Comments for Granthinām

Comment on Advanced document editing with Subversion version control by Manuel Batsching

Manuel Batsching — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:42:51 +0000

That is indeed an important topic! So many people I know, help themselves with frequently saving their files under a different name to keep track on the version history. Or they send emails to themselves or to other people they want to collaborate with. In any case I would call that “versions out of control” rather than “version control”.
I think what scares many people off from CVS, Subversion and the like, is that these things are quite complicated to handle on the command line (if you are not geek by nature). Also getting a Subversion repository to run online (which would give you some backup functionality) is not that easy in my eyes. Even further Subversion may offer a bit too much functionality for people just working with texts.

I think people who want a basic version tracking and online backup functionality, which is easy to install, costs nothing and does it’s job invisibly in the background, may be happy with Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com).

And another convenient Subversion GUI for Linux is RabbitVCS (http://rabbitvcs.org/), which also comes with a plugin for GNOME’s Nautilus, as not everybody finds KDE that kool ;-D. It is said to be inspired from TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/), which became famous among Windows users.

Comment on Indus Valley Civilization feature on German TV by Ujjwol Lamichhane

Ujjwol Lamichhane — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:16:07 +0000

Is there any way to get text of the video? I didn’t understand German language, if I had text, I could at least run google translate and understand it.

Comment on Indus Valley Civilization feature on German TV by Elisa Freschi

Elisa Freschi — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:05:39 +0000

Just by chance, I know the person who edits philosophical interviews for the Italian TV, since she is a dear friend of mine (and a trained –but jobless– historian of philosophy). I understand your point, but “abandoning” the TV as a too desperate case to be treated means condemning so many of our friends and relatives to all sorts of steretypes about India…

Comment on Indus Valley Civilization feature on German TV by Dagmar Wujastyk

Dagmar Wujastyk — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:19:55 +0000

The middle way: It’s a matter of style really. Truly good scholarship should be able to present complicated matters simply.
But TV shows….. the problem there is that the people editing the interviews are usually not at all able to make informed decisions about what is correct and what is not.

Comment on Debian Squeeze: Nouveau runs with 2.6.32-5 by Daniel Stender

Daniel Stender — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:21:43 +0000

Addition: the inclusion of the Nouveau into the kernel makes problems for the proprietary Nvidia driver which yields to a "kernel module load error" during installation because the Nouveau kernel module blocks that. On the net there are a lot of tips to add rdblacklist=nouveau to the Grub configuration etc. (mostly on pages towards Fedora), but on my Debian Squeeze it just worked to add nomodeset to /boot/grub/grub.cfg at the end of the line which begins with linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64 (don't forget to do a grub-install after that) - that prevents the Nouveau module to be loaded already during boot time so that the Nvidia driver could be installed properly before firing up the X server (without export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.3 the installation breaks with failed compiler version check, furthermore the proper linux-headers-2.6 have to be installed).

Comment on Indus Valley Civilization feature on German TV by Elisa Freschi

Elisa Freschi — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:25:04 +0000

Just a lateral point: One cannot but speak badly about TV and popular media. But could not we try to be more appealing to a wider audience (if we enjoy the feeling or even just if we dislike garbage stuff about India being said instead)? I am at odds with the US habit of writing a best-seller every second year, independent of the stage of one’s research. But I am sure there can be a middle way between superficiality and extreme philological accuracy. Moreover, extreme accuracy may become paralysing. What do people think?

Comment on Creating ebooks from book scans …. on Linux by Daniel Stender

Daniel Stender — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:25:59 +0000

Update: (1) I really haven't thought about kicking off such a thing with this but the American Linux Magazine has bought the article from German Linux User which has emerged from this contrib (issue 06/2010), and it's going to appear in no. 117 in August. (2) In the meanwhile Abbyy published a Linux command line version of their popular FineReader software (see here), which seems to work really fine (see the review in the recent Linux-Magazin, 07/2010, 68-71). The reader spits out also hOCR but also finished PDFs. (3) There is a comparison of the free OCR engines in the Linux-Magazin 12/2006 (see here, might be a little bit outdated). (4) Jakub Wilk also implemented a little GUI editor for DjVu metadata, Djvusmooth, which is available as I can see so far only for Debian Testing (that's anyway the choice if you want to run the latest stuff), see here.

Comment on Facets of current online LaTeXing by Cameron Bracken

Cameron Bracken — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:39:02 +0000

Thanks for the mention in your post!

Comment on Some events in 2010 by Elisa Freschi

Elisa Freschi — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:38:29 +0000

Hallo Daniel,
I did not notice this very useful post, thank you for posting it and for adding our conference, too.
One of the main problems scholars interested in South Asia (and probably in any other subject) have to face is exactly the lack of information. This may seem paradoxical, in our era, but more often than not is internet an obstacle more than a solution, due to the mass of useless information one has to read in order to gather a single piece of interesting news. Hence, once again thanks for your swan-like efforts!

Comment on A workshop on Indian logic and epistemology by Robert Young

Robert Young — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:05:23 +0000

Hello,
I sadly missed the conference but would like to be able to read copies of the papers presented. Do you know if any other them have been recorded or are available?
Thank you,
Robert