April 2011 – muellis blog

GNOME3 Release Parties

Oh, I almost forgot about the GNOME 3 Release Party that we had the other week. In fact, I had two times the pleasure of showing off GNOME 3 to the people. The first and official Release Party was held in the Attraktor. We even got mentioned by Heise. The second time was in my university during a self organised seminar.

On both occasions, I had to entertain a good bunch of people (around 15 and 30) and, well, it went at least alrightish, I’d say 😉 The second time was a bit confusing, because my Laptop didn’t want to as perform well as I expected so a good bit of improvisation was needed. But it was great fun overall. The goodies, that were provided by the GNOME Foundation, were well received, esp. the T-Shirts.

I showed off the really brilliantly done videos that Jason produced. We demoed and discussed those features and discovered even more stuff on the way. I haven’t really worked much with GNOME3, esp. GNOME Shell before and it’s kinda awkward in the beginning, but I got used to it very quickly. I really like much of it now.

Thanks to the Attraktor for having hosted us. And thanks to the attendees for the nice discussions. I’m looking forward to do some more GNOME3 presentations at coming LinuxTag and other occasions.

Happy GNOME3 everybody!

Perfectly scale an image to the rest of a page with LaTeX

I had the following problem for a long time: I wanted to embed a picture into a page and automatically have it scaled to the maximum size that possibly fits the page, but not more. Obviously, simply doing a

\includeimage[width=\textwidth]{myimage}

wouldn’t do the job, because if the image is more tall than wide, the image would grow beyond the page. One could use the information from the \textheigth register, i.e. like

\includeimage[width=\textwidth,height=\textheight,keepaspectration=true]{myimage}

But that doesn’t take already existing text into account, i.e. some description above the image that you definitely want to have on the same page.

So Simon cooked up a macro that would allow me to do exactly what I wanted by creating a new box, getting its height and subtracting that from \textheight. Lovely. Here’s the code:

\newlength{\textundbildtextheight}
 
\newcommand{\textundbild}[2]{
\settototalheight\textundbildtextheight{\vbox{#1}}
#1
\vfill
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight-\the\textundbildtextheight]{#2}
\end{center}
\vfill
}

I’m sure it’s not very correct and it’s possible to make it not work properly, but it does the job very well for me as you can see on the following rendered pages:

And well, the contents of the image is a bit ugly, too, but if you know a nice bullshit bingo generator, let me know.

RFID Workshop at CampusGruen’s Datenschutzkongress

I was asked to give a workshop about RFID for the CampusGruen Datenschutzkongress in Hamburg. So I did 🙂

I used the opportunity to introduce the audience to the basics of RFID, i.e. what technologies exist and what they are used for. Also, I took arguments from pro and anti RFID groups to have them discussed.

You can have a look at the slides altough I doubt that they make much sense without actually having heard what was to be said. We spend good two hours talking and discussing over my twenty-something slides. Thanks again to the interested audience.

Afterwards, we had a small hacking session. I brought some RFID readers, tags, a passport, etc. and we used all that to play around. We also scanned some wallets to find out whether anybody had unwanted chips in their wallet.