WSPR

Adobe Reader in 2011

2011-11-25T16:13:00.001+10:30

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

2011-11-22T00:49:00.001+10:30

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

2011-06-02T19:34:00.001+09:30

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

2011-04-26T17:27:00.001+09:30

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

2011-03-20T14:17:00.001+10:30

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

2011-02-15T23:49:00.001+10:30

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

2011-02-14T20:27:00.001+10:30

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.

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

2011-02-14T18:15:00.001+10:30

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

Spend lots of money building Windows Phone
Pay people to use it
???
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

2011-02-13T23:13:00.001+10:30

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

2011-02-13T22:30:00.001+10:30

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

2011-02-08T15:45:00.001+10:30

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

2011-01-23T18:34:00.001+10:30

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

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

2011-01-18T09:03:00.001+10:30

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

2010-09-27T15:03:00.001+09:30

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

2010-08-31T13:38:00.001+09:30

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

2010-07-18T15:41:00.001+09:30

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

2010-07-16T12:15:00.001+09:30

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

2010-06-11T03:20:00.001+09:30

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

Unboxing, setup, speed

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.)
None of Contacts, Calendars, Mail accounts, Bookmarks, or Notes are automatically synced. I find that strange.
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.
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.
Apple's Remote isn't native??
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

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.
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.
Badly need a BibDesk-like application for less light-weight file organisation.
Instapaper is absolutely fantastic for translating casual browsing on my MacBook into long-form reading for some time later.
OmniGraffle is A$60? I'm so tempted but that's a tough call.

Ebooks

iBooks not available for Australia. Bum.
Amazon Kindle app is very nice, even the buying process is easy despite going though the browser.
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.
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.
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.

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

Future Apple iPad/iPhone products

2010-06-09T02:47:00.001+09:30

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

2010-06-05T14:29:00.001+09:30

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

2010-06-03T12:43:00.001+09:30

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

2010-05-30T20:22:00.001+09:30

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

2010-05-23T19:10:00.001+09:30

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

2010-05-13T17:04:00.001+09:30

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

2010-05-02T16:30:00.001+09:30

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:

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

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

2010-04-28T13:43:00.001+09:30

(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

2010-04-23T16:09:00.001+09:30

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’

2010-03-22T21:13:00.001+10:30

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

2010-02-27T14:22:00.001+10:30

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

2010-02-04T18:13:00.001+10:30

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.

Cinema 2009

2010-01-08T10:58:00.001+10:30

Last year I started keeping a list of all movies I watched at home and at the cinema (and the books that I read, a considerably shorter list). I watched so many movies at home that I couldn’t keep an entirely accurate record, and didn’t start at the beginning of the year, so that list is somewhat incomplete. I saw so few movies in the cinema, by contrast, that it’s easy to take about them as a group. In hindsight, I must say that I am very happy with the movies I ended up managing to see (the majority in the last two–three months of the year), the list being: (reverse chronological)

Avatar
Where The Wild Things Are
The Boys are Back
Moon
Up
Inglourious Basterds
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Watchmen

Obviously my tastes in cinema-going (less so when watching movies at home) tend towards the mainstream. With the exception of Harry Potter, which I saw for a fundraiser and entirely against my will (but which I ended up not half minding), I would highly rate all of the movies above and recommend them unconditionally to most of my peers. I’m not going to try and rank them in order of preference or anything, but I’d have to say Inglourious Basterds would be my pick of the bunch. It promises great things to come for one of the most unique directors around whose movies just keep improving, and, in my opinion, raises the cultural bar for Hollywood cinema in general. Let’s never see a German character simply speak English-with-a-fake-German-accent-to-show-they’re-German again (let along without-even-the-accent-but-with-an-eyepatch — not that I saw that movie).

I should point out that I’m aware of less-than-positive views on Inglourious Basterds due to its irreverent view of certain events in history that should be taken more than seriously, but to be honest I’d prefer to see a movie that attempts some sort of catharsis as this one does, as opposed to reminding everyone how terrible a time and what a tragedy it was. But it’s easy for me to say that who has no direct link to the events in question.

Pixels so small…

2010-01-06T15:44:00.001+10:30

Google have released some sort of phone. The part of it that I care about is the technology in its screen.

When the iPhone came out, it’d have been pretty rare to see anything like its high-res. LCD display. 3.5 inches with 163 pixels per inch — graphics, but text especially look better than they’ve ever on a computer screen.

But this Nexus One phone? Pretty much the same size screen but with a d.p.i. value of 252 (roundabout calculation). That’s to the iPhone resolution how the iPhone res. compares to a regular computer screen. I can’t wait to see how Optima, say, looks on this new breed of screen.

We’re almost getting to the point of rivalling low-tech print quality. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the now technical inferiority of the iPhone screen vs. the current cream of the crop. It’ll be interesting to see what June’s new iPhone (as per tradition) will bring.

Is the higher resolution actually just a gimmick? It increases processing overhead (and hence power) to display text and graphics onscreen, and 163 d.p.i. is generally pretty good — but it could be better, and the higher resolution screen will surely happen if not this year then next.

When that happens, all of the hundreds of thousands of apps that have been created for the iPhone so far use a fixed resolution. Until developers release updated versions of their apps with higher-res. graphics, will auto-scaling them be an acceptable way to display them on this larger (in terms of pixels) screen? My hunch is that since few graphic elements on the iPhone are created down to single pixels, this will be fine.

And, of course, programmatically generated graphics and all text will be automatically improved since they are (or should be, in the case of graphics) resolution independent. So let’s toast the idea of print-quality output on our screens, but regretfully mourn the loss of any chance to use the beautiful bitmap fonts of old.

The Urge

2009-12-29T17:09:00.001+10:30

About a year ago I wrote:

I’ve accepted long ago that my mind latches onto ideas with a terrible grip and it’s inevitable that something that I’m currently spending time on will overwhelm my concentration, to the detriment of all other tasks and thoughts.

I’m starting to realise that I can predict when this will happen. It usually happens when there’s a natural lull in my work, such as the time just after completing a paper or finishing off some code. In the quiet time when my brain starts asking and wondering “What’s next?” I’ll queue up a bunch of possibilities and regardless of the order of their priority there’ll sometimes be one that simply overruns my thoughts. I’ll be able to picture in detail the stages of the task and exactly how to get started and an urge to get working on it; generally I find that there’s no point resisting at this stage and I’d better drop everything to focus on this one thing.

If I don’t drop everything (and attempt to work on what is most important rather than what is most motivating) I’ll generally start drifting into the fun work anyway, in and out of work hours, and it’ll slowly take over; in the meantime, I’ll have been attempting to multitask between a motivated task and an unmotivated one and generally not been as useful as if I’d concentrated on the former alone.

(Of course, there’s always the backlog that accrues during a time of blinkered/focussed working and it’s never fun to sort that out after emerging for breathe. Still, it’s often from the backlog that the ideas for what’s next? emerge.)

I think that learning how to transition continually between these focussed tasks is really the goal of productive work. It’s the dead time in between that’s soul-killing, when you finish a week or a month or a season and ask yourself “What have I been doing all this time?”.

Brief comments on: Everything and More (2003) by David Foster Wallace

2009-12-26T18:40:00.001+10:30

I don’t really intend to go on for too long about Everything & More, D.F.W.’s book about the history and philosophy behind infinity and maths. Suffice it to say that you’ll either like it or not depending primarily on two factors:

Like: If you are a D.F.W. fan (which counts me in)
Dislike: If you know a lot about the subject matter (i.e., you’re a set theorist–mathematician yourself, which counts me out)

This is assuming, also, that you’re the type of person who likes to read either unique works of literature and/or popular science–type things. Without a fairly good working knowledge of maths, be prepared to work hard to follow along with a good proportion of the book that’s dealing with technical content; it’s not impossible, however: the friend who lent the book to me managed to get through without much background knowledge.

Apparently there are a certain number of technical inaccuracies, or elements of the story that are simply wrong. I’m not one to judge these; (the only error I ever saw was a basic oversight-style typing mistake in a big list of examples of the application of differential equations (or something like that) in which was written F = m dx/dt) but it’s easy to find numerous critiques of the book in which the technical content is rather heavily denounced. However: It doesn’t matter. First of all, in some cases I’m sure D.F.W. was aware of some of the technical problems his popular descriptions required. He admits as much quite early on. But secondly, this is not a book to learn set theory in a mathematical sense. Just as you read Gödel, Escher, Bach to get a taste of some rather meaty mathematics in the context of a much broader philosophical discussion, Everything & More does a truly excellent job elucidating how all the things we learnt in school & university about abstract ideas such as irrational numbers and limits tending to infinity really were huge mathematical/philosophical problems back in the day and we should do better than take them for granted.

The best example of this is the way anyone’s who’s done a little university-level maths can reject Zeno’s paradox by their being taught about convergence of infinite series. How can you cross the road if you first have to reach half-way, and before you reach half-way you must reach the quarter-way mark, and before that get to one-eighths of the way, and before that one-sixteenths, … , ad infinitum? Anyone who’s studied the maths “intuitively” knows that this particular infinite sum equals one, q.e.d., but this result requires them to have already abstracted in their head the very idea of an infinite sum itself as something that is actually possible. It’s not exactly easy to explain how this works without using terms like “tends towards infinity” that a priori assume that infinity is an abstract concept that can be used to explain infinite sums. The formulation of a rigorous (explanation of a) proof is sort-of the main goal of the book (plus fleshing out a good amount of material about how this happened historically, and a number of consequences of what effects this had on the mathematics of the time leading into the current era).

This is a book about how some certain results were discovered, with a sufficient explanation of those results to expand your mind a little or a lot. And like all of D.F.W.’s writing, even just going along for the literary ride is well worth the effort.

Dean Allen on philosophy of self

2009-12-08T11:43:00.001+10:30

In explaining something he did about something he made, Dean Allen writes:

I’ve spent the past year or so reading and writing and doing my level best to chip away at 40 years of belief in the logical fallacy that one’s identity meaning – self-worth, self-image, whatever you want to call it – can accurately be measured in the thoughts of others. Much as you and I may enjoy being encouraged through recognition and praise and dislike being saddened by rejection or indifference […], deriving personal value from these transactions in the absence of a well-formed internal frame of reference through which you can decide on your own what does and doesn’t work, and subsequently accept the opinions of others as feedback, is just plain faulty thinking, of the sort that makes otherwise capable, centred people all loopy and weird.

Coders at Work

2009-11-10T22:40:00.001+10:30

I recently bought and read Coders at Work, a collection of interviews with past and present people of influence in the programming world. Very easy book to casually read. A few typographical problems, but I have fairly low expectations. Full of fascinating stories that really made me think about how far we’ve come in some areas and how little we’ve progressed in others. I recommend it if you’re into that sort of thing.

I found three quotations particularly poignant. I don’t have anything to add to them; make of them what you will.

Douglas Crockford:

My interest in programming is helping other people to do programming, designing a language or a programming tool specifically so that it’s more accessible to more people—the thing that got Smalltalk started. Smalltalk went in a different direction, but the initial direction was really attractive to me. How do we build a language specifically for children or how do we build a language specifically for people who don’t think of themselves as programmers?

Ken Thompson:

I think by necessity algorithms—new algorithms are just getting more complex over time. A new algorithm to do something is based on 50 other little algorithms. Back when I was a kid you were doing these little algorithms and they were fun. You could understand them without it being an accounting job where you divide it up into cases and this case is solved by this algorithm that you read about but you don’t really know and on and on. So it’s different. I really believe it’s different and most of it is because the whole thing is layered over time and we’re dealing with layers. It might be that I’m too much of a curmudgeon to understand layers.

Fran Allen:

Isaac Asimov made a statement about the future of computers—I don’t know whether it’s right or not—that what they’ll do is make every one of us much more creative. Computing would launch the age of creativity. One sees some of that happening—particularly in media. Kids are doing things they weren’t able to do before—make movies, create pictures. We tend to think of creativity as a special gift that a person has, just as being able to read and write were special gifts in the Dark Ages—things only a few people were able to do. I found the idea that computers are the enablers of creativity very inspiring.

Information wrangling

2009-11-10T22:32:00.001+10:30

I’m not particularly happy with the state of how I collect, absorb, share, and store generic information electronically. (On the whole, I’m generally happy with how I browse information, however. It’s not too hard to spend too much time reading about interesting things.)

I use Google Reader to browse information, from which I can also share items I find interesting.
I use Delicious to share other things that I’ve read from plain old “web browsing”.
On my computer, I store in a BibTeX database a subset of whatever appears in the above two public feeds plus “other things” that I haven’t shared for whatever reason.

The BibTeX database also contains links to local content on my machine, so I can still read articles and watch videos that I’ve collected, even away from a network.
Keywords or tags are used separately both in Delicious and in BibTeX to help organise the items therein, but the tagging is inconsistent and not kept in sync.

It’s all a bit of a mess. To top it all off, I still don’t have any good way of organising all this local information so that I can browse through it in a way that doesn’t remind me of combing through a poorly-maintained database (which is exactly what it is).

Furthermore, all of the organisation of my actual research literature I have no way of sharing with anyone. Someone coming along to do a similar literature review as I’ve done will either have to read my thesis or start from scratch, and even reading my literature review will hardly give a good overview for their research interests.

There are sites like Cite-U-Like and so on which aim to make academic literature reviewing a more “social” activity, but the fact that they are web applications means that I still need to locally sync my databases whenever I add new content. Manual syncing is simply not a useful solution. (Aside: I’m looking at you, Things.app.)

Furthermore, I can’t maintain an online database of research and be able to store the papers offline in a local database that contains a superset of the online content. In other words, I don’t want to maintain a folder structure and file-naming scheme for content that’s mirrored in a database.

All of these factors indicates to me that there’s still something missing to tie together all of these different aspects of information wrangling. I hope a solution rears its head at some stage in the not-too-distant future. What’s the point of 3D animation on the web if we don’t have similarly-advanced information systems with which to play?

A measure of low academic funding

2009-11-10T16:45:00.001+10:30

The common theme in Australian academia is that lecturers are hired on their research merits but must spend too much of their time teaching and performing administrivia, which ends up sucking the life out the research side of their job.

Certainly in my department, the more established as a lecturer you become, the lower the publication count trends in general.

Now, I know publications are not everything, because a professor will often be sitting on top of a pile of other researchers who are doing the grunt work below them. Still, in my opinion a healthy researcher should still be writing at least some of their own papers to indicate that they are still actually doing some of the research.

Could this be measured to a degree by looking at the publication output of every research group in every school in every university in Australia? Interesting results might appear after crunching the numbers on things like

Normalised number of publications per person.
Ratio of professors to academics to postdocs to postgrads.
Weighted number of publications per role according their ratio in the research group.

For example, let’s say that the ratio of roles is something like 1:4:6:20 (I have no idea if these numbers are feasible or representative). Papers published by a person in each role should be weighted by the inverse of these numbers, so the total number of publications per role is given equal weight (one paper by a professor is equal to twenty papers by the PhD students). Justify this by saying the time of a professor is twenty times more valuable than a grad student.

Now sum the papers per role according to these weights; if you see a large discrepancy from a 1:1:1:1 ratio of weighted publications, something is looking a little fishy. (This is just a hypothesis; I presume the numbers could be analysed a posteriori to determine that a healthy ratio might look like 1:2:4:3 or whatever.)

Even if this isn’t at all a suitable way to gauge the research health of a research group, it should at least be useful in comparing in a more detailed way the publication output between similar groups around the country. If it turns out the RMIT’s academics publish far more than Adelaide’s (after you’ve removed the masking influence of high-publishing postdocs, say), isn’t that a difference worth investigating?

Of course, my opinion on all of this comes back to basic funding at a tertiary level: the number of academics per student should be increased to give the academics more time for research. My aim at discuss ideas like “weighted numbers of publications per research role” is biased towards indicating this at some level. But I don’t have the time to actually look into the matter. (Especially being that I’m not actually part of the system at the moment.)

Does anyone do “research on engineering research”? In my opinion, they should.

Knuth on addiction

2009-10-26T15:15:00.001+10:30

Donald Knuth, Adventure (PDF):

Clearly the game was potentially addictive, so I forced myself to stop playing — reasoning that it was great fun, sure, but traditional computer science research is great fun too, possibly even more so.

The nature of procrastination

2009-10-22T15:55:00.001+10:30

When your mind is distracted to the point of not starting an impending task.

That’s not quite it.

The adage is that after being interrupted it takes fifteen minutes to get back into the “flow” of working.

The first fifteen minutes, then, is crucial. Before even starting something. If your mind slides off track at any point before the fifteen minutes is up, gotta start again.

But how often does my mental trigger kick in to read email, refresh feeds, check newsgroups (and, in the past, Twitter and Facebook and New York Times and …) ? In fact, I still get mental triggers to visit news sites I haven’t read in years. Which scares me, frankly. What sort of rut did I get myself into that my brain still brings it up multiple times every single day even if I never (in years, now) respond to it? Is that the side-effect of the addictions of youth? When will it go away?

(To see if you have such mental triggers of your own, close all the windows on your screen and open up a fresh and blank browser window and try and think of nothing. The first thing that pops into your head to type into the address bar?)

Worse than all of the above, how easy is it to slide from the hard tasks of involved research writing/reading/coding to the easy tasks of fixing bugs or renaming variables in my latest toy project? Especially if you can trick yourself into thinking that your toy project can substitute for your real work.

Sometimes, I even get a mental trigger to write things on the internet, things which people already know and which don’t help either the people reading them or person writing them.

Unlike Merlin Mann. (I linked him before, but no hard in repetition.) He says everything on the topic much better than I’ll ever be able to: (albeit this time in an uncharacteristically difficult-to-quote way)

…developing those invaluable tolerances [to “stick with [your work] at the time you’re most tempted to run away”] requires the exercise of some very small muscles. The muscles are super-hard to locate, and once you do find them, they hurt like a bitch to exercise.

Ain’t that the depressing truth.

Well, I’m off to do the dishes. And then get back to work.

Matlab vectorisation

2009-10-12T19:42:00.001+10:30

Wikipedia tells me that Donald Knuth said:

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

(I figure you don’t need a citation when you mention “Wikipedia” in the sentence.)

Back in the old days, the fast way to do things in Matlab was to use “vectorised” code which operated on entire array rather than the individual elements; loops were the devil. More recently (2003-ish), Matlab gained a just-in-time compiler, eliminating the old bottleneck. (Update: Thanks, Ben, for pointing out my mistake there; not sure what I was thinking when I wrote 2007. Perhaps I didn’t get access to Matlab-with-JIT until some time later; I forget.)

But you still sometimes see advice to use vectorised code whenever possible. In short, this is a bad idea on performance grounds alone.

For example, the above-linked advice gave the trivial example:

% Extremely slow:
for i = 1:length(x)
   x(i) = 2*x(i);
end

% Extremely fast:
x = 2*x;

Interested, I tested this out.

[Update: Ha, “I tested this out” completely incorrectly, because I was hasty and hadn’t used Matlab in a while. So don’t mind me on that particular point. However, the following still stands:]

Your rule of thumb should be: write the code that makes the most sense when you’re writing it. If it’s slow, try and fix it then. Vectorised code can get damned hard to write and harder to read. It’s only worth it if it saves you real time running the code. And I’m talking hours and hours of time difference here.

When you write x=2*x, you should do so simply because that’s the clear logical representation of the operation “multiply each element of x by two”. But just because you use vectorised code here doesn’t mean you always should.

GitHub from the command line

2009-10-12T13:14:00.001+10:30

Here are a couple of shell aliases that I’ve found useful recently. To use, add them to your .bash_profile file. All of these commands are intended to be run from the working directory of a Git repository that is connected to GitHub.

Used in the following, more useful, commands, this returns the GitHub identifier for a repository: (E.g., wspr/thesis)

alias githubname='git config -l | grep '\''remote.origin.url'\'' | sed -En   '\''s/remote.origin.url=git(@|:\/\/)github.com(:|\/)(.+)\/(.+).git/\3\/\4/p'\'''

On Mac OS X, this opens your GitHub project in the default browser: (I’m guessing it needs some adjustment to work under Linux.)
```
alias github='open https://github.com/`githubname`'
```

Similarly, this one opens up the Issues page:

alias issues='open https://github.com/`githubname`/issues'

Finally, this one returns the number of open issues in the GitHub project:

alias countissues='curl -s http://github.com/api/v2/yaml/issues/list/`githubname`/open -- | grep '\''\- number:'\'' | wc -l'

Via the GitHub Issue API, it’s possible to extract all sorts of useful information programmatically that could come in handy for project management. Use the output of this URL to get all the juicy info:

http://github.com/api/v2/yaml/issues/list/`githubname`/open

For example, I’d like to write a script to report summary details of all open issues across all of my projects/repositories. Saving it up for a rainy day.

It would also be interesting to write a script to run before pushing that checks which issues you’re closing (via the closes #xyz commit log interface) and shows a brief summary for confirmation before sending off the commits. That’s for a rainy weekend.

pdfTeX on Windows upgrade

2009-09-07T08:59:00.001+09:30

It’s not often in the (La)TeX world that new versions of things break existing documents and packages. Unfortunately this has just happened to me.

I maintain a LaTeX package pstool (written in collaboration with Zebb Prime) that sort of uses TeX as a portable scripting language to perform external graphics processing during the typesetting run. (The main benefit allowing you to use psfrag in pdfLaTeX.)

Since it executes programs on the command line, it needs to know whether it is being run on Windows or on some sort of *nix variant (Linux, Mac OS X, etc.). The package I use to detect this, ifplatform, is also written by me (in collaboration with Johannes Große), and it uses a heuristic based around the difference in how the shells in Windows/*nix deal with quoted material.

Unfortunately, this heuristic no longer works in TeX Live 2009 for Windows, as reported by Joseph Wright. “That’s okay,” I said, “Few people will be using TeX Live 2009 on Windows yet — no rush to fix the problem immediately.”

Unfortunately again, I’ve now discovered that the problem also exists in MiKTeX 2.8, which has been released in the past week, and which is much more widely used than TeX Live on Windows. I’ve received several good ideas how to fix the problem via the tex-live mailing list, so it just comes down to trying a few of them out with the help of some of my Windows-using friends.

But for now, be warned: ifplatform (v0.2 from 2007) and hence pstool and auto-pst-pdf currently do not work in TeX Live 2009 on Windows and MiKTeX 2.8. A new version to fix this problem will be forthcoming.

Update: The new version of pstool is now available from CTAN, and it fixes the problem above.

Burning happiness

2009-08-31T19:10:00.001+09:30

David Sedaris: (‘Laugh, Kookaburra’ in The New Yorker)

This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: (TED Talk, about 30 seconds in)

My mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that I took when I was a graduate student at Harvard with the great psychologist Erik Erikson. He taught us that the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love, and play. And that to pursue one realm to the disregard of the others is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age; whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement but with serenity.

Small trade-off there. I know which one I’d rather tend towards.

A few minutes with "The Now Habit"

2009-08-17T19:29:00.001+09:30

I’m skimming through a section of “The Now Habit” loaned to me by a friend, and while parts of it do resonate quite well with me there are sections that I receive in a vaguely repugnant way:

Jeff was stuck. He felt guilty about not making a contribution to his field and was feeling pressure from his colleagues to publish. But he was unwilling to make the commitment to the long hours of solitary work that were required to read professional journals and to write.

“He was unwilling” to do these things? That doesn’t strike the right chord with me. I’m perfectly willing to commit myself to my thesis. I just happen to break that commitment rather more frequently than I should.

As an aside, I can’t stand this style of self-help writing in which a supposedly-true pithy anecdote is given that fits the relevant points being made. What was Jeff’s solution, by the way? To spend two months acting in a play and then using the empty hole left after he no longer needed to spend twenty hours a week rehearsing to write. Well, not exactly a general solution, but the idea seems to be to spend time in concentrated pleasure and you’ll balance your life out enough to stop procrastinating.

What did I like about the section of the book? Here’s a quote of what sounded true to me:

The promise of future rewards for hard work has little control over what we choose to do now. Instead, the more immediate and definite rewards of life, such as leisure, seeing friends, and eating ice cream, are immediately and definitely followed by tangible pleasures and have, therefore, a higher probability of occurring.

This sums up the exact feeling I have towards procrastination. It’s not an anxiety thing or a fear of failure thing, or whatever of the explanations given in this book; it’s just that there are so many short-term fun and rewarding things to do. It’s a hard habit to break doing them.

Mental effort directed against disposition and desire

2009-08-10T11:05:00.001+09:30

It’s a problem with a well-known solution. But one that’s more easily said than done.

Nicola Tesla:

The possibilities of will-power and self-control appealed tremendously to my vivid imagination, and I began to discipline myself. Had I a sweet cake or a juicy apple which I was dying to eat I would give it to another boy and go through the tortures of Tantalus, pained but satisfied. Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day by day from morning till night. At first it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical.

Merlin Mann:

Given that your fears know you too well, they can capitalize on any uncertainty that they know you’d find intolerable. So, even a surprisingly trivial matter […] can suddenly seem extremely important and will swiftly divert your attention from the cool stuff you’d like to be doing onto….oh, whatever that other stuff might be. Better find out.

Procrastination and fractured attention is an addiction I’m terribly far from kicking. Even with a tidy desk, a tidy shelf, and long-past deadlines.

Least easily distinguished

2009-08-06T14:27:00.001+09:30

Edgar Allen Poe, Graham’s Magazine:

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Not exactly DRM for news

2009-07-31T11:20:00.001+09:30

I’m a couple days late with this one. Ars discusses the seemingly ludicrous plan by the Associated Press to improve its news platform online. In which they claim to be able to deliver news online with a ‘tracking beacon’. The whole press release/news story sounded very odd in that nothing they mentioned seemed possible with standard web technologies.

Their poor excuse for an info-graphic has received some hilarious commentary. I think I just like profanity in my parody.

But after some digging it seems to make sense after all; and suspicions confirmed that nothing they originally wrote is actually truthful of what their technology does. The best description was a comment by ‘deet’ on the Ars article (for which the permalink seems broken, so you’ll have to scroll down and find it):

Look at this embarrassing DRM verbiage as a kind of sideshow for the old folks.

and

AP’s hope seems to be that this new specification for online delivery of AP member content will slow, stop, or at least reveal the activities of the more blatant rippers-off, while giving useful tools to legitimate publishers for monitoring and controlling the use of their content, which is entirely within their prerogative. Obviously, and as with any security system, a sophisticated attacker can circumvent these measures. And the AP knows this. What’s great about the tagging system is, if you’re a legit publisher, the tags had better be there. If the tags are missing, well, be prepared to hear from AP.

(Don’t just read these snippets, the whole comment is longer and interesting.)

Their plan seems to comes down to some HTML metadata that, if present, flags the content as legitimate, and if not (or used incorrectly) yells loud and clear that the text has been misappropriated. The big problems after this information becomes available and widely-used are (a) to get people who are entitled to the content to use the metadata correctly, and (b) to somehow track down non–fair use quotations of the text that aren’t overwhelmed with false positives. (The former being necessary to even have a hope in hell in achieving the latter, assuming that simply looking at the domain name of the hosted content isn’t enough.)

It’s not clear to me that this latter problem is made any easier by the absence of some metadata.

Academic funding, and medical data

2009-06-29T10:15:00.001+09:30

Interesting article over at the New York Times on cancer research strikes a chord in the way academic funding works in general. Too little money to go around, so those who play the game the best get the (research) money. Usually, those who get the money produce results, so I couldn’t say the system is entirely broken. It’s the lack of money that is the bigger problem. (Cue comparisons with defence budgets.)

But much more interesting than the article is one of the comments left. It rings true with my own thoughts on how the government and the health care system should be feeding data back into the research arena:

The problem with medical research, generally, and cancer research, in particular, is that the amount and range of data that is used to map the causes and course of disease is far less than it should be.

[…]

We must gather consistent and substantial data on large numbers of the population, both those who appear well and those who are ill. […] The best way to accomplish that is to provide every citizen who wants it a substantial medical checkup either once or twice each year. All of that data would be placed in a database maintained by the National Institutes of Health and would be available to any credentialed researcher. Identity of patients would be shielded by assignment of an anonymous ID, that permits tracking of that patients medical history, but that does not otherwise disclose who the patient is.

This would be a gold mine of data, and serve not only to help understand the health of the nation but also to improve it. A gargantuan effort, most definitely, but also an enormous reward.

Pity the idea itself is too far outside of the box.

Australian five cent piece? Good riddance

2009-05-26T13:43:00.001+09:30

In March last year, The New Yorker published an article on the penny in America. Clearly, it’s a ridiculous amount of money, and the article goes into detail about why it still exists and what a nuisance it is.

The case in America is more extreme (as in all things, seemingly), but Australia is facing a similar issue now over its 5¢ piece. A report or rumour on moves to scrap the thing have prompted objection from the Queensland Consumers Association, but their worries really sound ill considered: “no matter what they do with the coinage, they manage to make sure the consumer doesn’t win”. Good luck with that particular argument.

Okay, let’s say you want to buy something that costs less than a dollar and it’s rounded up by, at most, 5¢; your purchase will increase by some shocking 5%–10%, but it’s only 5¢ maximum at any one time. It’s such a negligible amount compared to the overall cost of the weekly shopping that I’m rather appalled someone (speaking on behalf of the consumer) would deign to suggest it’s anti-consumer.

The efficiencies in eliminating this coin (which costs the mint on the order of four million dollars a year) far outweigh any nostalgia one may feel towards the little guy. You can’t imagine how futile and frustrating it feels to count hundreds of the things to balance a till when their sum comes to less than 0.5% of the total balance.

I’m very happy to look forward to saving precious minutes every night I count the till at Chocolate Bean.

What's in an ‘a’?

2009-05-01T16:19:00.001+09:30

When do you know that you’re correct? For me, in the world of grammar, the answer is rarely.

I’m reviewing the changes made to a paper of mine by the production team at Elsevier, and they’ve changed my sentence

An example of a system with such behaviour is…

to (emphasis added)

An example of a system with such a behaviour is…

Well, doesn’t look right to me. And Google reports half as many hits for the latter compared to the former.

But I’m not confident enough in my knowledge of English to call them out on what looks to me like, at best, a matter of style.

An abbreviated "git log"

2009-03-31T19:15:00.001+10:30

I’ve been getting more into (the version control system) Git as I’ve worked more on LaTeX3 code (mostly though git-svn, although I’m also using Git for my PhD work).

Here’s an alias that quickly calls up a one-per-line list of recent commits:

[alias]
    recent = log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit -n 10

Update June 2010: I now use the following, which reports all of the commits made since the last push to the remote origin/master:

git log --oneline origin/master..HEAD

I find this much more useful in getting my head back on track after coming back to some code that I've been playing with but haven't made public yet. (End update.)

Add this to your .gitconfig file. Then call git recent to get a quick overview of what’s been going on recently. Saves calling up GitX when you just want to remember what’s going on.

Output looks like:

$ git recent
462e945 set_pTF for l3io
[...]
ccf25cf set_pTF for l3box
48c9f59 Rename \prg...nonexpandable to \prg...unexpandable
cccc41a \prg_set_pred.. improved
8bca027 New version of cs_generate_variant

Git is nice (but intimidating) in that it allows you to make all these friendly modifications but you need to get some pointers on using it all.

Writing via iPhone

2009-03-24T00:27:00.003+10:30

I was really hoping that this site would have a decent mobile view for writing. Alas. Here's hoping for MarsEdit for iPhone sooner rather than later.

Not that typing on this li'l thing feels very good on my thumbs. But that's what a childhood of Mario was supposed to prepare me for, right?

On an unrelated note, am I the only one that's bugged by the fact that the iPhone keyboard uses curly quotes/apostrophes on its key caps but to hit them gives you their 'dumb' (or straight) variants?

Oh, I just happily realise that you can press and hold the keys to get glorious “curly” quotes. Still wish they could be a bit cleverer and auto-correct themselves, however.

TeX Live 2009 freeze date

2009-03-03T11:51:00.001+10:30

I’m not sure how many TeX/LaTeX developers read what I write here, but nonetheless.

TeX Live is the major distribution for TeX and LaTeX and related programs, released yearly by the TeX Users Group and coordinated by the tireless Karl Berry. TeX Live contains essentially everything on CTAN modulo the non-free branch, and is now the only supported distribution for Linux and Unix systems, including Mac OS X. (Windows users also have the option of using MiKTeX.)

Karl has just contacted me about fixing up a couple of my packages to go along nicely with a new feature that will be in TeX Live 2009 — a new “shell escape” feature that doesn’t need to be turned on by default and that accepts a restricted (but customisable) set of commands.

Shell escape can’t be turned on in TeX Live because it is a security hazard; one could write an obfuscated TeX document to delete your home folder, for example. However, it’s absolutely essential for some of the more convenient features that I (at least) rely on: being able to convert EPS figures on the fly (Heiko Oberdiek’s epstopdf); being able to pre-compile psfrag graphics from Matlab and Mathematica (see the pstool package), and so on.

So I have to go and look at auto-pst-pdf and the aforementioned pstool to make sure they behave correctly in this new mode, and to see if they can be improved to take advantage of it.

The initial freeze date for TeX Live 2009 is March 31, which has kind of snuck up on me. While TeX Live won’t be ready for some time after that (ironing out the wrinkles can sometimes take months), it would be unfortunate to miss the date.

I’ll have to go and check to see what we can do about the expl3 code, too…

Declaring attention bankruptcy

2009-02-24T12:36:00.001+10:30

Something changed in me early this year.

I don’t think it’s related to my going to Thailand for a holiday, but it might be something to do with my lack of doing anything for a terribly long period of time around Christmas and well, well, into the New Year.

I’d like to say something grew in me, like a desire to simplify and quieten my mind. Spend less time absorbing others’ information and start creating my own. That might be an overly romantic take, however.

I left Twitter, basically stopped using it. I don’t exactly like this state of affairs, because there is worth to the service; it’s just that I started being overwhelmed by too many people. So trimming down, but not just yet. Still avoiding it, for now, for the most part.

I’ve stopped reading whatever the hell I was reading every day. Once I started unsubscribing from a few RSS feeds, I couldn’t stop — the whole stack collapsed and I’ve decimated (well, bit-shifted left twice would be more accurate, I suppose) the number of sites I’m following. Which has decreased even more the number of “New Items” appearing in NetNewsWire every day, since I’m now only really paying attention to “low frequency, high quality” writing. The effect on my reading habits has been profound; I’m not really linking things on del.icio.us at the moment. People would ask me how I’d find such random/interesting articles all the time. Well, spending a lot of time reading is how.

Instead, I’ve been working on the LaTeX3 Project for the most part. Writing test suites and discussing improvements to the syntax and plans for the future. It’s been really satisfying to actually get some stuff done, even if I recognise that my obsession with “collecting information” (in the guise of reading a lot every day) has been replaced by “I wonder what I can do next on the expl3 code”.

I’ve accepted long ago that my mind latches onto ideas with a terrible grip and it’s inevitable that something that I’m currently spending time on will overwhelm my concentration, to the detriment of all other tasks and thoughts.

And this LaTeX3 work has all been a major distraction from my “real task” — I’ve got a thesis lingering over my head. Tomorrow I discuss with the academics what I’m to do about that, and I anticipate a great deal of soul-crushing acceptance on what there is left to do, how much work it will be, and how long it will take. Soul-crushing, because I should already know this but refuse to admit to the answers.

But sometime soon, the focus of my attention will finally shift back to this weighty document. And damn won’t it be nice to have the monkey off my back.

Academic English

2009-01-29T15:31:00.001+10:30

David Foster Wallace: (emphasis mine)

In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an [Academic English] sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak (“revenue enhancement,” “downsizing,” pre-owned,” “proactive resource-allocation restructuring”) that it’s tempting to think AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.

From “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” published in Harper’s Magazine, 2001. And that’s not the only good bit. A monstrously tremendous essay.

George Orwell on bad English

2009-01-21T19:11:00.001+10:30

An article I was reading in the New Yorker on past Presidents’ Inaugural speeches referenced an essay by George Orwell called “Politics and the English Language”, in which he discusses one variety of bad writing.

You know when criticism is good when you recognise yourself in the examples being criticised. Call it a knack for knowing your own failings. But the article itself is rather long; I’d like to share some of the better quotes.

From the end of the essay, the origin of some oft-heard advice:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Some argue that these rules lead to overly simplified writing, but I’d say first that only people that understand the rules are allowed to break them. A description of one who does not understand these rules:

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

I’m certainly not one to talk. It’s far too easy to bang out a few (too many) words and be happy that someone, somewhere might be reading them. Or use those words as a crutch to remember some vaguely related point.

His translation of Ecclesiastes to “modern English” is brilliant. From:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth.

To:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

I sure can see some of my own writing echoed in that example. It’s a great example, because the translation does sound lucid and intelligent.

And finally:

[M]odern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy.

George, you are damn right.

Harvey (1950)

2009-01-19T22:46:00.001+10:30

Just watched Harvey. What a wonderful movie. Puts me in mind of The Man in the White Suit, not for story or anything like that but for the feeling and the extraordinary acting and the uplifting philosophy shining from the whole thing.

They just don’t make movies like that these days, or not ones that I see anyway.

Elwood P. Dowd:

Harvey and I sit in the bars… have a drink or two… play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they’re saying, “We don’t know your name, mister, but you’re a very nice fella.” Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We’ve entered as strangers — soon we have friends. And they come over… and they sit with us… and they drink with us… and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they’ve done and the big wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey… and he’s bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that’s envy, my dear. There’s a little bit of envy in the best of us.

(Quote thanks to IMDB.)

A pursuit of a happiness

2008-12-17T02:46:00.001+10:30

A little while ago, Mark Pilgrim itemised a list of happiness-producing goals. Maybe tongue-in-cheek to an extent.

While admirable, I found it a little extreme to be practical. And thought my own life required a few more manageable goals for a similar outcome. Now, I’m not saying I’m actively trying to achieve these, but sometime down the line…

Stop buying unneeded things
Stop sleeping more than 6–8 hours a night
Stop drinking alcohol that’s not part of a diet
Start a long-term exercise regime.
Start actively removing things from my possession. Old clothes. Old books. Old junk.

But the one thing that would make me happy right now? Working hard on my PhD and getting the damn thing over and done with. And what am I doing right now instead?

:)

This would be a good time to link to Doris Kearns Goodwin, who speaks enthrallingly as a story-teller on the themes of happiness and finding meaning in life:

My mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that I took when I was a graduate student at Harvard with the great psychologist Erik Erikson. He taught us that the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love, and play. And that to pursue one realm to the disregard of the others is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age; whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement but with serenity.

[About 30 secs into the talk.]

I guess I’ll leave it at that.

A touch of Sage

2008-12-17T02:27:00.001+10:30

I’ve resisted looking into Sage for a while now, because it’s way too late into my PhD to use it for any legitimate purpose. Furthermore, I’ve spent too much time playing around with Mathematica to justify abandoning it, at this stage.

Still, my interest was kindled anew by the discovery that there’s a LaTeX package that can be used to write ‘literate programs’ in Sage. Well, I was at home, unwell. Why not at least install this Sage program and see how it goes?

First impression: ‘Christ, this thing needs manual installation’. As they say in the readme:

If you’re an OSX guru and want to make steps 4–6 much nicer, join sage-devel and tell us. You’ll be greatly appreciated by a lot of people!

The first thing that could be improved is to distribute it inside a zip archive rather inside a disk image. After decompressed the 300MB archive into a disk image, you have to copy that over the Applications folder anyway!

I really don’t have anything to say more than this, because I quickly exhausted any time allotment for exploring with this new program. I hope in the future that I can become an enthusiastic user of Sage; it seems to me to be the most promising possibility for improving the future of engineering, maths, and science research.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love Mathematica and I rue turning my back on it, but its closed nature, I believe, dooms the long-term benefits it may have. Backwards compatibility aside, if I write code now I really would like to have some hope of running it in ten year’s time.

Responsible drugs

2008-12-17T02:22:00.001+10:30

Wherein I meander briefly through the loaded topic raised recently on taking drugs to improve our brains. Opinions are not guaranteed to be well argued or even well thought out. In three parts.

Introduction

Nature has recently published an article “Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy” that discusses the topic of the current illegality of cognitive-enhancing drugs and how they might be used by healthy people for the benefit of society.

Cognitive enhancement, unlike enhancement for sports competitions, could lead to substantive improvements in the world.

My initial impression is: but of course! Drugs to help cognition have my full support. The comments to the paper, which I’ll discuss in more detail below, have some good arguments both for and against this idea.

[It] would also be foolish to ignore problems that such use of drugs could create or exacerbate. With this, as with other technologies, we need to think and work hard to maximize its benefits and minimize its harms.

Others’ comments to the article

Before I write down my own thoughts, I want to quote some of the excellent comments that have been made. At time of writing, this is a cherry-picked selection of basically every reply to the article that I thought added new information to the argument and/or made me think. I tried to trim it down as much as possible, but, as you can see, there’s a lot of good stuff.

Anonymous:

The key to a satisfying and rich life is not to be found in caffeine or nicotine, much less adderall, ritalin, or next generation cognitive boosters. Furthermore, what effect would widespread use of such drugs have on ever-widening global socioeconomic disparities, regardless of how well distribution/development is monitored?!

Terry Kremin

Timothy Leary advocated the same – LSD can be a great cognitive enhancer. Freud thought cocaine was the greatest gift to mankind ever as it was such a fantastic cognitive enhancer. Slave owners found cocaine a great boon in increasing the production from their slaves. Marijuana is great to help those in mundane lives accept their lives and just trudge through without complaining too much – is that ‘cognitive enhancement’? It increases their productivity and lowers their costs.

But what exact ‘cognition’ are you enhancing? Most of the cognitive enhancers have shown great results in cases where a simple response is required, but they tend to inhibit the ability to acquire flexible representations. These compounds have been great at enhancing learning in one specific case – and addiction to the substance, and an inability to now think flexibly and alter their addictive behavior and drug seeking behavior.

It is also said that it is a fine line between genius and lunatic, particularly in the arts. If people learn specific associations even better without the distractions of random and odd association, how important do we really consider thinking outside the box? If say da Vinci increased his focus through these drugs, how productive would that actually have made him? he may have become one of the greatest physicians of his time, at the loss of his art and inventiveness.

College students use many of these to ‘enhance’ their cognitive ability – on tests that overwhelmingly test rote memory – not creative thinking and application of knowledge. If the tests were changed to more reflect application of knowledge in life, would the drugs still be popular? So we need to not only define what we mean by cognitive enhancement, and not limit it to the over used and abused IQ measures, and also what we define as productive. SO then do we take ritalin to increase our focus, and then also take LSD to increase our insight and creativity?

Focus and production are great, for a robot or computer, or assembly line, but do we really want to say emulating those is the greatest endeavor or goal of humanity? […] How about instigating a national exercise program? Fight obesity and increase cognitive abilities all at the same time.

Mark Hammer

There is a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of cognitive enhancers. […] The fundamental fact is that unlike mood enhancing/altering drugs, cognitive enhancers require your unswerving cooperation to “work” […]. In this respect, as a “drug”, they are less like an antibiotic (which works without you having to do anything strategic other than take them as prescribed), and more like anabolic steroids (which requires you to actually DO something specific in order to produce the intended outcome).

What they need from you in order to work, is a strategic mind, or more specifically, a cognitive strategy and set of habits that the neurochemical system being affected by the drug supports. No drug has ever, or WILL ever substitute for a strategy.

Sadly, while cognitive impairment can be easily produced with specific disruptors, quite independent of the volition of the subject, cognitive enhancement (again, performance above normal expectations) requires significant volition on their part. If you park your car at a mega-mall and don’t bother to take a few moments to commit to memory where it is parked, no amount or type of drug in the world will make recall any more likely BECAUSE THAT’S HOW MEMORY WORKS.

[A] great many people tend to overestimate the cognitive difficulties they may be having relative to others. In that respect, it is a bit like the entire “penis enlargement” industry that makes profits on the backs of sexual insecurity as opposed to real need. Who DOESN’T wonder if they are smart or attentive enough? […] Get thineself a good night’s sleep, and a decent education, and you’ll be in better shape than anything such substances might conceivably be able to do.

Anonymous:

I’d like to begin by voicing that I off-label ‘cognitively enhance’, as I find that occasional metered use can make astounding increases in my ability as a researcher – which results in tangible benefit to society. It’s not a competition, I’m not taking an exam. I’m doing research; research that I hope may one day improve the lives of many. Of course I exercise, sleep, eat well, and I drink coffee. And yet sometimes that significant extra boost allows me to spend 12 hours pushing through math I frustratedly found myself unequal too for weeks previous. Why is this the act of a social criminal?

Mark Hammer:

It is my contention that perhaps the greater challenge is not the development of substances, nor the legal aspects, but rather the conceptualization of how a substance might impact on cogition in a positive direction when the individual has no particular impairment to start with. We KNOW that we can screw up normal cognition with drugs (and there are millions of people in prison, and families of deceased, who can vouch for that). We have SOME evidence that people whose cognition is lacking due to disease-related processes can SOMETIMES be improved upon by taking pharmacological steps to reverse some known neurochemical deficit or dysfunction. But when it comes to regular folks who have no known problems, the manner in which a substance could conceivably render cognition “better” or “improved”, and the classification of current and future substances into some nosology of types of action or cognitive enhancement, truly escapes us.

Peter Tylee

Does this support the need for further research? Certainly. Research targeted at solving real problems, not pandering to the lazy and the elitist or those who imagine that widespread use of ‘enhancing’ agents would so improve the world that the inescapable associated harms would be justified.

Jeffrey Atkinson

Mark Hammer’s Dec 8th reply details accurately what I perceive to be the crux of the matter – that ’cognitive enhancers require your unswerving cooperation to “work” ’. It appears that for these and similar drugs that the benefits are generally small but real. However, this benefit comes to the prepared and dedicated, and so the drugs are unlikely to turn an idiot into a brilliant scholar.

I doubt the current drugs are going to radically change the way students learn, or researchers work. But it most certainly is the time to start thinking about what happens when, inevitably, the drugs or implanted chips get better to the point were NOT having using them will leave you at a distinct disadvantage.

My own thoughts

As always, the line of scientific idealism that I wish I could strongly uphold falls short of practical reality. This is clearly a subtle topic, with several orthogonal arguments that often confuse the issue and make it hard for me to form a coherent opinion when I’m so far away from the actual issue.

Ideally, I think that schools and universities should actively discourage the use of these drugs, since I feel that these are supposed to be places students where students learn how to learn, rather than actually learn some great chunk of knowledge that can be assessed in examination form. Background knowledge is important “on the job”, but the more important aspect is solving problems that one has not seen before.

I think the desire to use cognitive enhancing drugs in schools is a little misguided as to what the purpose of being in school is actually for. And as the comments above say, sleep and food and exercise all contribute to cognitive skills; it stands to reason that if any of these are in deficit then it’s not constructive to prescribe drugs to fix a different problem.

But I’m not against the idea of taking drugs. This seems a little inconsistent given what I just said. So when do I see these sorts of drugs as playing an important rôle in society? Well, like other drugs that have been used in the past to aid artistic progress, cognitive-enhancing drugs should be used when the individual is actively involved in solving problems that involve a degree of cognitive load.

Where that line is drawn in an individual’s life is rather fuzzy. I would not advise taking performance-enhancing drugs to just “get through” a university course, but at some stage there are going to people with real gifts to share that happen to have taken drugs to get in the position they are in. And I’ll be more than happy when that time arrives, if you don’t want to argue that this event hasn’t already happened a long time ago.

I guess I would pay a fairly high price for the advancement of science versus attempting to retain our humanity. But I’d hope that in doing so, we would remain in a situation to appreciate the humanity that we have.

No content or no comment

2008-12-17T02:09:00.001+10:30

In the distant future I would like to write things here that people actually found useful, helpful, interesting, or simply related to. In the meantime, I’d be deluding myself if I thought I’d written much of value over the last few years. Kind of feeling like haven’t been, well, consuming the sorts of things that I’d like to write about here.

However, I do read rather voraciously most days, mostly stuff that isn’t directly useful to either my work or my play. Probably spend too much time on it, to be honest. If you’d like to read along with me, for those of you who don’t already, please, take a look:

http://del.icio.us/wspr

On a related note, if you’d like to read my middling thoughts over on Twitter, I guess that’s better than nothing.

One day, and I really do mean one day, I intend to collect these fractured views of me into a single place. Not that I know how that would help things any.

Sleep proof

2008-12-06T05:15:00.001+10:30

Some Twitter analysis tool spat out the following image of my averaged number of posts to Twitter:

Yikes. See that trend during the week? I’m clearly, on average over quite a period of time, not living with a twenty-four hour sleep cycle. No wonder I’m tired all the time.

(Well, I am awake at 5 a.m. on a Friday night. That could explain things, too.)

I wish I could get more concrete measurements for this sort of data. The direct feedback could well be useful to actually get me to sleep correctly.

Silly analogies

2008-11-26T11:20:00.001+10:30

While I do love the quote, this is a bit silly:

if the read/write head were a Boeing 747, and the hard-disk platter were the surface of the Earth:

The head would fly at Mach 800

At less than one centimeter from the ground

And count every blade of grass

And if the earth was a perfect sphere. That’s kind of important, too.

(And there was no atmosphere. And each blade of grass was evenly spaced. You just can’t scale dynamics between these sorts of scales.)

Erasing a hard drive

2008-11-25T14:50:00.001+10:30

Odd experience. Bought a new 1 TB external drive for backing up my machine (Western Digital, $189 from MSY — laugh uproariously at their website, but love their prices).

Plug into my machine, and it appears as an antiquated FAT disk. That’s normal, as it’s the baseline type of file system that all platforms will be able to read from and write to. But not optimal; much better on a Mac to use HFS+.

Reformating the disk is a job for Disk Utility. Selected ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’; chose the disk name (‘Mervyn’); hit ‘Erase’…and no good.

‘File system formatter failed’

WHADDYA MEAN?! That’s not supposed to happen.

A few minutes of panicking before I thought to, duh, Google the problem. Easy fix:

Go to the Partition tab;
Select 1 Partition (or more, if you like);
Click Options: select ‘GUID Partition Table’;
Click Apply.

This has the same result as erasing the volume with the side-effect of , you know, actually working.

In the course of doing all this, I saw a dialog box in Mac OS X that took me back: ‘Disk not recognised; would you like to initialise it?’ Cue memories of being a kid using System 6, not knowing what that word meant; luckily, no data was harmed before I learned it just meant Erase.

You sure don’t see ‘initialise’ used much these days…probably for good reason!

Tables vs. CSS

2008-11-18T18:27:00.001+10:30

Jack Shedd says

CSS makes certain things remarkably easy. But there is a class of design problems that are nearly insurmountably hard due to poor design decisions within CSS.

Which may be true. But I’d posit to say that tables (catch his link) are not the answer.

In many cases, a more versatile system is going to be slower for the particular case that a simple system is built for. That doesn’t mean the versatile system is broken.

Having said this, I would like to read some good criticism of CSS. I haven’t kept up with it for several years and I think it makes an excellent model for sorting out a successor to LaTeX.

Movember

2008-11-17T20:43:00.001+10:30

Um, go the mo?

You can blame the drunken look on the blurriness of the photo. Or vice versa, perhaps.

Vista plus one

2008-10-29T15:11:00.001+10:30

Microsoft has been talking up their next version of Windows. They seem to be getting the direction right in terms of marketing their progress going forward.

I believe the vague analogy between Vista and Mac OS X is a pretty good one: both represented forwards looking technology that was a bit of a hurdle to get over in the beginning. But the future potential makes it all worth it.

Competition between the platforms is really a win-win situation for everyone involved. For what it’s worth, I’m just as enthusiastic about Snow Leopard than I was about any “feature-based” upgrade to Mac OS X.

Now, not to knock Microsoft here but I’ll believe the new Explorer features when I see them in actual shipping versions of Windows. (I was rather disappointed the amazing Explorer features shown in a demonstration of Longhorn never made it to Vista, seemingly. Not that I actually use Windows, but the ideas were fantastic.) But these user interface features for window management sound insanely useful:

Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it automatically; dragging it off the top of the screen restores it. Dragging a window to the left or right edge of the screen resizes the window so that it takes 50% of the screen. With this, a pair of windows can be quickly docked to each screen edge to facilitate interaction between them.

The transition between these states had better be very clear about what’s going on, or that’s going to be some weird-feeling behaviour.

On a tangential note, as many people have commented before, it’s just crazy that window placement doesn’t have “snap-to-edge” in either of the major platforms yet.

A Good Review

2008-10-29T15:05:00.001+10:30

I like it when journals publish articles about academic publishing. Now, this one, called “A Good Review”, doesn’t say too much, but it does have a nice list of dot points: (and I quote)

A good review helps the members of the scientific community achieve standards higher than what they might be able to do without expert feedback.
A good review helps the authors learn something new or consider something they had not thought about.
A good review helps to improve the communication of the material and alerts the authors on statements that may be misleading, misunderstood or plain wrong.
A good review is done in good faith; it addresses the contents of the manuscript at hand not the state, status or character of the authors.
A good review is not about the expertise or cleverness of the reviewer, it is about the quality of the proffered manuscript—and, really, nothing else.

Me again: Generally, in my limited experience, I would say that feedback from the reviewing process has made my (few) papers better. At times, you don’t really want to hear what they have to say, but after changing things around and spending some extra time, the manuscript is improved.

Having said that, I don’t believe the huge lag times for this process are justified, and we’d all be better off with a more informal system like arXiv. The papers that are good will still be cited and read. Despite the whole review process, you still get some stinkers even in the so-called “high impact” journals.

Rather than hindering the publication of new material, we “just” need a better way to catalogue and access what’s already there. Should new postgrads really have to re-create entire literature surveys for every single project? One day, I would like to create the “Wikipedia of literature reviews”. But not like Wikipedia, coz that’s not the best model for this sort of information.

Email client wishlist

2008-10-24T10:03:00.001+10:30

Due to Poul-Henning Kamp, via Karl Fogel:

But let me suggest a few pop-up windows I would like to see mail-programs implement whenever people send or reply to email to the lists they want me to subscribe to:

  +------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand |
  | people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading |
  | it before they can decide if it is interesting.  At least  |
  | two man-weeks will be spent reading your email.  Many of   |
  | the recipients will have to pay to download your email.    |
  |                                                            |
  | Are you absolutely sure that your email is of sufficient   |
  | importance to bother all these people ?                    |
  |                                                            |
  |                  [YES]  [REVISE]  [CANCEL]                 |
  +------------------------------------------------------------+

Okay, that one’s a little silly. But this suggestion deals with a problem even I (I know!) have had in the past:

  +------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Warning:  You have not read all emails in this thread yet. |
  | Somebody else may already have said what you are about to  |
  | say in your reply.  Please read the entire thread before   |
  | replying to any email in it.                               |
  |                                                            |
  |                      [CANCEL]                              |
  +------------------------------------------------------------+

Poor writing

2008-10-21T12:47:00.001+10:30

I’m currently reading a paper related to my thesis. Remind me not to write like this:

In this section, the design of a beam-mass system, whose efﬁciency in converting the energy of vibration sources into electricity is increased by means of permanent magnets, is proposed.

Moreover:

This section consists of several subsections.

US Election 2008 FAQ

2008-10-12T22:28:00.001+10:30

I don’t know how this only just turned up in my feed reader, but Peter Norvig of Google fame has a great collection of information about the upcoming US elections:

http://norvig.com/election-faq.html

For the record, I’m pro-Obama but I’m sure that McCain would do a much better job than Bush. I’m pretty appalled by Sarah Palin, however.

I’m still amazed by the tax plans proposed by the two rivals; how McCain’s “cut tax to the rich and give (basically) nothing to the poor” could possibly be rationalised, especially by voters, really makes me wonder on its logic.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve really got to say in the matter, since I’m not American and can’t vote.

In an ongoing series…

2008-10-04T12:05:00.001+09:30

iTunes 8.0.1 fixes the gutter problem of this insignificant window:

Compare:

That scroll bar chrome still looks out-of-place, and the window still floats above all others even when iTunes is not frontmost. I think that bottom decorative strip should be the same height as the titlebar of the window; before it was too thick, but now I think it’s too thin.

Baby steps…

Diaeresis

2008-10-04T01:58:00.001+09:30

Here’re two examples of some odd typography with which I’ve recently become enamoured:

Courtesy, who else, the New Yorker.

I’m planning on this diaeresis usage for my thesis, but my supervisors have already raised questions about it. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea. After all, few people seem to find the spelling exactly intuitive, and even fewer, I’d wager, are familiar with the term “diaeresis” in the first place.

The diaeresis looks exactly like an umlaut, but has a rather different meaning. The umlaut, say in the word über, is an accent that indicates a change in vowel sound for that letter. It’s not really used in English (where double-consonants more often serve a similar purpose of changing the preceding vowel sound), but the umlaut is rather common in many European languages.

By contrast to that particular diacritic, the diaeresis is used, such as in the word naïve, to indicate that the two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately. nay–eve, instead of (er) nyve, let’s say. Even though all English speakers will pronounce the more commonly spelt naive correctly, anyway.

Which brings us back to the examples I showed above. The New Yorker, then, does not use hyphens to separate the halves of compound words. This is desirable in order to reduce the number of marks used on the page to represent the word; this has implications both for visual simplicity and running length of a piece of text (i.e., hyphenation and justification are easier when less characters are used).

And when it ends up that a compound word is used but the absence of the hyphen results in two adjacent vowels—then’s the time for the diaeresis in words like coördinate, coöperate, and so on. Personally, I think this is quite tidy and quaint, and I’m trying to emulate their style.

2³² − 1 messages

2008-10-01T10:20:00.001+09:30

I was so happy to achieve ‘Inbox Zero’. In the final hour, Mail.app had the last laugh:

Jokes aside, I’ve found the message count for smart mailboxes to be fairly flaky.

Rands on slides

2008-09-18T12:14:00.001+09:30

Rands has written some really great articles on how to give and prepare for seminar presentations (too lazy for links; use Google). Here’s another gem of his via Twitter:

If you can’t practice the hell out of your slides, you can, at least, care the hell out of your slides.

I believe the point here is that with carefully-done slides, half of your problem is solved already. When your slides don’t help to pull you along in your train of thought, it’s easy to lose momentum and lose the coherency of your overall “message”.

Oh god, my eyes

2008-09-13T03:48:00.001+09:30

A little while ago I complained about the “Podcast Information” window in iTunes.

Well, there’s now been an iTunes update, and I’m sad to say things are now much, much worse. On the plus side they fixed my bug.

It’s a pity they had to hit the damn window with an ugly stick at the same time.

Come on, guys. It’s not that hard. At least the old one had some padding in there:

And that new shadow looks ridiculous. Really.

They also didn’t paid any attention to improving its behaviour. That’s okay. The other new features in iTunes 8 are rather nice.

But this window now floats above all others even when iTunes is not frontmost. This is the least appropriate behaviour this window could possibly have. I guess I’ll have to file another bug report…

iTunes’ “Genius” logo

2008-09-10T11:05:00.001+09:30

This logo, for iTunes’ new “Genius” feature, is only going to look good once we have displays capable of 200 dpi:

Too many jaggies in the lower half of that centre orbit.

Google Earth and running

2008-09-09T21:03:00.001+09:30

Let me just say that one of the few actual uses I’ve found for Google Earth is utterly indispensable to me right now. Path distance measuring:

With only eleven days to go before the 12km City to Bay run, I’ve got some training to do…

A thought on iPods, 2008

2008-08-31T23:50:00.001+09:30

Jesper wrote the definitive prediction list for what Apple might reveal in this year’s iPod lineup refresh, but I just wanted to make a comment or two to see how badly I’m wrong when the announcements are actually made.

Firstly, I believe that if solid state drives were large enough, Apple would have no problem retiring the iPod classic. Not that it doesn’t have advantages over the iPod touch (“blind” operation, first and foremost), the iPod touch is a much better device in the scheme of things.

However, while it’s possible the iPod touch could reach 64GB this year, I still don’t think that’s big enough to drop the 160GB iPod classic. Next year, though, definitely.

Jesper raised a possibility I hadn’t considered: the iPod shuffle could be retired in favour of the iPod nano. (Not the iPod nona, which still has strong support in the Mediterranean community.) Considering you can buy 4GB flash drives for less than $30 these days, it’s probably going to happen sooner rather than later. I think the timing is a shade too early to completely drop the iPod shuffle entirely, and this is a change that will be happening next year, not this.

If a new product was going to be announced, I’d peg money on a re-designed iPod nano that has a similar form factor the iPod touch but much smaller. That is, an approximately 16/9 ratio device with a screen on one side and a button or two on the edges. Removing the scroll wheel allows for a large screen without really increasing the size of the whole device. And I think the screen would be just large enough to accept a limited range of input behaviour.

But really, I don’t think that’s going to happen (I can imagine an iPhone nano product sooner than this one); my predictions for this year are lack-lustre: no new products, very big de-emphasis on the iPods shuffle and classic; bumps on specs and price drops across the line for the iPods nano and touch. Hopefully bigger announcements regarding software and services. It’s about time for a bit of a refresh of the iTunes store, methinks. I could dream about a re-designed iTunes itself, but I don’t want to get my hopes up.

The chngpage package vs the changepage package

2008-08-16T00:53:00.001+09:30

It occurs to me that there aren’t many people writing on the web about LaTeX. Mostly, I suspect, for the same reasons you don’t see as many people writing about HTML+CSS these days. It’s just a tool that some people use.

(That’s not to say that there aren’t periodicals and the like for people to write about what’s been going on.)

Anyway; here’s a nugget of information that might be of some use to some people in the near future.

Peter Wilson’s memoir LaTeX class is a major, recent, project that ties in many ideas for how to layout and customise a document in a single class. Some of the ideas in the class are also broken out into separate packages so that people who aren’t using memoir can still take advantage of them.

“chngpage” was one such package. It allowed you to locally change the layout of the text block in various different ways (for example, to place a figure that is centred on the physical page rather than centred in the text block). It also provided the very nice ability to robustly detect whether you’re on an even or odd page at any given position in the document (which is harder than you might expect).

Unfortunately, because chngpage was written before memoir it differed in one important way; to cut a long story short this made it tedious to write code that required the chngpage package because you had to jump through hoops to get it working in memoir as well. (As an example, see my addlines package.)

The problem was that neither memoir nor chngpage could be changed because of backwards compatibility problems. So Peter Wilson wrote a new package “changepage” that provides the same functionality as chngpage but uses the same interface as memoir; the result of this new package is that chngpage should no longer be used.

While it can still be found in the “obsolete” section of CTAN (here), chngpage is no longer included in TeX Live (as of TeX Live 2008). Packages that use it should switch to changepage, which is simply a matter of something like s/\ifcpoddpage/\ifoddpage/ for those who like regular expressions.

That reminds me. I’ve got a package that uses chngpage that I really need to update now…

Update: Fearless Leader (a.k.a. Karl Berry) has convinced me that any backwards compatibility problems caused by removing chngpage outweighs any nice ideological benefit from removing the package entirely. So it still exists in TeX Live! (Which was not my decision, but I agree with it.) The moral of the story, in the end, is the same: in new documents and packages, use the new changepage so that you play nicely with memoir

iTunes’ “Podcast Information” window doesn’t scroll

2008-08-11T08:02:00.001+09:30

This is bug #6139143.

SUMMARY

iTunes’ “Podcast information” window doesn’t accept scrollwheel or two finger trackpad scroll input.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

Open the “Podcast Information” window (note that there’s no menu item for it, too)
Select a podcast with a long enough blurb so that the scroll bar appears
Try and scroll the text with the trackpad or with a scroll wheel

RESULTS

Doesn’t scroll.

Should.

NOTES

While we’re on the subject, what’s with that weird window re-size widget?

Problems with LyX #1

2008-07-22T18:06:00.001+09:30

This is the first article in a possibly ongoing series documenting the problems in LyX that I’ve had to debug for people in my department. If you’re not a LyX or LaTeX user, there won’t be much to interest you here.

I’m a LaTeX guy through and through, and while I would never think of writing in LyX myself, I can totally appreciate that “normal” people find LyX much more approachable (and easier!) than LaTeX. Nonetheless, LyX is a rather leaky abstraction, and most errors that people have are due to their complete lack of understanding of the underlying LaTeX layer. In my limited experience.

That’s okay; LyX is free software and they can’t afford to test on beginners. I’m sure heavy LyX users (and the developers) don’t run into the same problems that I have to solve, because they know what they’re doing and don’t make the same mistakes. At the same time, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that sometimes their knowledge of LaTeX isn’t as comprehensive as someone like me who actually writes documents and programs packages in it.

Now, the errors I report here are necessarily vague and don’t pin down problems very well. That’s because I can’t afford to spend any more time on this at all. That said, if contacted directly I’ll do my best to reply quickly and in as much detail as I can. Here we go:

Please make it much easier to insert a floating graphic; it’s the 99% case and should be a single action in the GUI. New users see “Insert graphic” (or whatever it says) and paste it inline in their document. If it were wrapped in a float, they’d get what they actually wanted.
Especially in maths mode, if non-existent macros are typed they shouldn’t be displayed in a pretty way. For example, I had a user who was used to typing “\alpha” to get greek type slashes before all roman characters in maths (e.g., “\x”). The visual display in this case (simply an italic “x”) implied that this was legal when it in fact produced sometimes complicated errors (in the case that an accent macro was typed such as, say, \i).
The prettyref package for automatically formatted cross-references is basically the worst choice from a variety of packages that do this function. Use the refstyle package instead.
If there is no bibliography inserted in the document, please prompt for one (with explanation) if a citation is attempted. It’s not obvious that you have to insert a bibliography before you’re allowed to reference citations (the logical flow is the other way around: I cite a paper and a bibliography is created from that). Adopting the biblatex package and putting the \bibliography{} into the preamble would help things in this regard.
File paths seem to continue to be a big problem. Yes, it offends my sensibilities when people use analphabetic characters in the directory names (not to mention spaces), but these damn users are just doing what the OS allows. If putting a LyX file inside the folder “# New Stuff/” causes the compilation to fail, then it should either protect the path better or just tell the user straight up to rename the folder.
This may no longer even be a problem, but a while back it was fiendishly annoying debugging a problem where something like “vector $[a,b,c]$” was put inside a subfigure caption. The reason? Subfigure captions are input in LaTeX in square brackets, so any square brackets in the caption need to be hidden from the parsing. LyX should automatically wrap the subfigure caption with curly braces behind the scenes.

That’s all for now. That these are only minor details, which is a testament to the highly useable state the LyX team have brought their program over the years. Here’s to a brighter future yet.

Naming in a bibliography

2008-07-22T14:53:00.001+09:30

So, how should it look? The bibliography, I mean. Is it the author or the work that is the most important aspect of the citation? In other words, how much emphasis should be placed on the name? Here are (most of) the possibilities for representing people’s names, let alone the rest of the citation information. Enumerating the types has helped me decide on a style for my thesis.

The default for the biblatex package is to place the first author’s last name first, which makes the bibliography look more obviously alphabetised:

Robertson, Will S., Ben S. Cazzolato, and Anthony C. Zander

This is a nice example but I don’t think it’s helpful for displaying the names more clearly. All last names first removes the inconsistency of reversing the name order of the first author only:

Robertson, Will S., Cazzolato, Ben S., and Zander, Anthony C.

In all of these “full name” cases, I’d prefer to use the European tradition of printing the last names in small caps for emphasis.

Will S. Robertson, Ben S. Cazzolato, and Anthony C. Zander

But maybe first names don’t matter, and should be normalised away to single initials:

Robertson, W. S., Cazzolato, B. S., and Zander, A. C. (*)

W. S. Robertson, B. S. Cazzolato, and A. C. Zander

With names in initialised form, it just doesn’t work to have mixed name orders: (The possibility of too many adjacent initials.)

Robertson, W. S., B. S. Cazzolato, and A. C. Zander

I’m inclined to favour the starred example above. Mostly because full first names aren’t always supplied by authors (or the references to them), so without the “initialisation” you’d get a mix of full first names and initials between different entries in the bibliography.

The counter-argument here is that bibliographic databases should always provide first names to avoid problems of author ambiguity, but this is a printed bibliography we’re talking about, not a bibliographic database. Nice to be concise.

And really, it is the work that’s important. The authors of the paper provide, perhaps, a taste of the authority the paper might hold, but whether it’s interesting to chase up should rest entirely on how it’s being referenced in the work in which it is cited.

Improving iTunes’ “Podcast Information” window

2008-07-15T13:52:00.001+09:30

Open a playlist that contains podcasts and turn on the “Description” column in the “View Options”. Each item in this column contains a circled “i” icon that opens up the “Podcast Information” window.

I have two small suggestions to improve this window:

There should be a way to open/show this window with a keyboard shortcut, and (optionally) a menu item as well. Shift+Cmd+I is a suitable candidate (and this shortcut could also toggle the visibility; that is, hide the window when it is already visible).
Only the selected row should display the icon to minimise the visual clutter of displaying this icon on every row. This is analogous to the “iTunes Store” links that are displayed in the respective name/artist/album rows when viewing music listings.

This is Apple “bug” #6075588.

The New Yorker’s (now) curly quotes

2008-07-14T19:07:00.001+09:30

Say, whaddya know?

Now that’s much more attractive.

Expensive connectivity

2008-07-12T14:56:00.001+09:30

Okay, look. I know that Australia is a technological wasteland and it is damned expensive to have us connected to the global grid because we’re so far away from everywhere. Download limits on our internet, and all that (I’m currently allowed 11GB per month for which I pay AUS$45). Read Neil Stephenson’s ridiculously long and entertaining article on undersea data cables (“Mother Earth Mother Board”) for some insight on why it’s expensive to get internet down under.

It’s always been expensive to access the internet in Australia. Our first plan when I was a teenager cost $5 per hour at 14.4 kbps. These crazy prices were always initiated by our national carrier, Telstra, who charges through the roof and caters only to those who don’t have the time or energy to shop around to the cheaper alternatives. Or who live in regional areas.

Yes, Telstra does a lot of infrastructure work, including having to cater to this regional population that’s not huge in number but spread over an enormous area — think trying to economically provide internet to every resident of New York City but spread them over the entire land mass of America. Not an easy, or cheap, problem.

Nonetheless, there are competitors to Telstra (in the civilised parts of the country) that manage not to charge ludicrous amounts for their services. To use the example above of how much I pay for internet at the moment, the equivalent Telstra plan by price is $40/month which gives me paltry 400MB and 15¢ per MB after that. OUCH.

To be fair, paying $90/month is pretty much the same as my current $45 plan, so it’s only twice as expensive at the higher end of the scale.

On that note, let’s look at Telstra’s new rates for iPhone 3G. There’s a story in The Australian that compares the different carriers in more detail. Well, here’s the simplified look:

Carrier   Cost      Calls    Data
Telstra   $80/mth   $ 70      5 MB
Optus     $79/mth   $550    700 MB

What. The. Fuck. That’s orders of magnitude difference, even after considering that the per-minute rate for calls is about 30% cheaper on Telstra. The article is bang on the money as to the reasons behind this huge pricing chasm:

… the low data capacity has been included to protect Telstra’s walled garden of online content.

The day that big telcos get out of the services game and realise that their purpose in life should be to make money in connectivity, and that’s it, will be a happier day for everyone. Just let me pay for bits from where-ever, and compete doing that the cheapest and fastest and most agnostic way possible. We don’t want to buy goods from an ISP.

iTunes’ “Shuffle” is repeatable!

2008-06-25T19:48:00.001+09:30

For years now I’ve been getting frustrated with iTunes’ seeming repetitiveness when listening to music with ‘shuffle’ turned on. I find ‘Album Shuffle’ a pretty good way to listen to music: just select the album you want now and a random album will be cued up in due course. (Listening to full albums is, of course, the only way to properly listen to music.)

You’re not stuck with the interruption of choosing what to listen to next (without getting stuck into listening ruts at the same time), and of course there’s nothing stopping you from skipping the album if you’re not in the mood.

Every now and then I’d realise that after going back to a previously-played album that I wanted to listen to again, the next album that started playing “randomly” next was in fact the same one that started playing next last time. I’m not the only one to have noticed this.

Try it out for yourself. Turn on Shuffle, with ‘Shuffle: Songs’ checked in the Playback preferences. (You get the same problem with both albums and songs.) Start playing a song and hit ‘Next song’ a few times. Keep track; here’s me:

Down By The River, Live At The Fillmore East, Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Les bras de mer , Le phare, Yann Tiersen
The Believer, Chrome Dreams II, Neil Young
Everything Will Be Alright, Hot Fuss, The Killers
A Drop in Time, All Is Dream, Mercury Rev

Now go back to, say, the second one, and hit play. Hit next song. Wouldn’t you know?

The Believer, Chrome Dreams II, Neil Young

Just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, hit next again:

Everything Will Be Alright, Hot Fuss, The Killers

I don’t know about you, but I find this behaviour incredibly (a) annoying, and (b) stupid.

Sure, you should be able to retrace your steps backwards in the random sequence. But under no circumstances should I be subjected to the same random sequence if my only crime was to want to re-listen to a particular favourite.

In Apple’s internal database, this is bug #6033030.

Applescript for iTunes: ‘Next Album’

2008-06-25T19:26:00.001+09:30

Here’s an Applescript I like to use. I listen to iTunes with ‘Album Shuffle’ activated, so I don’t have to think about what to listen to next. (And, embarrassingly, to keep the music going after an album finishes; if I’m thinking about something when the music stops, I’ll totally forget that I had music going in the first place and sit in silence for hours.)

The problem is that sometimes you don’t want to listen to a particular album. And there’s little worse than hitting ‘Next Song’ a dozen times to skip to the next one. Luckily, iTunes is rather scriptable:

tell application "iTunes"
    pause
    set |current album| to the album of the current track
    repeat while the album of the current track is equal to |current album|
        next track
    end repeat
    play
end tell

The New Yorker's straight quotes

2008-06-04T15:23:00.001+09:30

Usually The New Yorker is the epitome of good and consistent typographic design. Oops:

Note that they’ve got it right for the running text, but for whatever reason the quotation mark in the lettrine remains uncurled.

Mathematica packages of mine

2008-06-03T18:33:00.001+09:30

A couple of years ago I picked up Mathematica to use for some of my PhD research. And I quickly grew enamoured to its programming style and mathematical capabilities; as opposed to Matlab, my other tool of choice, which acts like and (mostly) has all the grace of a glorified number cruncher.

Since using Mathematica I discovered a few things it can’t do so well and wrote some packages to help myself along. The cost-benefit time ratio was heavily skewed against me, but what the hell. In for a penny, in for a pound. I could hardly ditch Mathematica because it couldn’t output graphics (say) in a form I felt to be sufficiently suitable.

Now, Wolfram has a site set up as a centralised repository of Mathematica code: the Wolfram Library Archive. At present I have three packages that live there:

ColorbarPlot co-authored with Mike Croucher,
FixPolygons co-authored with (actually rewritten by) Michele Ceriotti, and
FakeRegionPlot.

(I don’t, sadly, have time to elucidate their existence right now. Some pretty pictures would be nice.)

The terrible shame, however, is that Wolfram has a huge problem actually updating those sites. A few months ago I sent them updates to these packages and I’ve yet to hear any reply. It makes my life hard if I need to pay attention to whether people are even able to access the most recent versions of my code. Frankly, I’m far better off hosting the code myself.

(Cue suppressed announcement of a long overdue actual website that I’ll one day create but which is on ice until I finish my PhD.)

So here I’d like to point you all to the canonical repository for this work (and any future work as well): wspr/mmapkg at GitHub. It contains the three packages above in addition to a couple of other packages that aren’t as generally useful (yet).

I’d recommend that you use these links instead of the Wolfram ones; who knows how long it will take me to update the Wolfram library versions if it takes so long for them to get back to me. I understand the time constraints, but really. CTAN (for TeX and LaTeX code) is staffed by volunteers and they usually check and upload packages for me within 24 hours.

The other advantage to using GitHub for this sort of work is that it makes things easy for anyone interested in using these packages to make changes and fix bugs in my code.

Since posting the original versions at various times I’ve collaborated with two authors on two packages respectively to improve the features and performance of the code. It’s just so rewarding working in collaboration with people I’ve never met because we share some sort of passion with this tiny piece of code.

While I don’t expect any of the readers of this site to actually be using Mathematica (shout out if you are), hopefully Google will render the information here useful to some people at a later date.

Update: Mike Croucher has made his own announcement of the new version of ColorbarPlot with a great explanation of what’s new and — even better — some pretty pictures.

Update the second: The most recent versions of the packages are now (finally) available at the Wolfram Library (16 July, 2008).

‘Happiness’ by Matthieu Ricard

2008-05-29T15:40:00.001+09:30

My reading drought is over! After being stuck on a couple of books for the entirety of this year, I’ve finally got through one of them. Trying to read in parallel is simply a bad idea, even if one is fiction and the other non.

The subtitle of ‘Happiness’ is ‘A guide to developing life’s most important skill’. With respect, this is exactly what ‘Happiness’ is not, but I’ll forgive the marketing people for sexing up the idea of the book.

Oh, sure, there’s the occasional exercise in which we’re advised to perform deep meditative acts, but colour me sceptical that a non-meditator will be able to derive much outcome from such exercises without years of practise. (Indeed, my own experience confirms this :)) Not that the simplifications used to promote these techniques aren’t useful: when grumpy, meditate on your grumpiness itself and you’ll realise it’s meaningless — suddenly you feel better. In a perhaps overused analogy in the book, the negative emotion disappears like a snowflake in the spring sunshine.

What the book does do to great success is inspire one to take up a path of developing their happiness — and it’s not surprising that the teaching that the Buddhist Ricard espouses is Buddhism itself. But that’s, in fact, the strength of the book in my eyes. While Christians might stumble around trying to prove the power of prayer, the Buddhists can equivocally state why and how their practises help develop the mind from an objectively point of view.

Or perhaps I’m swallowing their bait, line and sinker.

Regardless, what this book emphasises is that being happy isn’t a genetic or environmental factor that’s out of your control. Rather, we create our own happinesses in our own minds, and with practise one can be happy all of the time. Sounds good, right? Well, Ricard spends an entire book teasing out the idea of being happy all the time. I guess the easy way to sum it up would be that once you’ve worked out the meaning of (your own) life then you’ll be happy. Simple, huh? Well…

This book isn’t just a “swallow this pill and you’ll be happy” solution. The pursuit of happiness is inextricably tied to the way we live our lives. Perhaps another way to boil it down is to say “be optimistic always, spend every moment doing what you should be doing, and make other people happy at the same time”.

Realistically, everyone’s search of happiness, if they are even trying, will follow a different path. The appeal of this book is that it’s a great elucidation on the different little meanings around “being happy”, and inspiration that our brains are tactile enough that, with practise, we can live our lives in a positive frame of mind.

Now, where do I sign up for meditation lessons?

A new TeXShop console window

2008-05-04T15:51:00.001+09:30

Sometimes I expend energy doing things that to the untrained eye look like a waste of time. Take TeXShop’s console window:

That’s easily the single ugliest window I have to look at on a daily basis. Running Matlab is a close second, but I’m not doing that quite so often these days. But considering both my work and my play is done in TeXShop, that’s a lot of ugly looking right back at me.

Eventually you just can’t take it any more.

In the end, a few long minutes messing around in Interface Builder yields a relative delight:

Ah, bliss. I’m literally a happier man for veritable seconds every day. I’m sure you’ll agree that the benefits of this can not be understated.

A couple of notes about the design of the window itself. Note the output of TeX is hard-wrapped before printing to 80 characters, so it’s essential to have a fixed width font in there. Using Helvetica as the default is just crazy. Since we know that 80 chars of Monaco 10 takes up about 500 pixels, the window can be fixed to that width. (To do this “properly”, you would want to adjust the width of the window depending on the size of the fixed width font that has been chosen.)

I’ve added a slight yellow colour to the window; this facilitates easy of background recognition when you’re trying to grab a background document. When there are three windows per document (source, output, console), it’s important to distinguish them in little ways. It would probably be better to consolidate the console window into the source, visible only during a typesetting run; this is more work than I have time for, however.

The placeholder text has been carefully constructed to try and get people to use the various commands that are available on error during a TeX compilation. The best is i, which replaces the token on which the error occurred with whatever text you write. Pity it doesn’t also edit the text of your document to synchronise the correction. Again, it would be better if this text field only became visible after an error had occurred.

The destructive buttons “Abort” and “Trash Aux Files” have been moved to the right to separate them from the constructive button “Goto Error”; I like adding keyboard shortcuts to interface elements (in heavy moderation, of course) so that I remember to use them.

Finally, the scroll bar (that disappears when not required, by the way) is mini-sized. Scroll bars are an anachronism in the era of two-finger scrolling and mouse wheels/balls (to a certain extent; they shouldn’t be eliminated entirely), and the fewer pixels used for their representation, the better.

Update: the NIB file can be downloaded here: TSDocument.nib.zip. To install it, pull up a contextual menu on TeXShop in the Finder and select ‘Show Package Contents’. Then drop it into Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ (or as appropriate for your localisation; only tested with English). Probably a good idea to make a backup of the original…

The man who absorbed the world

2008-05-01T02:13:00.001+09:30

One day I’m going to write a fairy tale about a man whose affection for the people in his life grows without bound, unchecked, until he ends up absorbing into himself everyone that he loves in the exterior world and then becomes totally alone. It may or may not be partly auto-biographical.

The whole notion of “absorbing” another being seems a little creepy when taken literally, but that’s kind of the point.

Applescripting Mail.app

2008-04-29T01:25:00.001+09:30

Applescript support for Apple’s own applications has typically been absent or poorly implemented. Leopard’s Mail.app is no exception, which is a pity because there are many nice things that a functioning scripting interface could perform. In this post, I’ll expound a couple of irritating bugs I have quickly run into while trying to write Applescripts for Mail.app; I’ll finish up with a useful Applescript that actually works and that I frequently use.

Bug the first

This one’s easy to sum up: get the properties of just doesn’t work. This works fine:

tell application "Mail"
    get the front message viewer
end tell

The usual way I write Applescripts is to just bung in a the properties of after the get to receive a nice list of, well, properties that I can extract and set for the object. Sure, I can get this sort of information (in the abstract) from the documentation, but querying the object with Applescript is easier and much more useful for debugging purposes. Alas, Mail does not support this, despite claiming to be able to:

properties inherited from item [snip] properties (record) : All of the object’s properties.

Here’s an example of the fail:

tell application "Mail"
    get the properties of (the front message viewer)
end tell

Update: this is Bug ID# 5981534.

Bug the second

I find Mail’s “Inbox” to be largely useless, because I filter much of my mail into sub-mailboxes as it arrives. Only unfiltered Mail is shown in the Inbox, which isn’t very helpful when there’s no “jump to next unread message in any mailbox” feature.

To work around this perceived problem, I have a “Smart Mailbox” to collect all Mail that needs my attention:

The “Message is in Sent” is so that I file/delete my own messages rather than let my Sent mailbox accumulate to thousands and thousands of emails.

Now, I really like Mail.app’s ⌘1 shortcut to select the “Inbox” mailbox. But since I don’t use the Inbox, I’d much rather it select my “Attention!” mailbox instead. This is the perfect case for Applescript, and should be a one-liner:

tell application "Mail"
    set the selected mailboxes of the front message viewer to {mailbox "xxx" of application "Mail"}
end tell

where xxx is the name of the mailbox. Well, sure, that works fine for a regular old static mailbox. But for a smart mailbox? Not a chance.

tell application "Mail"
    get the selected mailboxes of the front message viewer
end tell

With a selected Smart Mailbox the result is {application "Mail"}, and trying to set the selected mailboxes to a Smart Mailbox just gives an unhelpful error. Not very helpful at all, in the end.

Update: this is Bug ID#5981547.

Bug the third

This bug is less major because it can be obviated by using GUI scripting. I’m not really a fan of GUI scripting, though. Not very elegant (says the Applescript user).

Anyway, I’d like to be able to customise the template used to construct “Reply” emails (as you could in Mac OS X 10.2 or so by tweaking some hidden system files); specifically, I find the line

On 02/04/2008, at 9:13 PM, Will Robertson wrote:

terribly verbose and overly detailed. There’s a couple of other things that could be improved, too (cf. this year-old post by John Gruber in a similar vein; by the way, I’m a staunch bottom-posting advocate — although I prefer a top poster than a bottom poster who doesn’t snip).

The main problem is that Mail’s reply Applescript command has buggy side-effects:

tell application "Mail"
    set sel to the selected messages of the front message viewer
    set repl to reply (first item of sel)
    set repl_contents to the content of repl
end tell

Two reply windows are opened, only one of which is the actual reply. More often as not, the message repl is the other one, which is simply an empty Mail message. To add insult to injury, the empty reply requires a save/discard confirmation when the window is closed, whereas the actual reply lets you close its window (and destroy its content) with nary a warning in sight.

Finally, adding to reply the boolean without opening window doesn’t do what it claims.

I’ll probably adapt Gruber’s script, in the end, to do what I want. But this stuff is supposed to be quick and easy — and it’s not.

Update: this seems to have been fixed in Mac OS X 10.5.3; it's necessary to call `reply (first item of sel) with opening window` to get the reply window to appear.

A nice script I use

Okay, I don’t want to complain too much — when it works, Applescript can make life much easier and I bug report because I care. Now I’d like to share a script, Next-message.scpt, that I use many times in Mail on a daily basis (with the help of FastScripts to assign it the convenient keyboard shortcut ⌘\ ).

This script exists to make it easy to jump to the next message when you’re not using Mail’s three-paned interface (I greatly prefer having to open the message in a new window). To quote from the blurb at the top of the script:

This script is designed to open the next message in a thread when Mail is used in two-paned mode. To elucidate the problem, when viewing messages in the third pane below the mailbox list of messages, the space bar does a great job of jumping to the next unread message. When the message pane is hidden and messages are opened in their own window to be viewed, there’s no way to get to the next message without switching to the message list, selecting the next message, and opening it. This script automates this process, closing the original message and placing the next message in a window of the same size, in the same location.

The script currently does not detect if the next message is part of the same thread as the current. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible within Applescript to detect that (especially as their subjects will not necessarily be the same). Besides, sometimes you want to jump to the next message even if it’s not in the same thread as the one you’re reading.

As soon as I can I’ll write these up formally for Apple’s bug reporter. I needed to get them off my chest before doing that, however.

In closing, I really appreciate the power that Applescript can give, especially for cross–application tasks that would be otherwise impossible to achieve. For example, running a script in TeXShop to highlight uncited references in BibDesk.

I’m happy to see even lacklustre support despite the frustrations when it doesn’t work; I hope that, over time, Applescript support improves for all Mac OS X applications.

iTunes customer service

2008-04-21T22:38:00.001+09:30

One of the less tangible aspects of shopping online is the lack of any face-to-face contact in the inevitable case that something goes wrong. I haven’t had much experience with online shopping in general, but I have had a couple of things go wrong for me on iTunes. And I’m happy to report that, in Australia at least, their customer support is excellent.

My problems

The worst of my problems occurred quite some time ago when iTunes was periodically crashing on me. Not really sure how or why, and iTunes these days is fairly reliable, but back then it was rather a pain in the ass. Playing music over wireless was fraught with embarrassment (“aren’t Apple products supposed to just work?”), and buying music online a risky business. Once or twice, iTunes crashed midway through an iTunes download and a song or two from the purchased album was lost in the æther. (Usually this problem can be fixed with the Store > Check for Purchases… menu item — but not in this particular case.)

Another time, I simply bought the wrong album, due to the ridiculous setup where iTunes will often sell both an AU$18 basic album as well as an AU$22-ish album with music videos or live or bonus tracks — generally I buy the more expensive version, but in this case the link from the iTunes main page was for the basic version and I bought it before checking for the other.

Finally, just the other day I bought the “iTunes Live” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds EP and found that the last track ended abruptly, mid-chorus, at 5:13. Clearly something had gone wrong with the encoding of this track, and the one review of that album mentioned the anomaly in rather negative terms.

Reporting those problems

In each case, the response from Apple was swift and appropriate. I had to look around for a little while before I worked out how to report a problem. Recently, Apple’s been sending email receipts on all purchases, and these emails make the “Report a Problem” links rather more prominent. Through iTunes, however, here’s how you do it. In your iTunes account, access your purchase history:

You can then select any of your purchases with the little circled arrows:

Thus, each item that passes through your iTunes account can be separately reported upon.

Apple’s response

As previously mentioned, I have been completely satisfied with Apple’s response for each of the small number of problems I’ve had over the last few years. After a very short interval and despite the very brief exchange of words on both sides, I’ve always received a full “refund” to fix the problem by re-downloading the content. (As you would expect considering the cost to them is negligible, and you get to keep what you originally purchased, so it’s more of a “credit” than a “refund”. Whatever.) Apple claims to reply within 24 hours, and I think that’s about right (the most recent one certainly was). It even only took them a couple of days to fix the clipped Nick Cave track, restoring the missing ninety-odd seconds.

To conclude, how they cope with failure is a pretty important measure of the customer service of a business. Any misstep could result in alienating their very customers, especially when the business is as faceless as the iTunes store. (I wonder if this sort of thing can be fixed in the bricks’n’mortar Apple Stores in the U.S.) Disregard for now the causes of the problems that I had, which could probably be blamed in various measures on iTunes itself — that’s a rant for another time. In my own experience, iTunes’ customer service is very satisfactory and reassures me against any further problems down the road.

Make (in)visible Applescripts

2008-04-16T22:32:00.001+09:30

John Gruber’s latest fireball discusses invisibility in Mac OS X. He rightly comments that using the SetFile command line utility (which is bundled with the Developer Tools) is probably not that convenient when dealing with the visibility of items in the Finder.

For simple cases, however, I find the use of programs like “Super Get Info” to be overkill to an extent. Many years ago, I wrote two Applescripts for the exact purpose of using SetFile in a user-friendly way in the Finder.

The first, Make-invisible.scpt, is pretty simple; just select the items you want made invisible and run the script.

The second, Make-visible.scpt, obviously can’t be used by first selecting the invisible items! On run, it will display a list of currently invisible items in the frontmost folder window, from which you can select items to make visible.

To use these, you’ll want to use either the system-wide Applescript menu bar, Red Sweater Software’s FastScripts, Waffle Software’s ThisService, or something else again.

So, there it is.

One thing I just noticed is that the admin privileges no longer work;

do shell script … with administrator privileges

is failing with

Finder got an error: A privilege violation occurred.

Uh, isn’t that the sort of thing with administrator privileges is supposed to avoid? Oh well — I don’t have time to debug this (in my experience, Applescript support from Apple products tends to be a minefield of poorly tested functionality literally riddled with bugs) so if anyone can help with this I’d be greatly appreciative.

Update: this error comes about because the do shell script (with admin privileges) is situated inside the tell application "Finder" scope. Please find new versions of the scripts that fix this error in the links above.

Useless proposal #1

2008-04-16T21:49:00.001+09:30

This is an idea that requires way too much engineering, but I wish it could happen: How cool would it be if Mac OS X had a concept of “subscribed RSS feeds”, so that no matter which browser or feedreader you used, viewing a site’s webpage would not offer you the “subscribe” link if you already were indeed subscribed to it.

At present this would require browsers parsing the formats of whichever feedreader the user was using, which is clearly a rather unscalable approach. If all feedreaders used a common format file (ahem, not OPML) then this would be a lot easier :)

Twitterrific notes

2008-04-11T14:39:00.001+09:30

I’ve been using Twitterrific for a while now as my Twitter client. There’s no huge reason, really, that the web interface isn’t just fine, but a dedicated client is nice for a few reasons, such as: polling for updates, albeit bad for productivity; shortcuts for replying; a more compact interface; and so on.

I don’t have time to write extensively about any of my wish-list, so a bulleted list will have to do. Here are a few of features that, individually or together, could make Twitterrific even better:

Own posts are automatically marked as “read”.
“Favourited” tweets are indicated visually (or at the very least the action of favourite-ing them is indicated; I’ve got many favourite posts by mistake trying to hit CMD-2 to reply and missing).
Last read message is remembered so that relaunching Twitterrific doesn’t result in 40-odd unread tweets. (Alternatively, simply zero-ing the unread counter on launch.)
On that note, it would be even better if it could track back through the pages of unread tweets until it found where I was up to; currently when I wake up my ’puter in the morning there’ll be way more tweets that I’ve missed than Twitterrific gives me.
The input text box grows with my text rather than fixed to a certain height.
Less UI preferences. You guys are good designers! No need to ask us if the window should have a drop shadow or not.
Auto tinyurl (or snurl, or …) of pasted links.
Auto-expanding tinyurl-ed links.
Auto-completion of followers’ handles when manually typing replies to them (say there aren’t any of their actual tweets currently visible).
Perhaps: ability to un-follow people.

Now, I’m sure some of these suggestions are technically unfeasible due to network latency/efficiency. But without thinking too hard about the underlying technicalities, I think it’s not a bad list. So what have I left off?

‘View as single page’

2008-03-24T23:54:00.001+10:30

Yet another reason to love the New Yorker:

Clicking through multiple pages of a single article is one of my least favourite things on the web. I know I’m not alone in this. I don’t know why it is exactly; I think the mental hiccups that it causes impede the natural reading flow, or something along those lines.

It has always been possible to read articles in the New Yorker on a single page via their ‘Print’ version of each one. I suppose they must have realised that all of their longer articles (which can get up to, oh, eight or nine web-pages) were being read in this form because it’s clearly much more pleasant. Rather than restrict us this luxury because of lost ad impressions, they made the whole thing easier even for people who previously did not realise that you could access the single-page version.

The New Yorker is the only periodical I read. This is the kind of reason why.

Update five minutes later. It occurs to me that this is also good for the New Yorker, because people who were likely to read the single-page articles would probably also be inclined to link to them; the ‘Print’ pages lack the all important context links that keep people browsing the entirety of the website; it's therefore in their interest to provide linkable pages that do contain the rest of the auxiliary content (“Subscribe for just 85¢ an issue” possibly being the big one). The fact of their acting as capitalists bothers me not one whit; I'm even gratified by it. (I’d rather them be pragmatists that stay in business.) Because, after all, they could be like all of those other websites that don’t allow you to view their articles in a single page.