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Tag: mac

balm or poison

Published May 9, 2005 by lievenlb

Don’t try
to follow the previous post unless you want to end up in a neverending
(sic!) series of re-installs, unrecognized harddisks at start-up and a
few kernel-panics!

At this moment I know of NO safe way to use Carbon Copy Cloner
to make a bootable clone of my HD. Here is the only way I managed to
make a bootable copy :

– before you start, click on the
target-partition of the external HD and use _File/Get Info_ and
uncheck under _Ownership & Permissions_ the box _Ignore
ownership on this volume_
– this might be enough for you but I
had to use DiskUtility to _Erase_ the externet HD-partition.
– then follow the previous post (that is do _sudo open_ on CCC
and then proceed as usual BUT make sure in your
prefernces only the box _Make Bootable_ is checked and certainly
no syncing-options!)

A bit too drastic for me. Its a bit like
: make a DMG of your MacintoshHD and do a restore on an empty external
partition. It seems that Tiger and Panther have very different
DNA-samples bringing a lot of excellent free- and shareware developers
near a nervous breakdown. Have the Apple-people ever heard of something
like _backwards compatibility_? Anyway, I’m not going to try
making another backup again until Mike Bombich has released a
Tiger-version of CCC!

Also, don’t try to follow the suggestions
of my Tracks
post. It certainly is not enough to get tracks running under Tiger
(and probably also not under Panther as at the time I did a strange mix
of following this path and doing some manual installs using the Hivelogic
page. This time, I got strange errors coming from the Ruby-MySQL
dialogue. I’m not going to try installing MySQL, PHP and Tracks before
someone like Marc
Lyanage tells that it is safe to use the Panther-packages under
Tiger!

So, for the moment I’m just going to use my minimal
system (Tiger+Xcode Tools+TeX (following the instructions from this page
)+some excellent free and shareware like DevonThink , Pod2Go
, VoodooPad , SubEthaEdit ,
QuickSilver , Transmit and NetNewsWire ) until the
experts have tamed Tiger. Meanwhile, I’ll just confine myself to the
_Dashboard-Kintergarten_ !

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tiger days 1

Published May 8, 2005 by lievenlb

It
should be really day 2 but yesterday evening I was a bit overoptimistic
and tried to get MySQL, Ruby, Rails & Tracks installed and in the
process totally wrecked my Ruby-system (and probably a few things more).
Besides, I found out that the _Carbon Copy Cloner_ work-around
doesn\’t really work (that is, one canNOT boot from the cloned copy)
etc. etc. In short, a lot of frustration. So today, I started all over
again (using the install notes below to guide me and so I could reduce
the total time to about 2 hrs). But, as this was the easy bit (still to
come : MySQL, PHP, WordPress+LatexRender, Ruby&Tracks etc.) and I
don\’t want to redo everything again when I do something horribly wrong
I changed my overall tactics. I\’ll keep identical copies on my iBook
and on my iMac and do the next batch of installs on just one machine and
check whether everything works before syncing it to the other. If
something gets messed up I resync to the state of the previous day. Just
one question left : what program to use for the backup/restore now that
CCC seems to be broken? Fortunately, there is still PsyncX which still
seems to work fine (at least today…). Below, for what it is worth,
yesterday\’s log of events :

Okay, I checked that I can still
TeX papers and connect to the printer on the iMac (after Archive/Install
to Tiger). Most other things have broken down, such as my mind on tracks
and my MySQL-database, but I\’m quite hopeful I can rebuild them all.
So, time for a drastic _Erase/Install_ on my iBook.

12:04 : One final safety check. Connect the external
HD, select the _Carbon Copy Cloned_ partition as StartUp Disk and
do a Restart to verify that it can be cloned back should everything go
terribly wrong. Seems to work nicely, so change again from StartUp disk,
restart and disconnect the external HD.

12:16
: Printed the macdevcenter install
tips and made a fresh pot of coffee. Took the unread part of the
newspaper with me, connected Jan\’s iPod, made it the new StartUp disk
and did another Restart.

12:24 : Selected
\’English\’ as the main language. Selected _DiskUtility_ from the
_Utilities_ menu (before you have to select a Disk destination).
Selected the HD, clicked _Erase_ and choose _Erase Free
Space_ first, then choose the SecurityOption to \’zero out data\’.
(Both steps require a lot of extra time but what is the point of doing
an Erase if you don\’t erase properly? Btw. the macdev-article does not
agree with me on this point.) Meanwhile, had some coffee and a
read…

13:23 : Did quit DiskUtility
which brought me back to the Installer. Selected the HD and clicked on
_Options_ to select Erase&Install and clicked Continue. Then
clicked on _Custom Install_ to choose which Packages to Install.
Did choose _all_ Printer Drivers but in _Language
Translations_ only selected : French, German and Dutch. Didn\’t
select X11! Clicked : _Install_ and had yet another cup of
coffee…

13:45 : Restarted! Got me into
the SetupAssistant. Didn\’t choose to transfer info from another Mac. It
selected our wireless network immediately, and asked me for my .Mac
account info. Did create my main account and finished at
13:53 Only had to stop iTunes from wanting to put
PodSoftware onto the connected iPod… Checked for SoftwareUpdate
but there was none. Am connected to internet but had to add my other
mail-account. Done and received email at 14:05 Found
our Printer but did gray out two-sided printing (have to remember later
how I did set this up…).

14:12 : Time
to add the _Xcode Tools_ : opened the folder on the iPod and
clicked on _XcodeTools.mpkg_ . Followed he default installation.
Finished and deconnected the iPod at 14:24 Took a break
to decide how to continue. (21.97Gb available) Update today : do a
custom install using also cross-development!

14:37 : Okay, first things first : get myself a
working TeX-system starting from this page
to get the latest version of TeXShop and the i-Installer and place both
in the Applications folder and in the Dock. Placed the _To Your
Library_ folder of TeXShop in my ~/Library (containing the texmf
etc. path for pdfsync). Then followed this
page and the i-Installer to install the packages in the right order
:

  • FreeType 2
  • libwmf
  • Ghostscript
    8
  • ImageMagick
  • FontForge
  • TeX (did a
    Full install with 2005 Devel.)

Had a brief look
through the other packages and maybe I\’ll install _Latex to RTF_
and _RTF 2 Latex_ later. Created a _DMG_ folder and put
the downloaded disk images into it. Created a_PAPERS_ folder and
transferred the last version of the paper with Stijn to check TeX but
clearly it couldn\’t find the _diagrams.sty_ file (I know I have
to quit using this, but I\’ll better get it over for backward
compatibility; put it into ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/. Ran TeX again
without problems this time and checked the nice source-PDF syncing
(apple-click to jump). Finished : 15:37

15:56 : As long as administration sends me
_Word_ documents and expects me to read them, I have no choice
but to install _Office X_ . The upshot was that while searching
for the OfficeCD I found also the HP LaserJet 1320 CD and installed the
driver so now I can print 2-sided (using Printer Setup Utility) . Done :
16:15

16:45 : Used the
_.mac System Preference_ to get syncing started with my iDisk to
get adresses, calendars and passwords etc. on my iBook. Also filled in
the Sharing Preferences. Now that I have the passwords at hand, it is
time to get the latest versions of some of the shareware I own (and copy
their disk image to the DMG folder)

  • DevonThink
  • DenonAgent
  • Pod2Go : the site seems to be down at the
    moment but fortunately, I have a disk image of it which will have to do
    for now (note to self : check later whether the site is permanently
    dead…) Update today : it is up and running again…

and while I\’m at it I may as well get my wallet out and
purchase the full version of _Lite_ versions I like and use a lot
:

Fortunately, there is also a lot of excellent freeware that I
want to use

One of the following days : MySQL, PHP and perhaps Tracks but
first I desperately need to do some maths to kick off from all this
nonsense…

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tiger balm

Published May 6, 2005 by lievenlb

I still
havent received my Tiger-package but got a bit panicky because it is
released as a DVD and at least one of our recent iMacs (the older ones
do not even have build in firewire, let alone enough RAM) cannot read
DVDs. That’s not a major problem as one can always send the DVD back and
ask for CDs instead (and wait even longer) or you can follow this trick (using
Firewire target disk mode). Jan suggested another
approach : make the DVD into a _dmg image_, connect an iPod,
erase with DiskUtility its hard disk and use the _Restore_ option
of DiskUtility to copy the dmg onto it. Then choose the iPod as StartUp
Disk and restart and everything works nicely.

As he went through the
trouble of setting up his iPod, I merely borrowed it and did an
Archive/Install of Tiger on the redundant iMac.All went well and
afterwards you can hardly see the difference with Panther except in the
top right corner where there is the _SpotLight_ icon (a feature I
do like and will use often) and in the lower left corner the
_Dashboard_ icon (a feature which still has to convince me).

Anyway, I wanted to check out as quickly as possible a comment (also
from jan)
that there is a new _Tiger only_ version of TexShop out
which syncs nicely between the PDF-file and the source. As it requires
some extra packages using i-Installer I took the opportunity
to update my TeX-system.

As they predict bad weather for the
rest of the weekend I thought “well, why not just begin the
Panther/Tiger switch on my _iBook_ using the iPod trick as well”.
But first I wanted to backup the latest Tiger+TeX version using
_Carbon Copy Cloner_. Over the last year this has become such a
routine operation (backing up to a slick _Porsche_ designed 250Gb
HD) that I was quite surprised that the computer halted after typing in
the super-user password. Forcing CCC to quit and restarting didn’t solve
the problem so it was time to do a Google on “Carbon Copy Cloner Tiger”
to find out that other (quicker) people had already experienced the
same.

As making a bootable backup is crucial for me I had to
find a way round this and fortunately found the Tiger balm
post. Here’s the hack :

– go to the Applications folder
–
open Terminal and type sudo open
– drag CCC to
the Terminal-window
– type return and provide superuser
password
– open CCC and fill in Source and Target disks as
usual
– it works!

Rumours are that
Mike Bombich will rewrite CCC shortly to fix this problem. Let’s just
hope that I don’t find too many other applications behaving unexpectedly
(in the 2 hours I’m onto Tiger I also found _Remote Desktop_ not
to work at all but then it’s an old 1.2 version so maybe Apple took this
chance to force people to upgrade (and pay heavily) as they seem to do
with hardware (someone should come up with a way to get the first
generation iMacs onto Tiger!)

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nostalgia

Published May 4, 2005 by lievenlb

Unlike the
cooler people out there, I haven’t received my
_pre-ordered_ copy (via AppleStore) of Tiger yet. Partly my own fault
because I couldn’t resist the temptation to bundle up with a
personalized iPod Photo!
The good news is that it buys me more time to follow the
housecleaning tips. First, my idea was to make a CarbonCopyClooner–
image of my iBook and put it on the _iMac_ upstairs which I
rarely use these days, do a clean
Tiger install on the iBook and gradually copy over the essential
programs and files I need (and only those!). But reading the
macdev-article, I think it is better to keep my iBook running Panther
and experiment with Tiger on the redundant iMac. (Btw. unless you want
to have a copy of my Mac-installation there will be hardly a point
checking this blog the next couple of weeks as I intend to write down
all details of the Panther/Tiger switch here.)

Last week-end I
started a _Paper-rescue_ operation, that is, to find among the
multiple copies of books/papers/courses, the ones that contain all the
required material to re-TeX them and unfortunately my _archive_
is in a bad state. There is hardly a source-file left of a paper prior
to 1999 when I started putting all my papers on the arXiv.

On the other hand, I do
have saved most of my undergraduate courses. Most of them were still
using postscript-crap like _epsfig_ etc. so I had to convert all
the graphics to PDFs (merely using Preview ) and
modify the epsfig-command to _includegraphics_. So far, I
converted all my undergraduate _differential geometry_ courses
from 1998 to this year and made them available in a uniform
screen-friendly viewing format at TheLibrary/undergraduate.

There are two
ways to read the changes in these courses over the years. (1) as a shift
from _differential_ geometry to more _algebraic_ geometry
and (2) as a shift towards realism wrt.the level of our undegraduate
students. In 1998 I was still thinking
that I could teach them an easy way into Connes non-commutative standard
model but didn’t go further than the Lie group sections (maybe one day
I’ll rewrite this course as a graduate course when I ever get
reinterested in the Connes’ approach). In 1999 I had the illusion that
it might be a good idea to introduce manifolds-by-examples coming from
operads! In 2000 I gave in to the fact
that most of the students which had to follow this course were applied
mathematicians so perhaps it was a good idea to introduce them to
dynamical systems (quod non!). The 2001 course is probably the
most realistic one while still doing standard differential geometry. In
2002 I used the conifold
singularity and conifold transitions (deformations and blow-ups) as
motivation but it was clear that the students did have difficulties with
the blow-up part as they didn’t have enough experience in
_algebraic_ geometry. So the last two years I’m giving an
introduction to algebraic geometry culminating in blow-ups and some
non-commutative geometry.

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tracks

Published April 27, 2005 by lievenlb

Perhaps I
can surprise you by admitting that I’ve spend a lot of time lately
getting through Getting Things Done:
The Art of Stress-free Productivity, 250+ pages of management
babble. Probably you will even be shocked when I tell you that this book
is published in the same series as _Body Talk at Work_,
_Corporate Charisma_, _More Time Less Stress_, _Mrs
Moneypenny : Survival in the City_ and more of these. All in all, it
wasn’t so bad. It is a bit pompous at times, could be 50% condensed but
I wanted to find out first hand what all the GTD hype
was about (see this post for
some of the more interesting links).

I’m not looking for a miracle
method to become more productive or focussed (although I wouldn’t mind
either at the moment). No, my main motivation is simply : I want to be
able to sleep better!

This requires some explaining. The last
couple of months, I regularly wake up in the middle of the night and as
there are plenty of things on my mind, I start brooding on them and,
more often than not, loose a couple of hours sleep/night. And these
quickly add up! Now, the basis of the GTD-mantra is getting all the
_stuff_ out of your head to reach the _mind like water_
state whatever that means. And I can see some sense in putting all your
current projects and worries somewhere on paper or computer, setting up
a system that forces you to read through these lists at regular
intervals, plan _next actions_ and update the lists accordingly.
If you trust this system it just may free your mind from all the
stuff!

At a later stage I may end up setting up such a system
following the suggestions of the
DevonThink Forum or using
VoodooPad but at the moment all I want is to offload my mind as
quickly as possible to a GTD-able database.

Fortunately, But She’s a Girl has
compiled such a system : Tracks, a GTD Web
Application. At first I did the mistake following the generic
install instructions and quickly got lost in downloading packages from
SourceForge etc. until I found that there was an easy Mac OS X
Install Page. There is a Ruby and Rails .dmg
package but first you have to install Tcl/Tk Aqua. After these
easy steps, you have to follow the install man page which involves setting up a MySQL database and
filling it with the required tables (I have been using
phpmyadmin for this, but discovered in the process CocoaMySQL which makes all
this even simpler). Finally, you have to get to prompt-level and type
the magic commands

_cd Sites/tracks_

_ruby
script/server “”environment=production” port=3030_

(note
to self : make this a StartUp item as otherwise you have to redo this
step whenever you want to add material). Then,
_http://127.0.0.1:3030/login/signup_ gets you to a nice
webpage-interface and you can start to offload your mind of
_stuff_. I’ll report later whether it did have any effect at
all!.

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markdown

Published April 17, 2005 by lievenlb

The nerd
implimentation of GTD is based on plain text-files, or more
precisely

– all lists in text files, kept in directory
“~/Documents/txt”
– all documents maintained in Markdown for easy
HTML conversion

I’ve been writing HTML-code since the times
that the best browser around was something called NCSA Mosaic so I’ve never paid too much attention to
Markdown
before. Here is its main purpose

Markdown is a
text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to
write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then
convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or >HTML). Thus, Markdown is
two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool,
written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to
HTML.

An example of Markdown-code followed by its
HTML-output can be seen at the BlueCloth website and I have
to agree that the Markdown text is very legible. I’ve been playing
around with Markdown for a couple of days now (in fact this post is
written in Markdown as WordPress has a Markdown-plugin) and have found a
few uses for it (more on this another time). Essential sites to visit if
you want to learn some Markdown are : its basic
syntax and in the rare cases that this doesn’t do what you want to
do there is also a full
syntax page.

If you want to use Markdown to write your
HTML-pages you need to be able to convert Markdown to HTML (and
conversely although the uses for this are not immediately clear, but
there are plenty of good reasons!). That’s what the
Markdown.pl Perl-script does for you (one way) and the
Python-script html2text.py (to be found here) (the other
way).

To get them working using BBedit
all you have to do is to put them in the _BBEdit Support/Unix
Support/Unix Filters_ directory (to be found in the BBEdit-folder in
_/Applications_). Then, if you have written a Markdown-text, do a
_Select All_ go to the !# menu and look for
Markdown.pl under _Unix Filters_ and voila, you have valid XHTML
(the other direction is similar).

This is a bit of work and one
would like to do both operations in nearly all Applications using the
_Services Menu_ (in fact, until a few weeks ago I had no clue
that there was something as useful as this menu hidden under the
program-name-menu of any Cocoa-program!). This is best done using HumaneText.service. The
installation is really as siimple as they say on this page (although it
took me a couple of trials before it worked, and I use the Services-menu
rather than the keystroke-shortcuts).

HumaneText works perfectly with TextEdit,
SubEthaEdit and (probably more important to mathematicians) TeXShop and
iTeXMac (the two most common front-ends for (La)TeX under OS X). A
noteworthy exception is BBEdit (hence the above laborious work-around).
Sometimes there are problems with punctuation in the conversion but you
can get around this using SmartyPants.

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GMD

Published April 14, 2005 by lievenlb

I’m always
extremely slow to pick up a trend (let alone a hype), in mathematics as
well as in real life. It took me over a year to know of the existence of
_blogs_ and to realize that they were a much easier way to
maintain a webpage than manually modifying HTML-pages. But, eventually I
sometimes get there, usually with the help of the mac-dev-center. So, once again,
I read their gettings things done with your mac article long after it was
posted and completely unaware of the Getting Things Done (or GTD) hype.

At first, it just
sounds as one of those boring managament-nonsense-peptalk things (and
probably that is precisely what it generically is). Or what do you think
about the following resume from Getting
started with ‘Getting things done’ :

  1. identify all the
    stuff in your life that isnÕt in the right place (close all open
    loops)
  2. get rid of the stuff that isnÕt yours or you donÕt
    need right now
  3. create a right place that you trust and that
    supports your working style and values
  4. put your stuff in the
    right place, consistently
  5. do your stuff in a way that honors
    your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
  6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

But in fact there is
also some interesting material around at the 43 folders website which bring this
management-talk closer to home such as the How does a
nerd hack GTD? post.

Also of interest are his findings after
a year working with the GTD setup. These are contained in three posts :
A Year
of Getting Things Done: Part 1, The Good Stuff, followed by A Year of
Getting Things Done: Part 2, The Stuff I Wish I Were Better At to
end with A Year of
Getting Things Done: Part 3, The Future of GTD?. If these three
postings don’t get you intrigued, nothing else will.

So, is
there something like _GMD : Getting Mathematics Done_? Clearly, I
don’t mean getting theorems proved, that’s a thing of a few seconds of
inspiration and months to fill in the gaps. But, perhaps all this GTD
and the software mentioned can be of some help to manage the
everyday-workflow of mathematicians, such as checking the arXiv and the
web, maintaining an email-, pdf- and BiBTeX-database, drafting papers,
books and courses etc.

In the next few weeks I’ll try out some
of the tricks. Probably another way to state this is the question “which
Apps will survive Tiger?” Now that it is official that Tiger (that is, Mac
10.4 to non-apple eaters) will be released by the end of the month it is
time to rethink which of the tools I really like to keep and which is
just useless garbage I picked up along the road. For example, around
this time last year I had a Perl
phase and bought half a meter or so of O’Reilly Perl-books. And yes
I did write a few simple scripts, some useful such as my own arXiv RSS-feeds,
some not so useful as a web-spider I wrote to check on changes in the
list of hamepages of people working in non-commutative algebra and
geometry. A year later I realize I’ll never become a Perl Monk. So from now on I want to
make my computer-life as useful and easy as possible, relying on wizards
to provide me with cool software to use and help me enjoy mathematics
even more. I’ll keep you posted how my GMD-adventure goes.

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pdfsync

Published April 13, 2005 by lievenlb

I
expect to be writing a lot in the coming months. To start, after having
given the course once I noticed that I included a lot of new material
during the talks (mainly concerning the component coalgebra and some
extras on non-commutative differential forms and symplectic forms) so
I\’d better update the Granada notes
soon as they will also be the basis of the master course I\’ll start
next week. Besides, I have to revise the Qurves and
Quivers-paper and to start drafting the new bachelor courses for
next academic year (a course on representation theory of finite groups,
another on Riemann surfaces and an upgrade of the geometry-101 course).

So, I\’d better try to optimize my LaTeX-workflow and learn
something about the pdfsync package.
Here is what it is supposed to do :

pdfsync is
an acronym for synchronization between a pdf file and the TeX or so
source file used in the production process. As TeX system is not a
WYSIWYG editor, you cannot modify the output directly, instead, you must
edit a source file then run the production process. The pdfsync helps
you finding what part of the output corresponds to what line of the
source file, and conversely what line of the source file corresponds to
a location of a given page in the ouput. This feature is achieved with
the help of an auxiliary file: foo.pdfsync corresponding to a foo.pdf.

All you have to do is to put the pdfsync.sty file
in the directory _~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/pdfsync.sty_ and to
include the pdfsync-package in the preamble of the LaTeX-document. Under
my default iTex-front-end TeXShop it
works well to go from a spot in the PDF-file to the corresponding place
in the source-code, but in the other direction it only shows the
appropriate page rather than indicate the precise place with a red dot
as it does in the alternative front-end iTeXMac.

A major
drawback for me is that pdfsync doesn\’t live in harmony with my
favorite package for drawing commutative diagrams diagrams.sty. For example, the 75 pages of the current
version of the Granada notes become blown-up to 96 pages because each
commutative diagram explodes to nearly page size! So I will also have to
translate everything to xymatrix&#
8230;

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squeezebox

Published January 25, 2005 by lievenlb


This week I finished the first phase of my home-network plans : from
every computer one can stream iTunes-music files to be played in
the living room, and from every computer one can stream iPhoto or
iMovie-files to the TV-set. Both solutions involve new hardware
and as it usually is with hardware : there are elegant or clumsy
solutions. The photo-video solution is rather clumsy so I’ll postpone
it until later. The audio-solution on the other hand is extremely
elegant : I bought a squeezebox from slimdevices.
It is extremely small (22cmx5cmx12cm) so you can place it virtually
everywhere, it can be connected to your network either wireless or by
ethernet and it has several alternatives to connect to your speakers or
hifi-set : a headphone mini-jack (which is at the moment what I use to
connect it to a pair of powered speakers) but I can always upgrade my
listening experience using : analog audio RCA, digital optical or
digital coax. The service it provides is excellent, all information is
available from their website (they do not ship a CD but you can download
the latest version of slimserver from the website (available for all
platforms)) and they have several forums among which a rather enthusiastic
users-forum (no surprise to me). You get it running in no time. First
download slimserver and install it on the machine(s) containing music
you want to stream over the network. What it does is to add one extra
item to your SystemPreferences and clicking it you can start the
SlimServer. Then, power up the squeezebox and
follow the messages on the display. I choose to connect to a wireless
network, it then detects the names of the possible networks and asks you
to choose one, asks what type of encryption it uses (for Airport b take
64 bit, for g take 128 bit encryption). The most difficult part is to
type in the wireless password as it wants the hexadecimal
equivalent of your pass phrase. To find it, open up Airport Admin
Utility, log in to the network you want and on the screen you get
look for the password icon, clicking it will give you the
hexadecimal WEP-key. If you are familiar with SMS you’ll find it easier
than me to type this in to the squeezebox
(use the number keys to simulate a keyboard). After this it will connect
to your network and get the IP-address of the SlimServer (the computer
on which you started the server) and you have access to its
iTunes-library. Two caveats : make sure you use the MP3-option to
get CD’s into iTunes (the default setting of Preferences/import
is AAC not MP3 (btw. slimdevices now claim that you may also use
AAC-files, I didn’t check this out yet but have no doubts it will
work). The second is that the display screen is rather small to browse
the library if you are used to iTunes’ window. A neat way around it is
to use a webbrowser on ANY computer in your network (for example the
iBook on your lap). Just fire up Safari and go to the
Rendezvous-window (it took me some time to figure out what they
meant by it : in Safari go to the Bookmarks pulldown menu, then
choose Show all bookmarks and on this page you will find a
Rendezvous-tab, click it and one of the bookmarks will be
SlimServer and by clicking on it you have web-access to control
your squeezebox. Very neat, this Rendezvous
awareness and a sharp contrast to the clumsy photo-video solution. So,
if you want to free your music and hear it via hifi-standards rather
than via computer-soundcards go and buy as many squeezebox sets as you will need to fill your house with
music!

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ISBN prefix

Published December 27, 2004 by lievenlb

How to sell
modular arithmetic to students only interested in literature? Well, try
to explain the structure of ISBN-numbers
“The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a unique
machine-readable identification number, which marks any book
unmistakably. This number is defined in ISO Standard 2108. The number
has been in use now for 30 years and has revolutionised the
international book-trade. 166 countries and territories are officially
ISBN members. The ISBN accompanies a publication from its production
onwards.” The ISBN-number of a book is a ten-digit number divided into
four parts, separated by hyphens telling you a lot about the ambitions
and location of the book’ publisher. I’ll explain some of it by
telling how I obtained the barcode for the first book to be published by
neverendingbooks.org (see
picture). The first part is the group
identifier and identifies a country, area or language area
participating in the ISBN system. For the Netherlands and the Flemish
speaking part of Belgium this identifier is 90. Hence,
depending on your location you have to approach different agencies in
order to obtain an ISBN-number. If you are living in the US all you have
to do is to invent a name for your PublishingHouse, get your Visa-card
out and visit isbn.org
. For smaller groups the process is more personal. The first time I
tried to apply for an ISBN-number with De Boekenbank I
messed up and got immediately an email telling me what I did wrong. I
replied explaining what NeverEndingBooks had in mind and asked advice on
how to set it up properly. I’m sure I’ll need this personal contact
again in the near future. The second part is the _Publisher
Identifier_ or _prefix_. I didn’t know this before but the
very definition of a _publisher_ is the person or company
registering a book’s ISBN. Hence, if you intend to publish a series of
books your local ISBN-agency has to reserve a certain amount of
ISBN-numbers for you, all having the same start-block (the prefix). The
shorter the prefix the more ambitious the PublishingHouse. The
registered prefix of NeverEndingBooks is 90809390 which
tells the experienced ISBN-watcher that we intend in the next years to
publish “only” ten books. If you have more energy you can also apply
for a series of 100, 1000 or even 10000 ISBN-numbers but the amount of
money needed to register these series increases quickly… The third
part of the ISBN-number is the _title identifier_ so for our
first book it is just 1. However, in order to register
it you have to provide the agency (minimally) with a title and
publication date (fortunately, author, price, number of pages etc. are
optional at this stage). Anyway, the first real deadline for
NeverEndingBooks will be may 15th 2005! And now it is time to return
to modular arithmetic, the fourth part is a _check digit_. The
check digit is the last digit of an ISBN. It is calculated on a modulus
11 with weights 10-2, using X in lieu of 10 where ten would occur as a
check digit. This means that each of the first nine digits of the ISBN
excluding the check digit itself is multiplied by a number
ranging from 10 to 2 and that the resulting sum of the products, plus
the check digit, must be divisible by 11 without a remainder. In our
case, we have the following numbers(weights) 9(10) 0(9) 8(8)
0(7) 9(6) 3(5) 9(4) 0(3) 1(2) We have to multiply the numbers
with their weight and add them all up,
90+0+64+0+54+15+36+0+2=261=8(mod 11) whence the check
digit should be 3. For example, I know already that the
ISBN-number of the second book to be published by NeverEndingBooks will
be 90-809390-2-1 but, due to lacking information, it will take a while
before it can be registered.

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