Stefaan Lippens' webface

In the introduction chapter of my PhD dissertation, I had to make a listing of my publications. The obvious brain dead way to achieve this is just typing everything manually in a list. But this feels just so wrong when you're already using BibTeX for managing references and bibliographical stuff. However, the traditional usage of BibTeX in LaTeX is to generate a full list of all references and put this in a dedicated section or chapter.

With the bibentry package (which is part of the natlib package actually) it is possible to put bibliographic entries anywhere in the text. As far as I know and experienced, the bibentry package is included in a default LaTeX setup, so you don't have to install something, just enable it in your document.

Getting it work as desired can take some trial and error, so I thought it may be a good idea to feed "them search engines" with a working example.

I needed the LaTeX code for the sign that is called the "promille" sign in Dutch. It's the sign like the percent sign "%" ("procent" in Dutch), but with two circles at the bottom. Googling for "latex promille" was not very successful, so I thought this would be a good botsnack.
(Googling for "permille" or "(parts) per thousand", yield better results however.)

Anyway, I found two solutions:

1. \textperthousand from the package textcomp, also provides \textpertenthousand but both only work in text mode, not in math mode.
2. \permil from the package wasysym, works in both text mode as in math mode.

That's all folks

Yesterday I had to render a 3d animation for a colleague working on 3D television. He needed a short street-view video with depth map. Because there were some problems with some real world footage he wanted to use, he asked me to create an artificial video in Blender. After I created a simple scene with some models from www.katorlegaz.com, I wanted to render the whole animation overnight on one of the computers in our lab. I had some trouble with getting the command line arguments right and wanted to share this, in case someone else has the same problem.

I first tried

blender -b -a foo.blend

the option -b is for background mode, so I could log out from the computer after I started the job, the options -a is for (according to the command line help):render frames from start to end (inclusive), only works when used after -b I thought this was the bare minimum to get the job done. However, nothing happened but this:

Compiled with Python version 2.5.
Checking for installed Python... got it!
ERROR: No camera
 
Blender quit

Huh, no camera? There was an active camera, the scene rendered just fine from the UI, I checked my file over and over and everything seemed all right.

When you point your Mozilla or Firefox browser to a malformed url, for example http//www.google.com (no : after the http) or http://http://www.google.com (two times http://), you don't end up where you would expect. English google users would get served with Micrfooosobarfts website, while I (a Belgian/Dutch google user) end up at Elsefoovier.nl. This page explains what is happening here. And to follow the proposed solution, I'll put here a link to information about http.