mkolar’s ramblings

Another recipe from Felipe.

1. Select the beans, i.e., remove the bad ones and little stones
2. Soak the beans for 20-30mins in luck-warm water
3. Chop one sausage and one onion in very small parts.
4. In a large pressure cooker, fry the chopped sausage and onion until they get really brown
5. Remove all the onions (and some of the sausage if you want)
6. Put the soaked beans in the pressure cooker and fill with hot water until you get about 0.5-1cm of water above the beans
7. Seal the pressure cooker and put in the high temp setting of the stove
8. Once you start hearing the pressure coming out of the valve, change the setting to medium-low and count 15 mins
9. Do the procedures to open the pressure cooker and check if the beans are in the texture you want and you have the amount of sauce (liquid you want). If you want to cook it more, add more hot water and repeat 8 (using 5-10mins instead of 15mins)
10. Fry more sausage in a frying pan
11. Add the fried sausage and some of the onions to the beans and cook it without pressure, i.e., without the lid, for 5-10mins moving a lot the beans to propagate the flavor.
12. Add salt and pepper.

It works best with spiced sausage. Also, make sure to check the bottom of the pot to make sure that the beans are not burning down there. Burnt beans are awful.

I am in the process of moving my personal website to Google Sites. The main reason being the ease of creation and access control. Unfortunately, Google Sites do not allow Javascript, which is a bit problematic as I would like to use MathJax to render \( \LaTeX \) equations. After searching for a while, I realized that many people are not happy for this design decision. There are some application specific workarounds that embed JavaScript in gadgets.

However, since I am mostly interested in displaying math equations on a subset of the site used for personal note taking, I found an interesting solution after some digging. The main idea was to be able to see math equations on websites that intentionally do not render them, like arxiv.org. There seem to be a couple of solutions and I will present the one that I found most appealing. Note: an access to a server installation of MathJax is required.

In order to be render \( \LaTeX \), the following code should be inserted into a bookmarklet. Note that the code should be preceded with javascript:.

(function () {
  var script = document.createElement("script");
  script.type = "text/javascript";
  script.src = "/MathJax/MathJax.js";   // use the location of your MathJax

  var config = 'MathJax.Hub.Config({' +
                 'extensions: ["tex2jax.js"],' +
                 'jax: ["input/TeX","output/HTML-CSS"]' +
               '});' +
               'MathJax.Hub.Startup.onload();';

  if (window.opera) {script.innerHTML = config}
               else {script.text = config}

  document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
})();

Then whenever one wants to view the equations one only needs to press the bookmarked link.

More details on running MathJax dynamically can be found in the online documentation. Especially one should take a look at how to customize the display.

It always takes me 2 hours to recall how to use Latex in XFig. To make the process faster, the following advice is copy-pasted from here, which was shamelessly copy-pasted from here.

Inside xfig, add the LaTeX expressions to the figure, using $…$ to switch to math-mode where necessary. Use the normal method in xfig for adding text, but set the “special text” mode using the “Text flags” menu at the bottom of the screen.

Export the figure from xfig twice: firstly using the format “Combined PS/LaTeX (PS part)” to a file such as fig1.pstex, secondly using “Combined PS/LaTeX (LaTeX part)” to a file such as fig1.pstex_t.

Create a driver file (e.g., fig1.tex) containing something like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{epsfig}
\usepackage{color}
\setlength{\textwidth}{100cm}
\setlength{\textheight}{100cm}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\input{fig1.pstex_t}
\end{document}

Run the commands:

latex fig1.tex
dvips -E fig1.dvi -o fig1.eps

You should now have a file named “fig1.eps” which can be included (with scaling and rotation if desired) in other LaTeX documents.

I’ve installed Wubi on a computer that needs to have Windows as well. It seems to work great, except that every now and then my system does not boot properly. The problem occurs when the kernel gets updated and grub gets messed up.

Here is what I have to go through in order to restore the system. Once in GNU GRUB prompt, type the following.

insmod ntfs
set root=(hd0,2)
loopback loop0 /ubuntu/disks/root.disk
set root=(loop0)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2xyz root=/dev/sda2 loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-xyz
boot

Once the system is up, just update Grub.

UPDATE: It seems that the bug is well known. See the following link and comment #90 for the patch.