Bring your child to work day

As many know today is “Bring your child to work day”. We have a slew children walking around and to top it off, our pet Croc (link page 4) decided to pay a visit.

A co-worker took these photos

Surprisingly the local Iguana population is in hiding. I’ll have to post some pictures of them at a later date.

Update 4-27: it turns out late yesterday evening, the Croc decided to partake in an Iguana for dinner. He was spotted with the tail hanging out of its mouth.

My dragon has been named

Norberth! Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback from Harry Potter. +’th’ in the fashion of the dragon of Pern. All dragons in Pern (Anne McCaffery) have names that end in ‘th’.

Latex + Eclispe = Texlipse

I’ve posted before about editing LaTeX files, but here is a nice tool I just noticed today. I’ve been using Texlipse on a daily basis to write my thesis. Texlipse is a feature/plugin for Eclipse that allows for editing and quick compiling of LaTeX files in Eclipse, (also with the use of PDFPerspective from JPedal, view compiled PDF files). Anyways, today I was trying to enter data in a table, this is not a difficult task, but in LaTeX, it tends to be tedious. Today however, I remembered a view I had noticed when I first started using Texlipse, the “LaTeX Table View”. This view allows for the easy inputing of data and then creation of a table within LaTeX. The only missing item is border formatting, so you have to manually define the justification (left, right, center) and border lines in the actual LaTeX file. Oh well, but life is easier for now with this tool.

Update based on fussel73’s comment.
I guess I should have not eluded to that idea that I’ve integrated JPedal’s PDFViewer with TeXlipse, what I do is use the JPedal PDFViewer perspective as my base perspective and then open all my LaTeX files within that perspective. All this allows is that every time I open a PDF product from pdflatex, I don’t have to switch my perspective. I’ve actually posted the suggestion to the TeXlipse developers of trying to integrate the PDFViewer as part of the viewing options with in TeXlipse, but overall it really is not that big of an deal. The only issue with my approach is that I have to close the opened PDF file before recompiling my document or the new resulting new PDF will not be available until I do so. fussel73, I hope that clears things up a bit. If you find a way of better integrating the two, please post and share.

Amazing birthday gifts

Some birthday gifts are just amazing. This is one of the three gift I received this year from my soon-to-be wife Lauren. She also gave me a great shaving kit and a cool sudoku rubik cube, but this dragon is the coolest addon for a computer ever. The little guy is watching me complete my thesis.