I’m far from a ninja when it comes to but I’m a big fan. I’ve written a bit about formatting logical expressions for past homework exercises. I’ve also used it in blog posts for doing the same. It’s a very useful tool even if you’re just a using basic templates like me.

A major driver behind my work on this website was the desire to get some of my technical work out into the public domain. Around the same time I started blogging I told myself that I should host my resume on this site as an incentive to keep it up to date. I failed pretty miserably there.

But when I took my position with Citrix nearly a year ago I updated my CV and now I’m resolving to keep it that way. It’s never an easy task to drag an old CV into the modern age and mine had been formatted using a very old style called res from RPI. Instead of struggling to keep the style usable on a modern toolchain I took on migrating to the newer tucv from CTAN.

This was a catalyst for all sorts of useful stuff like getting my CV into a git repo and generally refreshing the content. I’ll be putting together an ‘about’ page this site where I’ll host it and make the source available as well.

Till then here’s a quick set of instructions for getting tucv working on Debian Wheezy:
Unfortunately I wasn’t ablt to find tucv in any of the Debian latex / texlive packages. So to get tucv working I had to get the basic latex and texlive packages. Once this was done I had to download the .dtx and ,ins files manually.

Figuring out how to generate a style file from these sources and where to put them was the next trick. A bit of web searching turned up a manual describing how to use LaTeX on Debian:

1. Just copy these files to /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/tucv.
2. Compile both files using latex

to generate the package and documentation.

3. Registering the new style using mktexlsr or texhash.

Then all you have to do is make your resume! Following the examples from the CTAN website is the best way to go. Personally I already had significant amount of content so most of my time was spent playing with layout.

It’s not perfect and I’ll be playing around to see if I can get better spacing in some of the sections that have a two column layout. The right most column is too narrow and forces date ranges on to multiple lines and I’m not a big fan of how that looks.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. Day job has taken over my life. It’s had me attached to a keyboard working 12 hour days for pretty much a month now. I haven’t had much chance or desire to geek out after getting home from work as a result.

With the fall semester starting up (my last class!) I have spent some time playing with LaTeX again. I’ve been using LaTeX off and on for a few years to prepare labs and reports for school and even some proposals for work though I’ve never done more than minor edits to existing LaTeX styles. For my fall class I’m using LaTeX in a similar capacity but with a fun twist: I’m formatting propositional logic proofs.

First off the class is CSE 774: Access Control, Security, and Trust taught by Dr. Shiu-Kai Chin at Syracuse University. He co-authored a boot by the same name if you’re interested in the content. Long story short Dr. Chin and Dr. Older developed a small logic language based on the logic of Abadi and Lampson. They use their logic to formally reason about access control decisions in a number of systems. Interesting stuff.

Most of the homework I’ve been doing requires either doing formal proofs or manipulating formulas and constructing Kripke Structures. The first assignment got messy quick so instead of copying all of my work over I decided I’d type it up in LaTeX. I managed to use generic math mode (the align environment) for most of my work but the structured proofs needed something extra.

Thankfully some industrious academics out there ran into this problem long ago and wrote two different styles for typesetting Fitch-style structured deduction. Both have their strengths and in the end I used a mix of the two. The fitch style is simple and straight forward. That said I couldn’t figure out a way to get it to display multi-line formulas which was a problem since the logic we’re using is quite verbose. I managed to track down another fitch style, this one by Peter Selinger which handles multi-line formulas quite well.

I know people are always looking for a way to get their work done more quickly and LaTeX isn’t going to help you there. So in the end my homework didn’t get done any faster but it sure looked nice when I was done 🙂