programming language
Another one on one of my favorite topics, programming languages, here’s an interesting thing about the LOLCODE language.
Add comment October 17th, 2008
Archive for October, 2008
presentations
After just recently updating my links page to add links provided by my research design students on how to prepare slides and do presentations, I stumbled on this presentation by Apple’s Steve Jobs on their new line of notebooks. I think this is a very nice example of a good presentation, even if selling a commercial product is not quite the same thing as presenting academic research. The slides are well designed and bare in content; the presentation is clear and to the point; etc. - it all holds as well for academic presentations.
Providing the link is also strong advocacy of Apple’s notebooks, of course, which are indeed great machines, but they’re also totally over-priced. I’m still hooked, but sometimes I wish Linux or FreeBSD would just make a little quicker progress in becoming user-friendly, so that people can buy well-designed (!) PC laptops and install a nice operating system on it. (My reason for liking the Mac so much is: 1) the operating system is based on BSD, so I can use all my Linux tools that I like; 2) it is a zillion times easier to install hardware than on a Linux system, even easier than on a Windows system; 3) the laptops look nice; 4) the laptops have flashy screens, to my knowledge only comparable to the Sony VAIO’s.)
2 comments October 16th, 2008
artificial intelligence
Here’s a very funny story about an AI player in a little computer game trying to escape the game itself (!) and subsequently crashing the entire system.
Add comment October 13th, 2008
thesis writing
Not sure what this is, but might be interesting: thesis blog.
Add comment October 5th, 2008
sweave / latex compile script
Ah, just because I got tired of typing latex; bibtex; latex; latex; dvipdf every single time I wrote a little script a few months ago to do that. Of course, the script is super simple:
latex $1; bibtex $1; latex $1; latex $1; dvipdf $1; cleanup
whereby cleanup refers to another little script that just deletes all Latex’s intermediary files. (Perhaps there is a Latex setting to have them saved in an entirely different place anyway, wouldn’t there be?)
Later I added one for the rare occasion that I use Sweave as well to integrate R code into my Latex files. Now I am also starting to become a fan of the pic language to add diagrams to my files and it also integrates very well with Latex. So now I upgraded my script a little and just post it here in the odd case that it turns out to be useful for someone else as well. The Sweave version:
#!/bin/sh
R CMD Sweave $1
fn=c`date +"%M%S"`
pic -t $1.tex > $fn.tex
rm $1.tex
latex $fn
bibtex $fn
latex $fn
latex $fn
dvipdf $fn $1.pdf
rm *.aux
rm $fn*
I had tried Sweave earlier but was not too satisfied, since most things I was estimating took too long to have them run every time I compile my text. But now I have been working on a document with a lot of straightforward regressions, several plots, and several diagrams, and the final layout is only of importance as an internal working document - not for publication - so I have been making heavy use of both Sweave and pic and I am really enthousiast about the result.
Add comment October 5th, 2008