Four Free Computer Applications

Four programs:

• Unlocker, at http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/#download is a very good freeware program for deleting locked files (ones in use by some program) or stubbornly undeletable ones.

• Detexify, at detexify.kirelabs.org, is an online program, Java maybe, that lets you use the mouse to write a math or other latex symbol and then tells you what latex code generates it.

• Super, at http://www.erightsoft.com/, is freeware, eccentrically presented, that you can download to intelligently merge video files and to convert them from one format to another--- for example, from DVD format to the smaller *.mpg that works on a computer.

• Foxit, at http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/, is freeware with fancier for-pay upgrade, that reads pdf files better than Adobe Acrobat does. It is smaller, and works better with Miktex, and had some other advantage I liked.

Inserting PDF into HTML

Does anybody know how to do this?

The following method didn't really work for me-- the width wouldn't work. But here it is:

Brad DeLong did it at :

http://braddelong.posterous.com/delong-the-modern-revival-of-t .

His HTML is a mess, but it looks as if he used some application or add-on called SCRIBD, maybe using Java.

A New Technology Weblog

I've set up a new weblog for Indiana University people who have useful things to say about computers, gadgets, and suchlike. I imagine much of it will be about STATA, Latex, and new gadgets my colleagues and I have bought. I'll put my future technology posts there instead of here, probably, or maybe I'll cross-post. It's at:

http://iucomputers.blogspot.com/

I wonder, by the way, if we will get spammed. You need a signon and password to make a blog post there, but I've posted both of those things at the top of the blog, so no registration is needed. Can a robot figure that out?

HTML-Expanding Thumbnail Images. Highslide is javascript for putting a thumbnail image to show up in your HMTL page and for another, larger, file, to appear if it's clicked upon. (Click here to read more.)

It's freeware for noncommercial use. The instructions are not very clear, but I got it to work without too much trouble. Here are my instructions:

1. Download the zip file.

2. Unzip it.

3. Upload the "highfile" directory to the top directory of your weblog. In my case, with Blogger, this is the same directory where I have blogger.html and index.html, and it is not the root directory for my server.

4. Save one version of your graphic file with full quality (say, 1012kb) and another with lower quality but faster to load for the thumbnail which shows up first (say, 24kb).

5. Don't put the entire code into your weblog entry. Blogger objects to having things like html, head, body, there. Instead, put in something like my example: http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example.txt. What it looks like as a blog entry is here.

6. Or, change your Blogger template, which as the css style file as part of its file, by inserting http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example3.txt in the style section of it. Then you can leave the style parts out of each blog entry, just using a blog entry like http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example2.txt.

I've also done this for Wordpress. There, the css file in step 6 is inserted in the Style Sheet. The highfile directory in step 3 is loaded up to some wordpress directory. I put up duplicates to make sure, to the top directory and to the wp-content one where the index.htm file is.

I changed the code slightly. I deleted the height parameter, because if you have both a height and a width parameter the image is fit into that thumbnail space and distorted. Some people might want that, though.