Alexander Shibakov's homepage

This page is under construction. Permanently. Constantly. Like a river.

Hi, this is me (fixing my drill press). Quite handsome, huh? Sorry, I really hate three things: pictures on websites, bad ropes, and Gatlinburg (this is not an exhaustive list, though).

CVics

Some News

Old news out, fresh news in. Nothing fresh, so I'm out.

Three of my favorite (nonmathematical, nonfiction, nonliterature) books

• The Art of Electronics, by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill
• The Complete Guide To Sharpening, by Leonard Lee
• The Science of Radio, by Paul Nahin

Three of my favorite authors (fill in your own links)

• Stanislaw Lem
• Donald Knuth
• Edgar Poe

Coming Soon! (Before the end of the Universe, that is :) )

Nothing I can think of.

Raw, untested stuff

• PerlTeX -- A fusion of Perl and TeX via Web2C (or the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but not in this order (the order is 1-2, 2-3, 3-1, or the Ugly, the Good, and the Bad) -- test your macros quickly by generating test cases in perl. Some simple TeX extensions, too (like \number\toks0 will expand to the number of tokens in \toks0; guess what \number\toks\toks0 will do, :) ...). Perl macros can be run from inside PerlTeX using \perl ... \endperl. A simple test.tex is provided that pretty much descrides what the package can do. Should build on any system on which a Web2C distribution can be built. Drop me a note if you find PerlTeX useful or have any ideas that go in a similar direction.
• TeX style for a dictionary Here is what this style file allows you to do. It lets you typeset text in several columns (as many or as few as you want), with footnotes. The footnotes are the tricky part. They are counted starting from one within every page, and typeset as a single paragraph that fits under the columns you specify. It also puts the first and the last word on the page in the header (if you use it to typeset a dictionary, as I do). The output routine is pretty tricky but I do not see how to do it with less or even simpler code. Run it on a sample provided (a simple shell script is included, too, so just type ./texdriver.sh dictionary.tex to see what happens). This thing is slooooow; it runs TeX several times (theoretically it might never stop, and it is not just this code -- just think about the problem for a second). If you do not have `literaturnaya' fonts (probably the most beautiful cyrillic fonts in existence), just modify `dict_fonts.sty' to your liking. The words come from ``Summa Technologia'' by Stanislaw Lem (one of the most inspiring books I have ever read); the numbers next to them are counts of the number of appearances of each word in the text. If you want to test it on noncyrillic input, just generate your own dictionary file. The format is simple: `word[count]', one per line. The cyrillic in the file is in `alternativnaya' encoding (type Ctl-X RET C in emacs to choose a different encoding).
• GRUB hack -- allows the user to choose which image or OS to load before GRUB's menu comes up, by pressing CapsLock or such. Just a patch for GRUB v.92 -- does not include any of RedHat's sugar (such as an image background). It does what I need so I have frozen it.
• HC12 Loader -- oh, boy, this one is pretty raw. It DOES work, sort of. This is a simple loader for HC12 uCs. Was tested on a standard EVB only. I wrote it so that I can script the loading/programming for the board. Here is my LCD code for HITACHI 1330F chip that shows hc12 programmer in action (by the way, if you can squeeze the `executor' routine in this code in under 37 bytes, I will send you a real $20 bill, I promise (the first person to send me working code will get the prize; working code should output stuff EXACTLY as the old one and should terminate the same way; a promise is not on obligation, remember, and can be retracted at any time)). The loader does not do any bootstrapping (c'mon, it is just some HC12 assembly), uses DBug12 instead: do not say later I did not warn you.