Adobe Reader in 2011

I know it's cruel to mock, but: Is there much worse of an error than flat-out refusing to save a document that has changes you'd like to keep?

Eight months of Shadow Yoga

This is a long rambling story about me and yoga. Primarily written so I can reflect back on it when I'm older, I suppose. Feel free to pass it by if you tire of people with blogs egotistically writing about themselves.

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Early yoga

My first experience with yoga was around 2005, when I went steady at Hatha Yoga Shala for I forget how long but let's say six months of weekly or perhaps twice-weekly sessions. This was the fittest time in my life, when I was running and working in hospitality at Chocolate Bean; I weighed on the order of 52kg–53kg. I was advised at the time by my teacher there that running was not appropriate for either my hamstrings or my ‘yoga breath’, so yoga replaced running as my form of exercise.

Despite very much enjoying the practise, I wasn't able to maintain it—at one point it slipped out of my life (supposedly temporarily) and didn't return. Looking back I think this time of my life was fairly experimental and transitory, without much stability or consistency in terms of my lifestyle choices. However, I credit my teacher there Gary Mills with planting the seed of yoga philosophy in my mind even if I wasn't ready to commit myself to it at that time.

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Yoga Mukti

Fast-forward some five or six years to 2011 and I've ceased any sort of exercise (besides walking to work each day), gained around six or seven kilograms, and I'm feeling older and out of shape. (Although any neck and back complaints are far less pronounced after leaving Chocolate Bean.) My partner Toni—due I think to her both tiring of hearing my complaints on the matter and wanting us to spend time together—signed us up for a beginner's course at a local yoga studio, Yoga Mukti, based purely on the convenience of their schedule fitting in with ours. The idea of her going to a beginner's class is fairly laughable considering her experience here, and I'm deeply thankful she was willing to do that for and with me.

Now, at the time I had no real understanding of the fact that my original yoga classes were in the Shadow Yoga style, and I was similarly clueless that Yoga Mukti was—surprisingly—in the same style. Why surprising? The teachers of Shadow yoga are trained personally by its founder, Shandor Remete, and there are simply not that many of them! Given that Shandor Remete is from Adelaide might explain the presence here of two Shadow yoga schools literally around the corner from each other, though. Imagine my surprise to learn that a world-famous yoga teacher comes from our li'l city.

Anyway, I naively kinda thought yoga was all the same—although I'd heard of various varieties, that fact hadn't really clicked—and I was gratified to find that I slipped quite easily into this new yoga school. That Shadow yoga and its teachers suited me so well has certainly been a happy coincidence.

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Brief summary of Shadow yoga

I don't feel qualified to explain Shadow yoga for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it's the only style of yoga I've done so I can't put it into context against any other school. (And even if I had been to other yoga teachers, I suspect they would vary just as much as the schools themselves, whereas I gather that Shadow yoga teachers are relatively consistent between each other.)

As I've only been practising Shadow yoga for a little while, I also can't comment on where it eventually leads, but I've done enough now that I think I can at least adequately describe it.

You can read the official description of Shadow yoga on its website but I think a more prosaic description is warranted here. But consider the following a heavily skewed interpretation of yoga in general based on my limited reading and experience.

Like all branches of the yoga system, hatha yoga—the yoga of the body, as compared to the various yogas of meditation, breathing, etc.—aims at stilling the mind to create inner calm and reach enlightenment, whatever that means. Grossly speaking, it achieves this by putting the body into difficult positions requiring the full attention of the mind to concentrate on achieving, holding, and practising those positions.

[ Digression. Us westerners can then consider hatha yoga from a physical or philosophical point of view, or both. Physically, yoga is a good way to strengthen the body and make it supple, and is a lifelong exercise program to keep us healthy; philosophically, yoga keeps our mind clear and happy. On this last point, there's probably an endorphin addiction element as well, as anyone who has known a gym junkie can attest to the addictive quality of exercise in general. Additionally, this makes the physical side of hatha yoga a gateway to the philosophical, where people like me who started yoga for the exercise might stay for the spiritual side of things. ]

These yoga positions are known as asanas (stress on the ass, contrary to my Adelaide accent—or is this english in the general?—which tends to stress the second syllable) and these are how yoga is known in our society. Most people I know consider yoga as a means for ‘stretching’, and I'm sure the images of people doing, say, downward facing dog are well-known to many.

But Shadow yoga is more than just moving between asanas which are found and held. Indeed, most asanas—there are eighty-four ‘standard’ ones of which a subset are used in various practises—are simply inaccessible to people like me who work in an office and sit all day, lacking strength, flexibility, and body awareness to even attempt them sensibly.

Instead, as a bridge to reach a level appropriate for asana practise, Shadow yoga contains what it terms three ‘preludes’, which have certain features to aid the yoga student in this progression. Each prelude consists of a fluid set of movements, some of which coming from a yoga tradition and others inspired from elsewhere such as other martial/dance disciples. An idea of the style of these preludes can been seen from the Shadow yoga videos that are extracts from their DVD.

The preludes progress in their level of availability or difficulty, and Shadow yoga classes are tied to learning these forms in series. Having now practised for eight months, I would say that I'm quite familiar with the first form, reasonably familiar with the second, and somewhat familiar with the third; on my own I only practise the first, so far.

The preludes have a number of common themes, involving:

• A variety of movement types (twisting, bending, turning, etc.)
• Building strength in the thighs, hips, and core
• Finding flexibility (or lack of tension) in the major joints of the body
• A rhythmic progression or flow, promoting a strong degree of breath control as the breath is linked to the prelude movements

The working of the breath also involves using uddiyana bandha during many poses, which exercises the diaphragm and (I assume) leads into the practise of nauli. Many of the prelude poses are also aided by the application of mula bandha. I believe the early introduction of these important yoga techniques and their inclusion in dynamic movements is quite a unique component of Shadow yoga, but I could be wrong about this.

In their advanced or complete form, the preludes culminate with a series of Shadow-themed sun salutations, forward and side splits (samakonasana and hanumanasana, resp.), a twisting backbend (atikrantam), and the peacock pose, all of which can take years of practise to perfect (and are asanas in a more traditional sense). And so the complete preludes on their own are a formidable series in their own right.

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The arc of a Shadow yoga class (each is 90 minutes) follows a consistent formula:

• Warm up
• Prelude work
• Asana practise
• Inversion
• Pranayama (breath exercises)
• Warm down

(Sometimes time runs short to include all the last three.) My understanding is that at least in the school I attend, the inversion work goes no further than viparita karani mudra, which is kind of a supported shoulderstand, and halasana, its natural (more difficult) companion. One day I am interested in practising shouldstand and headstand proper, but I'm in no rush at this stage—in my whole life I've never been able to hold myself upsidedown, and I recognise this will be a difficult challenge for me.

It's interesting to me to view the variation of prelude work and asana practise over the course of several months and across a range of classes (from beginner to advanced). Asana practise in our school tends to follow a theme across several weeks, focussing on twisting at one time then folding, say, another. And in many cases, these asanas will feed back to aspects of prelude work—twisting leads back to atikrantam and folding to halasana, for example. An almost guaranteed asana we perform is supta padangusthasana, which directly stretches the hamstrings and opens the hips for samakonasana and hanumanasana. As someone with ridiculously immobile hips, the feeling of performing these vary for me from intolerable to extraordinarily gratifying, week to week.

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Personal practise

I've made measurable progress since I begun yoga eight months ago. Every week I tend to be sore in a different (and unusual) place. The discovery of being able to consciously control the diaphram and intercostal muscles of the rigs was rather startling, to be honest.

While I started originally at one class per week and seemingly needed the whole week to recover, that quickly built up to two classes per week and then three. Each time, it suddenly felt like the gap between lessons was too long, and slotting in another class just ‘felt right’.

So right now I'm usually attending three sessions of Shadow yoga per week, and attempting on my own to at least perform the warm-up exercises most mornings, if not a run-through of the first prelude if time and energy permit. This self-practise started maybe two months ago, and running through a prelude under my own steam is significantly different to doing so in a class. For one thing, it changed the way I viewed the class—after memorising the sequence the class became more fluid as I knew without thinking what was coming next. Secondly, the classes tend to push me further in a practise than I would manage on my own; there's nothing like someone else telling you what to do.

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I have an addictive personality, and there's no doubt I've latched onto Shadow yoga as my latest obsession. As always with such things, while in the midst of it I feel like I'll never give it up, but I probably thought that when I first tried yoga five or six years ago. For the moment I feel stronger and more flexible than I've ever been, and yet there's still so many aspects of our classes in which it seems like I'm completely hopeless.

I'll be so busy next year I like to think I'll need yoga to keep myself sane, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Quick numbers on renewables & nuclear

I'm in favour of Ben Heard's plan to start phasing out the smaller and dirtier power plants in SA with nuclear options while simultaneously building up our renewable energy infrastructure.

I can't really follow all the arguments for/against nuclear and renewable power without some sort of reference to the costs and energy requirements behind them. Since I'm from South Australia, here are some numbers that make sense to me:

• Current coal/gas energy supply: ~4000 MW
• Nuclear costs: 1000MW @ $6B (very very rough; here are some assorted figures)
• Cf. solar proposal in Victoria: 150 MW @ $0.4B
• Largest wind farm: 240 MW
• Seemingly typical wind farm prices: 100 MW @ $0.2B

The South Australia government has the target for 20% renewable energy by 2010, which is around 2.5 times what we current have.

Were SA to be given a blank cheque to immediately replace its carbon-producing power stations with possible alternatives, it could follow some combination of all the following: (it seems unlikely that renewable energy can provide consistent-enough power)

• $24B for four nuclear plants
• $11B for 27 solar plants
• $8B for forty wind farms

Have I got those numbers even close to right? I'm actually surprised that the solar and wind options even come in at a rough order of magnitude equivalence to nuclear. Solar and wind farms clearly are not 100% operational all of the time, so you'd need many more of them to cope with continuous and transient-spike power requirements. And logistically it is far more difficult to build ~50 wind farms/solar plants than four nuclear plants.

Geothermal power is another base-load energy possibility that I haven't considered above. SA is listed among the suitable regions around the world for large-scale geothermal power, but it's not clear whether it (nor its required infrastructure) can be developed quickly enough and in a large enough scale to be a serious alternative. Current developments in the area indicate ‘hundreds’ of megawatts would be feasible.

Perhaps geothermal is indeed a viable option to take up some of the base-load slack. But otherwise I find it hard to see an alternative to nuclear that can handle our base-load energy requirements.

PhD rationale

The best explanation behind the appeal of a PhD, to me, is expressed in a comment on an Ars Technica story:

Someone - an eccentric billionaire, say - contacts you and offers you three or four years on a paradise island, all expenses paid. Accommodations will be sparse but sufficient, and you'll have lots of time, excellent connectivity and lots of resources to pursue whatever project strikes your fancy. Of course, it's limited to the agreed time; once the time is up you're off the island and back in your home time to fend for yourself again. [...] The point is, doing a PhD isn't only - or even most - about what kind of career it will get you.

Of course, I'm an optimist who's not interested in earning money just for the sake of it. By all means do a PhD if it does lead you towards a better career, but I recommend doing one for totally different reasons: learning about who you are and what you like to do. I had no idea who I was when I started my PhD, and the long, long leash given to me by my supervisors has allowed me to explore such things about myself.

Considering a Mac Pro

I'm earning a little bit of money at the moment, and I've convinced myself that it's time to buy my first ever desktop. Largely due to storage but also ergonomics and stability.

I've used a MacBook or PowerBook as my sole computer for around ten years; if memory serves, I went through most of uni without a computer until I received a hand-me-down in 2000 or 2001.

(As an aside, I still believe the black G3 Powerbooks—designed in the pre-minimalist Apple era—are among the most attractive notebooks ever made. I'd have to say that the recent unibody MacBook Pros take the cake, however.)

Back to desktops. Marco Arment wrote last year on choosing between iMac or Mac Pro. To take the first and last paragraph of his article most sums up the argument quite well:

Today’s overdue Mac Pro update is a welcome change, but for a computer that’s so expensive, why not just get an iMac?

[...]

While the Mac Pro costs a lot more up front, high-performance users also get a lot more value and versatility over its lifespan, which is likely to be much longer and end much more gracefully.

In fact, if you look at the Mac Pro prices on eBay, these things have mad resale value. You're looking at something like: (Australian dollars)

• Five-year-old, dual 2.66 GHz dual-core: $1100–$1600
• Four-year-old, dual 3 GHz quad-core: $1900–$2600

Newer models more expensive again, of course; price ranges seem largely due to varying amounts of included memory.

Current stock prices for Mac Pro models with education discount are $2949 (quad core) and $4129 (dual quad core) and up.

Current prices for iMacs are $1929 (dual core) and $2279 (quad core). For a premium of some $900 the iMac can be augmented with a 256GB SSD as well, but if you're doing that you might as well also fork out the addition $200 to get a 2TB drive over the 1TB original.

I'm not really able to afford the eight core Mac Pro, so it's only in this list to taunt me. I'd rather not get a dual core iMac, so drop that one. Which narrows the choice to two options at very similar prices at around $3400:

• Low-end Mac Pro + 3rd party SSD
• Top-end iMac w. bumped drivers from Apple

These are both items that Apple will be updating this year (well, the Mac Pro is less certain but still likely). I'll keep my eye on these models as the year goes by. My favoured outcome is that with judicious saving and a juicy update, I'll be able to afford the Mac Pro. If not, I'm sure the all-in-one will suit me just fine.

Gross National Happiness

I'd just like to make you aware of the idea, if it's not already familiar to you, of maximising ‘Gross National Happiness’ as a way to run your country. Cf. maximising ‘Gross Domestic Product’, which certainly causes some people unhappiness at least some of the time.

Matthieu Ricard says: ‘We cannot expect the quality of life to simply be a by-product of economic growth, since the criteria for these two are different’. Damn straight.

Disregard the obvious ‘what about the people that become happy from others‘ unhappiness’ faux-argument you'd make if you were discussing this at the pub. Kick those people out of the country. (The unhappiness-wanting ones. Not the faux-argument at the pub ones.)

Anyway, the government/leaders of Bhutan have used gross national happiness in their decision-making process since the 1970s. What an awesome country.

(P.S. I do have to say that putting ‘Gross’ and ‘Happiness’ in the same term is a bit funny.)

Roast pumpkin pea soup with peas

This my favourite meal for maximum taste/cost ratio. You need

• Split green peas (2 cups)
• Pumpkin or sweet potato (around 300g)
• Frozen peas (cup or two)
• Two large onions
• A head of garlic
• 5–10 Cardamom pods

Preparation is easy but cooking time will take a little longer.

1. Fry, in butter if your morals allow it, the onions and some chopped garlic (say three or four cloves) until tasty. Optional: add a splash or two of sherry or white wine.

2. Add the split peas and fry quickly then add six cups of boiling water and the cardamom pods. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for however long it takes to get the soup edible.

3. Meanwhile, cut up the pumpkin into bite-sized pieces and roast (i.e., coat with olive oil and lightly salt) with the remaining garlic cloves. (Remove excess paper from the garlic cloves but do not remove from their shells.)

4. When the pumpkin is soft, add it to the pea soup.

5. When the garlic is mushy, smash into a paste, removing their skin, and stir well through the soup. The readiness times for the garlic and pumpkin may or may not align.

6. Finally add frozen peas and cook for a few minutes until they pop in your mouth. You may want to fish out the cardamom if you don't like flavour bombs in your soup.

Serve with lemon pepper, if you like, and—of course—buttered crusty bread. (Serves six, probably.)

Those pesky kids at Google

John Gruber linked to a report that Microsoft has recently paid billions of dollars to Nokia to have its OS in their upcoming phones.

Google earns money on Android apparently by licensing its apps and tangentially—but lucratively—through ads shown through Google search and other services. Microsoft typically has been in the business of licensing Windows to earn its money, and you'd think they'd like to do something similar with Windows Phone. But it seems that instead of having Nokia pay them for the privilege, Microsoft had to outbid Google for the reverse: ‘invest’ in Nokia for future profits via the Windows Phone platform.

You could argue that Microsoft's business plan here is

1. Spend lots of money building Windows Phone
2. Pay people to use it
3. ???
4. Profit

Let's assume there's a little more of a rationale behind it.

One could hardly argue Windows Phone sales were spectacular to date. The number of phones that Nokia sells is larger than most (see the Symbian chunk of the Horace Dediu's graph of mobile platform marketshare), so there's huge opportunity here for Microsoft to cement Windows Phone in the market. The partnership with Nokia gives the platform a real future, and may even allow Microsoft—if they're smart—to extend the platform to the tablet space, where its OS offering is strikingly unappealing.

Without this Nokia deal, Windows Phone could easily have turned into the next Palm Web OS—great technology and original design without the critical mass to keep it alive. (But HP seem to know what they're doing with Web OS, now, so it's certainly not down-and-out.) Despite the costs for Microsoft, I think it was essential that they pay this gamble just to keep themselves in the game.

It's hard to state just how profound Google's effect on the mobile industry has been. Imagine where we'd be if Android had never come to life—the tablet market would be even more dominated by the iPad, and Palm's Web OS and Windows Phone would be the big contenders against Apple's iPhone. In this scenario, Microsoft would probably not be stuck in this unappealing situation of paying people to license their OS.

Google sure have thrown a spanner in the works.

iPad New Yorker app

The New Yorker app for iPad is probably my favourite experience on the iPad. The interface for the magazine works really well and perfectly suits the long-form essays plus other assorted stuff contained in the publication.

I have one major technical complaint with the application, which is that each issue is some 150MB and while it's downloading the app cannot be used for anything else, and it doesn't (obviously, perhaps) continue downloading in the background if you exit the app. So going into the application and choosing to read a new issue results in putting the iPad out of commission for some ten minutes while the issue gets pulled down.

(I don't understand why these magazines come to such large file sizes. Text and images shouldn't be so large; I'd prefer movies and lengthy audio to stream and cache themselves only after you choose to watch/listen to them. I very much hope these apps aren't using pre-generated bitmaps for the text; PDF files would be a far more sensible approach, here — especially in the not-too-distant future when the iPad moves to sup.-300 DPI screens.)

Anyway, it's good stuff, and imminent subscription services should make the whole thing much more affordable and convenient. I hope Condé Nast will be able to add background downloading in the future and it'll be all good.

My second more worry-some complaint is the in-app ads. Don't get me wrong: the magazine has always had ads and in the past they haven't bothered me.

In the February 7 issue, the magazine contained 42 "pages/articles" which are swiped horizontally for navigation. Short pieces scroll vertical, and longer articles are broken into discrete vertical pages. Of the 42 pages, eight were long-form (paged) articles, seven were single-screen ads, and the remainder (27) were various forms of content (including table-of-contents, cover page, etc.). Of the eight paged articles, three had another ad mid-way through. To recap:

42 pages / 8 long articles/ 8+3=11 ads

I found this a perfectly acceptable ratio of ads to content. They were infrequent enough to actually notice during the reading of the issue.

When I purchased the joint Feb. 14/21 issue, however, I noticed almost immediately a huge uptick in the number of total ads. Because it's a double issue, it's larger than the previous issue I described above; it contains 67 "pages", with eleven long-form articles, and twenty-eight ad screens. For the long-form articles, there were nineteen more ads within (sometimes two or three per article). To summarise:

67 pages / 11 long articles / 19+28=47 ads

The problem with the ads is that they're more intrusive than for reading a paper magazine; it's easy to turn physical pages, but swiping repetitively is a tedious process.

The huge increase in the number of ads detracted significantly from the enjoyment of reading the magazine. I sincerely hope that this increase was, for some reason, related to the fact that it was a double-issue and this large ratio won't continue in subsequent issues.

Community memory

Regan Forrest has a recap on our post-colonial tendency in Australia to lose track of our community history. Good stuff. It does boggle the mind that great floods in Brisbane in the 1970s would be forgotten a generation later.

Writing about my real work

I sort of feel like this isn't the best place to discuss what I'm actually thinking about in terms of my "real work" that I supposedly do as an engineering researcher.

(Much like I've offloaded my LaTeX writing, such that it is, to another place.)

So if you would like to know what I think about things like forces between magnets, elliptic integrals, sports engineering, robotics, noise and vibration control, and so on, consider taking a look here in the future.

I've always thought that frequent writing helps keep my brain in tune although I'm not great at keeping up with it. Being able to focus into different areas helps a little, I think.

Keeping it all together

I'm feeling pretty busy right now. A quick run-down of vague ‘things on my plate’:

1. Marking for summer school. Sigh. It's equivalent to a day out of my week, but I need the money.

2. Reviewing the paper I just accepted to review (what foolishness). It's interesting but needs a little clarity. And the graphs need work (but when do they not?).

3. Putting together new code for calculating elliptic integrals in Matlab. This has come about through a tangent of some research of mine, and I've had a work experience student help me out. We've extended the code that already exists to handle unbounded input (previously the code was restricted to inputs between zero and one with phases between zero and pi/2), but there are a few edges cases that we can't fix yet.

4. Working on my code for the force between magnets in various configurations. I'm not sure if someone has come up with an expression for the force between cylindrical magnets with radial and axial relative displacement; if so I need to add it—if not then I need to derive it first! (I don't believe there's a closed-form solution, however.)

5. A new paper on the force between a solenoid and a cylindrical magnet; this is work that I've previously done for my thesis, but I've discovered that it's wrong—so I'm in the middle of fixing that up and I've got a friend in France who might be helping me with simplifying the integrals involved.

6. And that's only a small step away from finishing off another chapter of my thesis. Of which there are several chapters that ‘just’ need finishing off, and it seems like there's always just something in the way before I do each of them.

7. And of course the bug counts in some of my LaTeX packages are continuously increasing but I hardly even get the chance to reply to them let alone fix them at the moment. Need some breathing room to get these done.

My context switching is slowing me down, I think, but it's all too interesting to give any of it up. Look out, 2011!

The Summa Scientiæ

For future reference.

The Summa Scientiæ was a proposal to create a ‘Summary of Human Knowledge’ around turn of the 19th Century.

This would make a great name for a modern-day equivalent: like one of the ‘—pediæ’ but tracking and collating (primarily) scientific work as it is published and disseminated. Older works fading into the background as newer ones advance their theories; a way to group academic fields into literal groups rather than the more ad hoc approach used by researchers now who build their literature reviews from scratch when starting in a new field.

Gladwell on social media

Some insightful writing from [Malcolm Gladwell](http://gladwell.com/) in the [New Yorker](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell) on social media. This is the message of the piece: > The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. And good comparisons between tight-knit hierarchies and loose networks: > No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system.

Practising writing

In ‘3 qualities of successful Ph.D. students’, Matt Might writes on cogency:

Generally, grad students don't arrive with the ability to communicate well. This is a skill that they forge in grad school. The sooner acquired, the better.

Unfortunately, the only way to get better at writing is to do a lot of it. 10,000 hours is the magical number folks throw around to become an expert at something. You'll never even get close to 10,000 hours of writing by writing papers.

Assuming negligible practice writing for public consumption before graduate school, if you take six years to get through grad school, you can hit 10,000 hours by writing about 5 hours a day.

Of course, you're not doing a Ph.D. to become an expert writer, you're doing it to become an expert in your field of research. But the point can be a shocking one: when I was early in my Ph.D. my realisation was slow that my writing was, at best, very average. Then consider that an Australian Ph.D. will take on average only 3.5–4 years after a four-year bachelor; we skip the important learning experience of doing first a Masters project.

Writing a blog isn't the only way to practise writing. Document your code as if others were to be using it; write notes on papers you read as you read them, don't just file them in a bibliographic database for ‘one day’ writing a literature review. Joining mailing lists and asking for and offering help and advice online will quickly make you realise how difficult it can be at times to make yourself understood through the medium of text online.

I also find that reading a lot helps my writing, but I'm pretty ashamed of the paltry number of books that pass by my bedside table these days.

For future reference (for myself, mostly), here are some tools I've recently read about for improving your writing without expending any time to do so:

• The diction and style programs

• 3 shell scripts to improve your writing (also by Matt Might)

These certainly won't do much to improve your writing, but if they save even one silly doubled-word mistake in your thesis, they're worth it.

Abbreviation Punctuation

Consider ‘Mr Smith’ as opposed to ‘Prof. Crumb’. My rule of thumb for punctuation around abbreviations is that if the abbreviation ends with the last letter of the original word (in the case of ‘Mister’ to ‘Mr’) then no period is necessary. Conversely, since ‘Prof.’ ends half-way through its originating word ‘Professor’, stick in the dot.

(I’m not saying this is the absolutely correct way to do things; my philosophy for writing style is that consistency trumps, always, ad hoc style ‘rules’.)

I recently realised that I wasn’t following my sometimes-period-after-abbreviation rule consistently with ‘vs.’ for ‘versus’. I went to write ‘LaTeX vs. MathML’ and had to stop and think for a minute. Should I be writing ‘LaTeX v. MathML’ instead? Or just drop the period?

My other rule of thumb for formal writing is to avoid abbreviations entirely, and hence write ‘for example’ instead of ‘e.g.’ and ‘versus’ instead of ‘v(s)(.)’. Maybe I should adhere to this rule now to avoid having to decide what to do with ‘vs.’.

I shouldn't read pop science

The New York Times has a blog talking about how being inactive for some hours per day increases your risk of heart disease, even if you exercise. References a study. Unfortunately, the study comes to different conclusions; from a commenter on the blog:

From the abstract of the actual study:

CONCLUSION: In addition, high levels of physical activity were related to notably lower rates of CVD death even in the presence of high levels of sedentary behavior.

From the article:

Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

This is ludicrous and embarrassing. Remind me not to read this sort of garbage in the future.

Unexpected iPad

Unexpectedly—and delightfully—I have an iPad. Some quick thoughts.

Unboxing, setup, speed

1. The box it comes in is far bigger than the iPad itself to accommodate the power brick, small as that is. Maybe Apple want to start with a big box so they can boast about reducing its size in the next update. (And, less cynically, it's easier to invent a not-so-small box first and then put in the effort to shrink it later.)
2. None of Contacts, Calendars, Mail accounts, Bookmarks, or Notes are automatically synced. I find that strange.
3. I'm finally going to need to sort out a multi-computer solution for email. I've been using local mailboxes in Mail for years.
4. Finally have a reason to put movies into iTunes. Speaking of movies in iTunes, I can't stand the often false distinction between "Videos", "Podcasts", "iTunes U" content, and so on. Please let me organise things as they make sense to me.
5. Apple's Remote isn't native??
6. Processor speed is fine but not blow-me-out-of-the-park. Can stutter on PDF scrolling, for example. (Not that my MacBook doesn't have troubles sometimes, too.) I figure if you think about it as a large iPod, the speed is impressive. If you think about it as a small Mac, the speed just feels like what you'd expect.

Apps

1. It's annoying when iPhone apps sync in their iPhone form, and you have no idea that there's an "xyz-app for iPad" waiting to be bought in the app store. Almost duplicate iPhone/iPad apps are not so great.
2. Dropbox is a great method for light-weight file organising. They should really work their viewing features so that other apps such as GoodReader don't have a reason to exist/eat their lunch.
3. Badly need a BibDesk-like application for less light-weight file organisation.
4. Instapaper is absolutely fantastic for translating casual browsing on my MacBook into long-form reading for some time later.
5. OmniGraffle is A$60? I'm so tempted but that's a tough call.

Ebooks

1. iBooks not available for Australia. Bum.
2. Amazon Kindle app is very nice, even the buying process is easy despite going though the browser.
3. I want to start reading magazine/periodical/newspaper content, but I don't really know where to start. I feel like my reading tastes are too varied/particular to subscribe to entire magazines-worth of content.
4. Pretty impatient for ebooks to take off in a big way. I access to any book whenever I like. E.g., three random books I've always wanted to read but have never seen in bookstores: Momo, Mr Pye, Broom of the System.
5. I dislike but will accept using different apps for different stores. It would be nice if there could be a universal interface to all ebooks regardless of their origin.

Games

Preface: I'm not a game player, usually. I used to play Peggle, until it ate up too much of my time.

1. Totally hanging out for Mimeo. Any suggestions in the meantime?
2. I would love to play the old Warcraft games on this thing. Warcraft 2 was the last game I really played intensely.
3. Typing with thumbs in landscape mode is bareable. Haven't tried real typing yet.
4. I just found Prince of Persia from the old days. Oh wow, gotta go now.

Future Apple iPad/iPhone products

Things Apple will eventually ship:

• iPad with 300dpi resolution

When? I give them 24 months. On the other hand, larger high-dpi displays are one of those technologies that simply hasn't emerged as quickly as one would have thought.

• MacBook without DVD drive (i.e., becoming the same product as the MacBook Air)

I thought this would have happened by now. Obviously, though, it would have if it were sensible; I'd be really interested in seeing the market research that justifies the current scenario.

• Magazine distribution app.

I just can't see Apple being happy with the idea of mags like Wired using the functionally impaired — albeit pretty — Adobe technology to produce its iPad content.

---

Things Apple probably won't ever ship:

• Dual screen (‘notebook style’) iPad.

I watched the Courier demo the other day. What a great concept. What a terrible waste of time and money to make the demo without plans to build on it.

• Stylus support.

Speaking of that Courier demo, it really did look justified to use a stylus for certain kinds of input, especially diagramming/drawing. But Apple'd never complicate the device to have stylus use as a supported option.

• MacBook with an iPad instead of a keyboard.

Come on, you know this would be cool.

• iPhone mini

Imagine if the height screen were its current width and scale down the whole phone accordingly. Keyboard landscape only. Only enough space on-screen with the keyboard to display a small amount of text above for text messages, but otherwise functions fine with iPod and phone functions. Requires re-written apps if any.

Backup drive

It’s a shame Disk Utility can’t try that little bit harder:

I guess it’s time to buy a new drive to back up my backup.

Something wrong, somewhere

Something’s not quite right in my world at the moment:

It could be Chrome; it could be a font I installed; it could be Mac OS X. Who knows.

Mobile widgets

You know what I hate? Waiting for widgets to update. (It’s barely acceptable in Mac OS X’s Dashboard because of the convenience of bringing it up.)

Having to wait half a second (on a good day) is one of those interface delays that is unavoidable but unacceptable. This is a purely personal and subjective opinion of “acceptable” — I want to be able to hit a key and see the weather without having a brain stutter while yesterday’s weather flickers out and is updated.

This is fine, just, on a computer. But I have a hard time imagining the idea of widgets on iPhone or iPad. Can you imagine swiping through screens and having to wait for a network pole before your weather is correct? Or only of having some odd chance of the weather on the unlock screen being correct? Widgets don’t even get background processes on Mac OS X — there’s no chance you’d ever see a widget updating itself without direct user input.

And given the delay from user input and network delay and interface updating, I just don’t see widgets working on any kind of mobile device.

Update: Thanks to S.-S. P. for reminding me that it is in fact possible to have background processes in Dashboard widgets. Not sure what I was thinking there.

Fracturing

If you’re reading this and you’re interested in the things that I do or say related to LaTeX, go here: http://latex-alive.tumblr.com/. I’ve decided that having separate areas to write about separate interests really is a good idea.

Living in the mountains

I’ve joked around with people before about living in the mountains one day. I honestly don’t know how it would ever happen. I’ll organise it (just like I’ll organise the rest of my life) when I’ve stopped tearing myself into too-small pieces with the different projects I’m working on. I hope that happens one day sooner rather than later.

Why do I want to do it? Matthieu Ricard makes a good argument:

Installing noweb nowadays

Brief thoughts installing Norman Ramsey’s noweb. Which being the best literate programming tool out there, from my limited experience, although I’d like to make a big shout out to FunnelWeb, written by a friend of mine also from Adelaide.

I’m using Mac OS X, but I doubt the procedure below wouldn’t also work under Linux. Need to sort out how to do this on Windows, though, so I can use noweb with a new student I’ll be working with. The wayback machine has some instructions but I haven’t tried them yet.

For now I am going to take Norman’s advice and write here for using/installing noweb2, the current stable release. (Updating version 3 to a modern version of Lua and packaging it up for LuaTeX would be the ultimate. But not yet.)

The big, huge, important point when installing noweb is that you do not want to use the deprecated awk version over the new (relatively) and exciting Icon version.

So first download binaries of Icon from the University of Arizona and add it to your default path. (Side note: why does the Icon Makefile when compiling from source require a switch for the platform? Isn’t that easily automatically detectable?) Installing binaries is a matter of personal taste but I moved the Icon binary distribution to ~/bin/icon-v950 and then added

export PATH=~/bin/icon-v950/bin:${PATH}

to my .bash_profile. Then download noweb and configure its Makefile in src/ appropriately:

1. Change the line LIBSRC=awk to LIBSRC=icon
2. Chage the line ICONC=iconc to ICONC=icont

3. Set the TEXINPUTS line to

    TEXINPUTS=$(shell kpsewhich -expand-var='$$TEXMFLOCAL')/tex/latex/noweb
   

Then hit the familiar

cd src/
make all
sudo make install

and you should be set. I’m a bit confused about the correct procedure for getting man pages found automatically, so I also had to include the following in .bash_profile

export MANPATH=${MANPATH}:/usr/local/noweb/man

in order to get man noweb and so on working. There’s a lot of documentation in these man pages that you do not want to miss out on!

Finally, to check that it’s all working, let’s compile the PDF documentation for the (La)TeX support:

cd tex/
noweave -autodefs tex -index -delay support.nw > support.tex
pdflatex support && pdflatex support

Skim over the resulting support.pdf document and witness yourself the amazing abilities of literate programming. (Especially notice the improvements over LaTeX’s docscript format.) But don’t use that document to try and work out how to customise noweb with LaTeX; the user-friendly documentation is inside man nowebstyle.

And now to start using it for work rather than playing around with getting it installed.

Things I would like to be able to do in LaTeX #63

(In an on-going series.)

Grid-based algorithms for filling up space with boxes: (this is all HTML+CSS+Javascript)

The best LaTeX algorithms for space-filling revolve around column-balancing running text with floating boxes within. For arranging boxes as here, I’m not aware of any high-level tools, although ConTeXt may have some that I’m unaware of.

Wherefore 960 × 640

The alleged number of pixels in the display of the next-generation iPhone has been discussed and questioned in recent times.

If you would like a concrete reason why it would be a good thing for the rumoured 2010 release iPhone to have a screen resolution in excess of 300 dots per inch, consider a screenshot taken on a current iPhone display, which has a resolution of around 160 pixels per inch:

The image has been taken in portrait orientation, cropped vertically, and zoomed to emphasise the low resolution. At its natural size, this text would not be physically too small to read; in my estimation it’s equivalent to type at around 6pt to 8pt. This is small for most printing standards, but not unreasonably so.

However, the low number of pixels per character in the image above inhibits the text from actually being comfortable to read due mainly to the anti-aliasing artifacts. With double the resolution, this text would look fantastic.

‘My head is in the cloud’

I think I need to quote this whole chunk from Dave Pell:

My phone tells me numbers, Facebook reminds me of birthdays, my nav system gives me directions, Google tells me how to spell, my bookmarks remind me of what I’ve read, my inbox tells me who I’m having a conversation with – my mind has been distributed across several devices and services.

My head is in the cloud.

Now, after a few years of this, I realize that when I look up from the screen I know almost nothing. And maybe that would be fine if the absent phone numbers and upcoming dates were freeing space for deeper and more introspective thought. But I sense that my addiction to the realtime stream is only making room for the consumption of a faster stream.

Indeed. We need computers to extend our brains’ cognitive ability as well as just their trick of memory. (Ray Kurzweil has various things to say about this. Look him up if you like wild-eyed and optimistic futurism.)

In the meantime, I suppose we should strive to avoid “realtime stream” as best we can. Read novels. Experience good theatre, and watch long movies.

Corollary to the "fifteen minutes" rule

I've read about some theory that says that it takes fifteen minutes before one starts working with full concentration. I can't actually find a good reference to this theory, but here's an article that mentions it.

I've been thinking about what that means for tasks that take less than fifteen minutes to perform. Or for writing that takes less than fifteen minutes to read. Or so on. If your brain is only half-engaged for these things, is there really much point doing them? Read a book instead of one hundred short news articles online. Devote serious time to problem solving rather than fixing niggles (until niggles are all that are left, of course). Write a book instead of a blog.

Because there's always something that will take more time than whatever you're currently doing.

Autism vs. Vaccination

The paper that, apparently, started the whole movement against the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine has been withdrawn by the journal in which it originally appeared in 1998. Not only have its suspicions been very much discredited by subsequent scientists, but its principle author acted unethically in both his approach to science and his reasons for publishing the paper. Dastard.

I find it terribly, subtly tragic that I know people younger than me who have had measles, which I hope to see it eradicated before I die. Disease eradication is in my list of ideal traits of high civilisation. Anti-vaccination mongers ruin everything.