Open Source

BibLaTeX references across time and cultures I was writing paper in English so ideally there would have been solid English language references, but I found this was not so for my topic. This is for LaTeX authors who need to include references with unusual requirements, especially non-latin scripts, non-English references, rare scripts and ancient documents. In some references I had all three, meaning in my case: Category Range in my references Languages Chinese, Sanscrit, Spanish, Arabic Eras ancient (3400BCE), modern ancient (900CE), old (1898) Right-to-left Arabic Dates precise, approximate, and ranges I had no previous experience of publishing an extensive research piece with this sort of variation. No computer system really handles it well, and as content is increasingly created in non-latin scripts, latin-centric software is showing its flaws. LaTeX has responded with the modern LuaTeX project which demonstrates how robust this 50 year old software is. ...

(written in 2008) How a young Australian discovered Open Source and a career. Eventually learning that a mixture of code, law and mathematics is a frontier for human rights battles. It isn’t often I come face to face with myself after a twenty-something year break, but I did yesterday. As a first year university student at the South Australian Institute of Technology, I wandered into an Adelaide company called Australian Launch Vehicles (ALV), a company I noticed when driving around doing landscape gardening oddjobs. “Launch Vehicles” sounded very cool, so in I went. ALV was founded by a pair of entrepreneurial rocket scientists. Despite decades of rocketry history in South Australia, there was no local space industry. Establishing a new Australian spaceflight capability in 1987 was very ambitious. ...