And the name of the pub quiz team that was entered into the Compsoc Pub Quiz 2005, that entailed a lot of obscene looking photos of men, some very evil questions on the part of Peter Dickman and some pretty nifty computer games (a lot more nifty than we had last year – we had a Heat round!).

It was a good night had by, dare I say, all. I’ve got a few photos which will appear in the Gallery soon.

C.L.I.T.O.R.I.S, what a team, apparently we won! I had to leave half way through the last round, I’m hoping we won best name as well.
- Chris

Today is that day.

I’m sitting at home in Dumfries, although I’m meant to be sitting in a lecture in Glasgow, because my lift to the station this morning didn’t turn up. I’d usually catch a ride off my dad but he’s off on holiday in another country.

Naturally I was a little displeased about this state of affairs. Anyway, everything else today seems to be annoying the hell out of me, my dog’s being a pain in the ass and things just don’t seem to be going smoothly at all!

For instance my iPod wont connect to my PowerBook through the dock anymore, normally I’d just shrug my shoulders and connect it via the firewire connection which plugs into the dock (which it seems to work perfectly through). However today I’m in a perpetual state of anger, shouting at the dock and threatening to throw it out of the window. Perhaps it’s because of this film I watched last night, The Last Horror Movie, which looked as if it was going to be a decent enough film but turned out to be an utter pile of steaming, freshly lain shit (seriously, never see this movie, not even for the sake of curiosity as to how shit it is). Perhaps it’s because of this itch I have on my back but can’t quite reach.

The thing that seems to be pissing me off the most is the fact that I’m pissed off for no real reason at all.

If you don’t hear from me in a while it’s because I’ve murdered someone, been caught, and have been sent down for 20-to-life!
- Chris

Where is he nowadays when he’s needed?

Anyway, if this is in fact bonfire night then you’ll be able to see my bonfire night theme for this site.

I thought I’d post the full rhyme that is linked to this day, I can’t ever remember hearing the whole of it before:

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes,
’twas his intent
to blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah!

Have an explosive bonfire night,
- Chris

I used to do all my LaTeX writing under Windows XP, using a program called WinEdt with the MiKTeX version of LaTeX.

Since changing to Mac OS for writing LaTeX I’ve been looking around for some good tools for managing and writing anything I have to and here’s what I’ve found:

TeXShop

Good, free tool for editing and typesetting LaTeX documents. Comes complete with BibTeX integration as well as a lot of useful templates and shortcuts (a very nice feature is an automatically updating .pdf viewer), the inclusion of syntax highlighting and auto completion is very useful. I’ve been using this for the past few months and have found no flaws in it.

Here’s some speel of the site:

TeXShop is a TeX previewer for Mac OS X, written in Cocoa. Since pdf is a native file format on OS X, TeXShop uses “pdftex” and “pdflatex” rather than “tex” and “latex” to typeset; these programs in the standard teTeX distribution of TeX produce pdf output instead of dvi output.

TeXShop uses TeXLive and teTeX, standard distributions of Tex programs for Unix machines. The distributions include tex, latex, dvips, tex fonts, cyrillic fonts, and virtually all other programs and supporting files commonly used in the TeX world. These distributions are maintained for the Mac by Gerben Wierda, and available below.

The latest TeXShop release requires System 10.4 (Tiger). Users with systems 10.2 or 10.3 should use TeXShop 1.40, also available on this site. Users with systems 10.0 and 10.1 should use TeXShop 1.19, available here.

TeXShop is distributed under the GPL public license, and thus free.

Here’s the links to:

• the developer site, and
• download page

I’d recommend trying it out if you’re likely to be writing any serious documentation.

BibDesk

Another really useful tool which I’ve found for academic use. It’s basically a BibTeX organiser with a lot of addons.

As well as allowing you to add, edit and organise BibTeX entries it allows you to:

• locally link papers or articles,
• self-organises these linked articles if you wish (much like the iTunes music folder will if you ask it to),
• URL linking of articles,
• drag and drop LaTeX citation code for entry into .tex documents (in a variety of formats, i.e. \cite{Miller:2005}, \citet{Miller:2005}, …),
• auto cite key generation from BibTeX entry (based upon a user specified pattern},
• searching of BibTeX entries,
• import and export of the BibTeX file in a variety of formats (XML, RSS and Atom included among others), and
• previewing specific or ranges of entries as they would appear in a LaTeX document.

This is the kind of tool I’ve been looking for ages for, not only does it hold the details of the articles for referencing in reviews/papers, it holds and organises the articles themselves. This tool has made using BibTeX with LaTeX a hell of a lot easier for me, I’d highly recommend this to anyone who is ever going to keep a record of the papers that he/she has read.

The definition of BibDesk on this site is given as:

BibDesk is a graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager for Mac OS X. BibDesk is designed to help organize and use bibliographic databases in BibTeX .bib format. In addition to manual typing, BibDesk lets you drag & drop or cut & paste .bib files into the bibliographic database and automatically opens files downloaded from PubMed. BibDesk also keeps track of electronic copies of literature on your computer and allows for searching your database through several keys.

BibDesk integrates well with TeX for creating citations and bibliographies. This integration includes a Citation search completion service, and drag & drop (cut & paste) support for adding citations to TeX files.

Here’s the links to:

• the developer site, and
• download page

So not only can you generate nice looking, transferrable documents; but you can do so on a good OS with some great tools, making the LaTeX experience (not the rubbery kind!) much more stress free and enjoyable for all!
- Chris

The film is like a 88 minute long episode of Family Guy, 4 times the normal length and just as funny! You really need to see this, even if it’s just for Stuwie’s camp comments throughout.

If you’re a fan of Family Guy then you’ll definitely like this film, if you’re not (yet) a fan, then this film will have you queuing up to buy the boxed sets of the series the very next day. Cheap at around £12, and in my opinion worth double the price, you should definitely see it. Buy a copy, rent a copy, steal a copy, get a copy of your friend who has a copy, kill someone and take their copy, watch it through a neighbourhood window. Just see the damn movie!

Did I mention that I thought the movie was damn ace?
- Chris