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.)
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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
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] |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
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.
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.
iTunes 8.0.1 fixes the gutter problem of this insignificant window:
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…
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.
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 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”.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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
This is bug #6139143.
iTunes’ “Podcast information” window doesn’t accept scrollwheel or two finger trackpad scroll input.
Doesn’t scroll.
Should.
While we’re on the subject, what’s with that weird window re-size widget?
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.
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. (*)
or
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.
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.
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.
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:
Now go back to, say, the second one, and hit play. Hit next song. Wouldn’t you know?
Just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, hit next again:
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.
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
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.
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:
(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).
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?
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 intoContents/Resources/English.lproj/ (or as appropriate for your localisation; only tested with English). Probably a good idea to make a backup of the original…