Custom display sizes with Remote Desktop Connection

Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection is a nice piece of software. Wondering how to configure a desktop size so that it would fit perfectly into rotated monitor, I found the directions hereto be very simple:

To set a custom display resolution in an .rdp file

Open the .rdp file in a text editor. Add or change the following settings:

desktopwidth:i:<value>

desktopheight:i:<value>

where <value> is the resolution, such as 1680 or 1050.

The articles goes into detail about other ways to set the values.

How to render a ^ (carrot) in normal LaTeX text

Here are two ways to render a ^ (carrotcaret) in plain text within LaTeX:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
A caret: \verb|^|
\end{document}
\textasciicircum

I tested them and both work as prescribed. They produce different carrotscarets.
(via comp.lang.texcomp.text.tex)
Addendum: 03/02/09
Corrected spelling of caret.
Addendum: 03/03/09
Wrote the wrong newsgroup name.

daemontools

daemontools is a collection of tools for managing UNIX services.
supervise monitors a service. It starts the service and restarts the service if it dies. Setting up a new service is easy: all supervise needs is a directory with a run script that runs the service.
multilog saves error messages to one or more logs. It optionally timestamps each line and, for each log, includes or excludes lines matching specified patterns. It automatically rotates logs to limit the amount of disk space used. If the disk fills up, it pauses and tries again, without losing any data.

(via PLT)

LaTeX Advice

While reading this article, it occurred to me that one ought to approach LaTeX coding much as one would code in any other language: re-use whenever possible.
Aspiring TeXnicians should get comfortable with searching for packages that contain the desired functionality, and using them, rather than starting from scratch each time.
Perhaps this is something of a no-brainer, but, it is very easy to get caught up in the fact that you are writing, rather then coding, while using LaTeX.