May 18 2008

Books Section

I have created a books section in my website. You can find it here:

http://leugim.com.mx/books

Right now you can only find the first chapter of Historias de Tristania, but soon I will publish the first chapter of Web Development With Seaside.

Enjoy.


May 18 2008

latex2html and UTF8 encoding

The last two days I have been fighting with latex2html. I am writing my books in LaTeX, in a Debian GNU/Linux machine. The .tex source file has UTF8 encoding, as has any new text file I create under Debian. One of the books it is written in Spanish, so there are a lot of accented characters:

á, é, í, ó, ú.

When I used pdflatex to generate a PDF document, all was ok, but when I tried to generate HTML with latex2html, the accented characters were generated as:

á, é, Ã, ó, ú

By the way the preamble of my .tex file was like this:


documentclass[10pt,letterpaper]{book}
usepackage[spanish]{babel}
usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
usepackage{makeidx}
author{Miguel Cobá}
title{Historias de Tristania}
begin{document}
maketitle
include{ch1}
end{document}

After a lot of research I finally could find the right invocation of latex2html to generate HTML correctly with accents:

latex2html -html_version 4.0,latin1,unicode book.tex

So, when using LaTeX to write something with accents, the encoding of the .tex files is UTF8 and want to generate HTML from the very same source .tex files, use the command above.


May 15 2008

Leyendas de Tristania

Desde hace mucho tiempo había querido escribir historias fantásticas. El género fantástico, junto con la ciencia ficción son mis favoritos.

Cuando nació Tristán, supe que había llegado el momento. Escribiría para él  las historias que hasta entonces revoloteaban por mi cabeza. Ahora tienen una razón de ser. Son historias para mi hijo que crecerán conforme él crezca. Y las publicaré aquí en mi sitio, para que, si alguien tiene la paciencia y le interesan, pueda también seguirlas. Estas historias, al ser para mi hijo estarán escritas en español, nuestro idioma, nuestra lengua. El libro se llama “Leyendas de Tristania”

Por ahora tengo la primera parte de la primera historia. Se llama Torán. En unos días que la tenga completa (y corregida estilística y ortográficamente por mi amada esposa)  podrán leerla.

¡Estoy emocionado!


May 15 2008

Seaside book

Last weekend I installed LaTeX and began to write my first book.

It is a book about Seaside.

I want to include, at least, the following topics:

  • Seaside basics
  • Advanced Seaside
  • Ajax
  • Announcements
  • Persistance (GLORP, Magma, GemStone/S)
  • Scalability (load balancing, static content caching)
  • Deployment (big iron, VPS, Amazon EC2)
  • Unit Testing
  • Maintenance (monitoring, updating)
  • Magritte (just a little)
  • Data export (JSON/REXX)

I am thinking of creating a full application, from design to deployment, following an agile process (write a test, write the code, you know). Of course it will be hard as I’m by no means an expert, but in writing the book I will learn a lot more about Seaside, and at the same time this knowledge will be preserved in print.

I have read An introduction to Seaside by Michael Perscheid et al and I know about the book that Stéphane Ducasse and others are writing. Also I have read all I could from Ramon Leon’s blog, Lukas Renggli’s blog and the mailing lists. In spite of that I think that something else is necessary. This is my little contribution to the Seaside documentation.

I don’t have idea how long this will take as I have never written a book (except my thesis). I have just finished the first chapter, but I hope that as the time pass I will write faster.

Wish me luck!