Tips for improving efficiency and reusing hard-won experience from your fellow students

editor: David Buttler
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Printing

Xfig

Misc software
MathML


Printing

Printing PDF files from Windows to some printers results in a stack overflow error. Possible solutions: 1) print to calvin. It seems to be able to handle the PDF files better
2) Use the PCL driver for the printer. For example use \\cobra\spiff-pcl to print print (Start->Run->"\\cobra\spiff-pcl")

Xfig

Quality of output
Xfig is a really great environment for creating figures (a little slow to learn, but once you understand it is powerful and efficient).  Unfortunately, simply exporting the results to jpeg can produce highly pixelated results and text that looks non-professional.  To alleviate this problem, when exporting to jpeg increase the file size to 200-400% of the original size.  Powerpoint allows you to resize the graphic inside a presentation; reducing a jpeg inside powerpoint results in a much higher quality picture than exporting to the appropriate size directly from xfig.

Bug free version
Also, the version of xfig that CNS has installed on solaris has some bugs, especially with displaying boxes with rounded corners or properly handling layering. 
Use the linux version of xfig instead: e.g. from
guadeloupe.cc.gatech.edu
or
poseidon-lnx.cc.gatech.edu
or
hera-lnx.cc.gatech.edu
(for systems people; other groups may have to use other linux machines; also note that the last two machines may be rebooted without notice since they are lab machines, so you are better off not using these machines unless you are in the infosphere lab)
One way you can do that from a solaris machine is simply type
    ssh username@guadeloupe.cc.gatech.edu xfig
substituting in your user name and an appropriate linux box of course.

Logo generation services

contributed by Wei Tang
http://www.gifworks.com
http://www.uforesources.com/banners_free.htm
http://www.web-animator.com


Misc software

Big Tar

The first tar, sends it to file '-' which as I said is stdout. The second takes it from file '-' which is stdin. As weird as it looks, the dashes MUST be there like they are.
tar -cvf - files(s) | ssh machine2 "tar xf - -C /destination/path
contributed by Vin Scarlata
Vin's solution is a good one and is more generally useful. However, here's a couple other Unix utils to have in your toolbox:
1)       ssh machine2 'cat > /destination/path/foo.tar' < foo.tar
This should be exactly the same as scp, except that, unless something has gone horribly wrong, 'cat' shouldn't have a 2GB limit. (Of course, I personally think something's already gone horribly wrong if scp has such a limit.)
2)	split --bytes=1024m foo.tar
	scp xa? machine2:/destination/path/
The 'split' utility will split the tar file in to smaller files of whatever size you want. It will name them xaa, xab, xac, etc.. At the other end, you can concatenate the files with 'cat' and pipe the result in to 'tar':
	cat xa? | tar -xf -
contributed by Ben Wong

public

If you are looking for software that is not installed in the normal place, check out
/usr/local/public
This is student/staff maintained software (As opposed to CNS maintained software)

I have also installed some software for my own purposes. You can access it from
/net/hp71/students/buttler/bin
The main items there are
python2.1
jython
mozilla (for linux)


Finally, if you are interested in setting up a Web Server that you control to run Java servlets, take a look at
Enhydra.
I am currently using version 3.1 and it works very well.
Its benefit over Tomcat is that you can run multiple servlets on multiple ports and each servlet gets its own
classloader. If you have the settings right, as soon as you recompile a class the servlet will automatically
be reloaded.

Note: CNS frowns on running any type of server on regular servers. If it is for your research make sure that it it kosher with your advisor and CNS before you create security holes for all of us. Recently our group moved all of our servers from our private solaris machine to a CNS machine that is managed like the rest of the web servers. This is usually the best solution.

MathML

Here is a handy tool to translate bits of tex documents into the MathML rendered version http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/mml/
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