NetworkManager goodness (and Ubuntu ramble)

I was reading this article from Ars about Ubuntu 8.10 features and saw some links about NetworkManager at end. These links are here, here and here and link to Dan William's blog.

This looks like the start of NM being more useful, than annoying - sure it worked in the past but it seriously screwed things up a lot. I like the idea of a 3G connection being able to be shared easily - means Jayne and I can sit in a hotel room and both surf the web.

It's also good to see progress on the WiFi scene. Wireless on Linux has been a very mixed bag for years with mostly out of kernel drivers. This has been sorted out via moving to the ex-Devicescape code in the kernel and drivers all shepherded by John Linville. Unfortunately 2.6.24 for Ubuntu 8.04 was worse for many Atheros cards and people reverted for madwifi. I believe that this is getting largely fixed so Ubuntu 8.10 might be the one for road warriors (as also mentioned in the article at start)

IEEE FMN '08 paper

My paper as will be presented at this conference is now available from my website here for those that are interested.

Embedding fonts with Latex/Pdftex

When I have been submitting to IEEE conferences my papers have been coming back as failing format checks due to not all fonts being embedded. Anyway I had a quick look and hacked it originally. I took my PDF file from Linux, rebooted into Windows and then used CutePDF to print my PDF back to PDF but with embedded fonts.

Well I thought I'd get this fixed for two reasons - I don't like hacks as I want to know what caused it, and I also don't want to keep rebooting between operating systems.

As it turns out when generating PDFs on Linux Ghostscript embeds all fonts except the standard 14. So I found out how to fix this and documented it here. Unfortunately this didn't work out straight away so just fired up gvim on the pdf file to examine the source. Turns out that I had embedded graphs as pdf so regenerated all those and then it worked out fine.

Accepted for IEEE FMN

I've been accepted for the IEEE FMN workshop and so Jayne and I will head to Wales. We've both got Welsh ancestry so are quite pleased about it.

I'm also pleased for my PhD as getting accepted at such an event helps heaps for being examined (when I finally finish writing up)