Final Version of my PhD thesis

I passed my PhD defence on Friday. I’ve uploaded the final version of my thesis titled Algorithmic Algebraic Techniques and their Application to Block Cipher Cryptanalysis. Not much changed since the last draft, which I also posted on this blog, except a few typos and errors.

Mercurial, LaTex and my Thesis

I use Mercurial (and bitbucket.org) to track changes to my thesis (yes, I’m writing up, scary thought). Quite naturally, I use LaTeX to typeset my thesis. For LaTeX documents I prefer not have a fixed column width where line breaks are inserted manually. This makes using Mercurial’s standard diff somewhat pointless because it will only show me paragraphs that I edited. Meet wdiff: “The program wdiff is a front end to diff for comparing files on a word per word basis. A word is anything between whitespace. This is useful for comparing two texts in which a few words have been changed and for which paragraphs have been refilled.” I use the following options in order to use wdiff.

[extensions]
hgext.extdiff =

[extdiff]
cmd.wdiff  = wdiff
opts.wdiff = -a -l

I couldn’t get colour output to work, suggestions welcome.