CTo'W and a personal project

Hello again! I am back. This week, I'll be talking about LaTeX, XP-Dev, and a personal project I'm working on.

LaTeX is a programming language used to typeset documents. Instead of a WYSIWYG editor like Microsoft Word, it's a WYSIWYM language to describe elements of what you're writing and let styling rules decide how your document should look. This is nice for a few reasons; notably, once you're familiar with the language, it is very easy to create documents. You can write it in whatever text-editor you like, set up your document information (which paper size you're using, whether it's a report, an article, a book, etc.) and go. Whenever you have a section, you just say so:
\section{Section Title}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

and LaTeX (or one of its slaves - I'm still pretty fuzzy on what happens behind the scenes) will make it look nice for you. The Wikipedia page has some example LaTeX code and the corresponding output to check out. I'm trying to move to LaTeX for future documents - probably my work term report this term, for example - because I don't enjoy dealing with Word to try and get my document to look just right.

Next up: XP-Dev.com! In an earlier post, I mentioned Subversion. XP-Dev is a free Subversion host that includes project tracking capabilities as well. I'm really enjoying it so far - I had a minor problem the other day with something, so I reported a bug. The issue was dealt with in four hours, complete with a friendly, "Hey – should be fixed now :)" I'm working on a couple different projects we're hosting at XP-Dev; for one of them, there are five of us on the team and the forums are proving to be a very useful way to discuss the project. We can also create and assign tasks, so it's very easy to see what's been done and what is left to do. This brings me to...

My personal project! I haven't been making much progress on it lately, but my plan is to write an audio visualizer, like you can see in Windows Media Player or foobar2000 or Winamp or Amarok or whatever else you like. Since I've been using XP-Dev lately, I decided to track the project with its utilities, and create this wiki page describing the project in a little more detail than I'll do here. There are still a lot of details to work out, but I'm looking forward to it! I might wrangle a programmer friend or two into helping me with it over Reading Week... (Not that I have Reading Week while I'm on co-op, but they do.)

That's it for now. Cheers!
AC