Open Source

How to manage BibLaTeX across time and cultures I wrote a paper in English using LaTeX ↗ on the topic of Epidemiology and One Health. Some essential references did not exist in English. That might sound simple — just list the originals, plus some translation/cross-referencing work to get the necessary information! It isn’t that simple. This howto is for LaTeX authors with references which are less common in computing/mathematics but otherwise unremarkable, particularly: non-latin scripts, latinisations, non-English references, rare scripts and ancient documents. My sources had all of these at once, giving me the following situation: ...

(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 ↗ in Adelaide I did landscape gardening oddjobs for companies. I noticed a company called Australian Launch Vehicles (ALV), which 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 Australian spaceflight in 1987 was ambitious; they failed but others are giving it a go.) ...

Adversarial interoperability… Here is the history of our project Samba as it stood in the Adversarial Interoperability ↗ days, recorded in the file history.txt from the Samba source code tree ↗. In the 1990s Microsoft was one of the earliest tech monopolies, and when working in IT at the University of South Australia I saw first-hand the harm being done. I was quite passionate in 1993, according to my co-founder’s statement below. Later, in the dot-com boom days I wrote the first Windows replacement paper. Recently I made a timeline of battles lost and won. ...