Are you frequently working with bibliographies, e.g. writing LaTeX documents with BibTeX? Finding the references you want to cite, and fetching/inserting the bibliographic data usually involves a number of clicks and database searches. There is an Emacs extension that may help you out here: Pub-Mode streamlines the whole process down to a couple of keystrokes.
Also, as he reported on a conference I attended recently, the author of Pub-Mode is developing a Bibliographic Management System that, amongst other things, automtically fetches the PDF-file of a reference. No more clicking through publishers websites. I’m really waiting for this one!
Tags:emacs english science |
Filed on March 18th, 2009 | No Comments »
Scientific papers are mostly written in LaTeX, a markup language for typesetting. With LaTeX, a document is programmed rather than edited in a WYSIWYG-way. There is a great deal of specialized editors or editor modes (e.g. AucTeX) simplifying the creation of LaTeX documents. In many cases, however, you just want to quickly write down what’s in your head instead of getting stuck in the details of LaTeX markup. I found that Emacs org-mode is very well suited to fill that gap. You can efficiently draft a scientific document that can directly be converted into LaTeX code which you can beautify later on. I’ll show you here how.
Read more »
Tags:emacs english science |
Filed on February 26th, 2009 | 22 Comments »
The R-project describes itself as a “free software environment for statistical computing and graphics”. It can produce nice graphics indeed, but in practice editing them often gets tedious since any alteration must be given as one or multiple command-line commands. At least I thought so – until I found out about the playwith package. With it, you can play with any kind of graphic (plots, histograms, images…) interactively: zoom in/out, add text, modify colors and more. You can even add input elements (sliders, buttons,…) to interactively control any variable you’re using. The resulting graphics can be exported directly (hint: set output format with playwith.options(save.as.format = "svg") ). Try the package out: Playwith at Google Code.
Tags:english R |
Filed on January 27th, 2009 | 2 Comments »
This one is for zsh users. As you read this, open your editor at once an add the following line to your .zshrc
setopt extendedglob
This will activate extended globbing and allow you to do even more zsh commandline candy. Here some examples
rm ^important.txt # remove all files in the current dir but important.txt
rm *.log~apache.log # remove all .log-files except apache.log
ls (#a1)blu.dat # shows all files with one type error distance to blu.dat, e.g. bla.dat, blu.dot, bl.dat, ...
More possibilities are shown at man zshexpn | less -p 'Glob Qualifiers' or at the Zsh Lovers Page.
Tags:commandline english linux tech |
Filed on January 16th, 2009 | No Comments »
Eine Kältewelle erschüttert das sonst so frostresistente Leipzig! Letztes Jahr haben Passanten noch erstaunt die Digitalkamera herausgeholt als sich etwas Schnee auf den Tischen der Gemüsehändler sammelte. Und nun: Schneeberge auf den Gehwegen und fast -20°C. Folgender Temperaturverlauf muss deshalb einfach ins Archiv.
Temperaturverlauf in Leipzig
Tags:deutsch leipzig |
Filed on January 7th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
After reading this article in the Wired Magazine, I got interested in learning with spaced repetition. Assume you want to learn a particular subject, e.g. spanish vocabulary. You might want to write your word-pairs (spanish/english) on flash cards and practice regularly. It has been shown that you both speed up learning and improve retention if you review your flash cards in predefined intervals. For a particular card, the length of such an interval is determined by the number of its reviews and the graded ability to recall the vocabulary. Spaced repetition lets you remember your facts for years, but you must learn very regularly. About 10 minutes per day will do. Learning and reviewing can be done either by hand or, more conveniently, by software.
I currently attend a spanish course and want the same as most language learners: to remember as much of the vocabulary as long as possible. Woudn’t it be nice to have a tool or webservice which allows all course attendends to use the above thechnique to learn the vocabularly and allows each of them to update the vocabularly list after the courses in order to share the work? Well, I would really like such a thing. 
In the following, I’ll explore the software landscape for tools that might aid here.
Read more »
Tags:english learning |
Filed on December 28th, 2008 | 5 Comments »
I think many folks have been waiting for this. R is a statistical language widely established itself in the life-sciences. However, many lab people dislike it due to its bare commandline interface. This might change with a new program called RGG:
Self written R scripts are usually not longer than 100-150 lines. In most cases, there are 5-10 code items, that the user needs to change often, like setting the working directory, reading an input file, setting parameters to new values etc. The rest of the code usually remains unchanged.
For this problem we have developed a solution: “R GUI Generator (RGG)”. RGG is a GUI generator for R scripts based on a GUI definition language in XML. A GUI is generated by adding predefined GUI tags to the R script. User-GUI interactions are converted to R code, which replace the xml-tags in the R script.
This sounds quite promising, doesn’t it?
Tags:english R science |
Filed on December 10th, 2008 | No Comments »
Linux workers like you and me often need to move a bunch of files. For example, you want to rename all *.dat files into *.dat_save, or you want to rename all files foo.* into something like bar.*. This, however, is not easy to do using the move command as 1) “mv” only supports a single destination file or directory and 2) the shell tries to expand patterns like “*.dat” into e.g. “a.dat b.dat c.dat” before executing the command. The typical workaround is to write a for loop like “for f in *.dat; do mv $f ${f/dat/dat_save}; done“. But it goes much easier if you use the power of zsh, which is the superior shell anyway. 
Insert the following two lines into your .zshrc
autoload -U zmv
alias mmv='noglob zmv -W'
The first line activates the zmv command, an extended move command provided by the zsh. The second line creates an alias for a simplified invocation of that command. All of a sudden, you can write something like “mmv *.dat *.dat_old” or “mmv foo.* bar.*” into a newly opened terminal and it will do as you expect! You can even invoke “mmv **/*2008.mp3 **/*2009.mp3” and all matching files residing in any subdirectory are renamed according to the pattern as well.
Tags:commandline english linux tech |
Filed on November 26th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Well, I never thought that the following could possibly happen: I hereby recommend a great and free piece of software manufactured by Microsoft! I’ve been looking for a photo stitching tool that does the job fast and does not require for much marking nor readjusting by hand. Microsoft has the Image Composite Editor (ICE), a relatively new program that relies on the advanced panoramic stitching algorithms that Microsoft Research developed and that are used, for example, in the famous Photosynth. ICE is really easy to use and produces panorama images of very good quality (see this example). So if you happen to run Windows, try out this free software.
Tags:english photos tech |
Filed on November 7th, 2008 | No Comments »
First part of the tour: From San Francisco to Sacramento to Yosemite to Mammoth Lakes.
Read more »
Tags:photos |
Filed on November 4th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
