This post describes a very, very elementary debugging skill. Yet, I could not find any concise tutorial about it on the web. So, here we go!
Assume you’re developing a small software under Linux, maybe using C or C++ and the GCC compiler. Testing your program, you find that it crashes with an error (segfault, assertion, [...]
Tags:emacs english programming | Filed on May 26th, 2009 | No Comments »
Since weeks the media is reporting about the severity of the current economic crisis, comparing it with the Great Depression (GD) that began 1929. However, to me this seemed like a historic exaggeration since I couldn’t really rediscover the severe effects of the GD in the current crisis. However, I now found some figures that [...]
Tags:economy english politics | Filed on April 29th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Today I stumbled over a very neat extension for the email client Mozilla Thunderbird. It allows you to include LaTeX style formulas into your email. Simply write down the formula enclosed in $$’s, e.g. $$\alpha = 5$$. Hitting a button will then convert all formulas into images and thereby allows you to send the email [...]
Tags:english science | Filed on April 22nd, 2009 | 2 Comments »
In december, I wrote an article about spaced repetition systems for learning vocabuly and other facts. The both web- and desktop-based tool Anki turned out to be particularly suitable for our purposes (see older post). One requirement was the ability to instantly share entered facts among a group of people, which interestingly was problematic for [...]
Tags:english learning | Filed on March 28th, 2009 | No Comments »
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, [...]
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 [...]
Tags:emacs english science | Filed on February 26th, 2009 | 10 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 [...]
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 # [...]
Tags:commandline english linux tech | Filed on January 16th, 2009 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Tags:english learning | Filed on December 28th, 2008 | 3 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 [...]
Tags:english R science | Filed on December 10th, 2008 | No Comments »