A very lightweight pdf viewer!

Last days i was testing the speed and the quality of the pdf viewers on Linux. Xpdf was out of question. Acrobat reader a good quality but really heavy solution for viewing the files. Another option is the default evince but sometimes the pdf is bit blurry (if for example is scanned). Another new good alternative is the MuPDF. So i did a small test: i used this pdf to test the quality of the pictures:

A better zoom in at the equation shows more details about these three programs:

For me, the MuPDF is the winner, not only because it has the best quality between the other, but for its speed. Its really fast, and it has the same keyboard shortcuts with VIM: ideal solution for me. The mos serious drawback of the viewer is the absence of "copy" from the pdf file. 

Linux mint 12 finally

Finally, after almost four years i decided to upgrade my old Ubuntu 9.04 to something newer. I wanted to avoid installing "short lived" distributions in terms of repositories support and the same time avoid experiments with distributions that require compiling everything. I even thought to put FreeBSD. Nice operating system, you have both options to compile the packages or download the binaries. But, most of all i liked the gnome2 they are using. Unfortunately, i test on the VM showed me that not everything is working ok with the source packages (ports was not working well for gnome2 - clean install..), but it was extremely fast!

So, i have either to go for Fedora (too unstable for my taste), Ubuntu (where is gnome???), or something else. So i selected to go with Mint 12 64bit. It has long term support, includes gnome 2/3, has the same repositories with Ubuntu and includes some nice meta-packages for automatic installation of video/audio codecs. The installer recognized my old Ubuntu installation and moved my home directory without problems.

Then, in started installing the 32bit libraries. A mess, after installing manually some debian packages the whole packaging system broken and i had to remove critical parts of the system. So, i had to install it again and with more caution. This time i had to edit the deb packages to remove manually the dependencies with other packages. And it worked well. What were the packages that i had problem: Lotus Notes  and Lotus Sametime (you need them if you want to read mail from IBM). I had to follow a set of instructions for installing them:  i had even to download and compile a file to make it work properly.  Installation was much easier in 10.04 LTS versions of Ubuntu. I can't imagine how the installation will be with Ubuntu 14.04!

After spending a Sunday evening,  everything works fine now. I still had to use some old tricks for making skype to work with video (use with LD_PRELOAD to 32bit version of v4l1compat.so), but everything works fine now. Well, i still missing the old gnome setting and support.. but i guess i just have to move on.

Use google scholar to track your publications and citations!

I started using the Google scholar for searching articles a couple of years ago. I 'm using it for getting paper from multiple sources or exploring for finding new stuff. It was an good alternative from just searching in the Google. As the years passed it seems the engineers in Google have improved a lot the search algorithm and created some additional tools that can help the tracking down your publications. You have just to follow the citations sign up form. After confirming your name and email address you are ready. You can also upload your own photo and make your profile public, allowing others to search you. An example of public profile can be found here. One of the things i like most is the bar graph with the number of citations per year. Also, you can see citations per publication per year. You can track the different topics and get an idea what is on "fashion" and what not. Unfortunately, my profile is almost empty, but i hope things will get better in the future...