an author to describe his document's function,
thereby typesetting the text in an attractive and correct
way. In addition, one can define semantic tags to a
document, in order to describe the meaning of the document;
rather than the layout.
Work term reports, papers, and other technical documents
can be typeset in
LATEX to great
effect. In this session, I will provide examples on how to
typeset tables, figures, and references. You will also learn
how to make tables of contents, bibliographics, and how to
create footnotes.
I will also examine various packages of
LATEX that can help
you meet requirements set by users of inferior typesetting
systems. These include double-spacing, hyphenation and
specific margin sizes.
It is widely acknowledged that the best system by which
to typeset beautiful mathematics is through the
TEX typesetting system, written by Donald Knuth
in the early 1980s.
In this talk, I will demonstrate
LATEX and how to
typeset elegant mathematical expressions.
Before the GNU project ever existed, before the phrase
"Free Software" was ever coined, students and researchers
at the University of California, Berkeley were already
practising it. They had acquired the source cdoe to a
little-known operating system developed at AT&T
Bell Laboratories, and were creating improvments at a
ferocious rate.
These improvements were sent back to Bell
Labs, and shared to other Universities. Each of them were
licensed under what is now known as the "Original BSD
license". Find out what this license means, its
implications, and what are its decendents by attending this
short talk.
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your
freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General
Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and
change free software---to make sure the software is free for all
its users.
The GNU General Public License is one of the most influencial
software licenses in this day. Written by Richard Stallman for the
GNU Project, it is used by software developers around the world to
protect their work.
Unfortunately, software developers do not
read licenses thoroughly, nor well. In this talk, we will
read the entire GNU GPL and explain the implications of its
passages. Along the way, we will debunk some myths and
clarify common misunderstandings.
After this session, you ought to
understand what the GNU GPL means, how to use it, and when
you cannot use it. This session should also give you some
insight into the social implications of this work.
The Debian Project produces a "Universal Operating System"
that is comprised entirely of Free Software. This talk focuses
on using Debian GNU/Linux in an enterprise environment. This
includes:
Stephen Kleene developed regular expressions to describe
what he called "the algebra of regular sets". Since he was a
pioneering theorist in computer science, Kleene's regular
expressions soon made it into searching algorithms and from
there to everyday tools.
Regular expressions can be powerful tools
to manipulate text. You will be introduced to them in this
talk. As well, we will go further than the rigid mathematical
definition of regular expressions, and delve into POSIX
regular expressions which are typically available in most Unix
tools.
XML is the "eXtensible Markup Language," a standard
maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium. A descendant of
IBM's SGML. It is a metalanguage which can be used to define
markup languages for semantically describing a document.
This talk will describe how to generate
correct XML documents, and auxillary technologies that work
with XML.
XSLT is the "eXtended Stylesheet Language Transformations,"
a language for transforming XML documents into other XML
documents.
XSLT is used to manipulate XML documents
into other forms: a sort of glue between data formats. It can
turn an XML document into an XHTML document, or even an HTML
document. With a little bit of hackery, it can even be
convinced to spit out non-XML conforming documents.
The Secure Shell (SSH) has now replaced traditional remote
login tools such as rsh, rlogin, rexec and telnet. It is used
to provide secure, authenticated, encrypted communications
between remote systems. However, the SSH protocol provides for
much more than this.
In this talk, we will discuss using SSH to
its full extent. Topics to be covered include:
In today's world, people have hundreds of connexions. And
you can express these connexions with a graph. For instance,
you may wish to represent the network of your friends.
Originally, webs-of-trust were directed
acyclic graphs of people who had identified each other. This
way, if there was a path between you and the person who want
to identify, then you could assume that each person along that
path had verified the next person's identity.
I will show you how to generate your own
web-of-trust graph using Free Software. Of course, you can
also use this knowledge to graph anything you like.
If you have used Unix for a while, you know that you've
created configuration files, or dotfiles. Each program seems
to want its own particular settings, and youuu want to
customize your environment. In a power-user's directory, you
could have hundreds of these files.
Isn't it annoying to migrate your
configuration if you login to another machine? What if you
build a new computer? Or perhaps you made a mistake in one of
your configuration files, and want to undo it?
In this talk, I will show you how to
manage your home directory using CVS, the Concurrent Versions
System. You can manage your files, revert to old version in
the past, and even send them over the network to another
machine. I'll also discuss how to keep your configuration
files portable, so they'll work even on different Unices, with
different software installed.
LATEX is a
document processing system. What this means is you describe
the structure of your document, and LaTeX typesets it
appealingly. However,
LATEX was developed
in the late-80s and is now showing its age.
How does it compete against modern systems?
By being easily extensible, of course. This talk will describe
the fundamentals of typesetting in
LATEX, and will then
show you how to extend it with freely available packages. You
will learn how to teach yourself
LATEX and how to
find extensions that do what you want.
As well, there will be a short
introduction on creating your own packages, for your own
personal use.
UniConf, GConf, KConfig, D-BUS, Elektra, oh
my! or DConf — a configuration framework for everyone
We've been watching the discussions surrounding DConf with
interest and amusement. Coincidentally, we've been talking
amongst ourselves and have been saying, "wouldn't it be nice
if there were just some way to glue all these different
applications together?" And then we realize that we've been
asking a rhetorical question. In this paper, we're going to
recap what people want in a universal configuration system.
Then we're going to show you the one we've built; because
we're kinda sassy that way.