Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005

LaTeX on Windows

If you ever find yourself wanting to write LaTeX documents on Windows, I’d suggest installing the MiKTeX utilities along with the WinEdt editor. One guy’s opinion on why you might want to do this.

Also, there are nice LaTeX style files for both the SPIE and IEEE proceedings.

/life   〆   permalink

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005

libjpeg is good

Recently for my master’s work, I found that a very nice implementation of JPEG compression is available from the Independent JPEG Group. The code and supporting documents are quite nice and flexible. At least one of my readers (Steve) will like to hear that it supports compressing with a user-specified quantization table.

/image processing   〆   permalink

Sunday, November 13th, 2005

Web Application Development Platforms

Ruby on Rails vs Django vs TurboGears. Ready … fight!

For the first round, we’ll look at two O’Reilly articles:

  1. What Is Ruby on Rails
  2. What Is TurboGears

Which brings me to my point: why no article on Django yet? Is it because they don’t have a cool demo video?

Oh yeah, I’m thinking that Blog engines are not really the same thing as these web application platforms. Or maybe they are a focused special case.

/web   〆   permalink

Wednesday, November 9th, 2005

William Kahan’s Archive of Math-Related Problems with Floating Point Implementations (including MATLAB, Java, C, …)

Mr. Kahan is a math/EE/CS professor at Berkely who writes some interesting notes on limitations and problems with math libraries. His work is archived on his homepage. Some of my favorites include:

/developer   〆   permalink

Wednesday, November 9th, 2005

How to Approach Research

“You and Your Research”, an interesting talk by Richard Hamming given 7 March 1986.

“Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

/science   〆   permalink

Wednesday, November 9th, 2005

Here’s Hoping for Launchy

While my normal computing platform of choice is Mac OS X, I do end up using Windows at work. On OS X, I really love the quick-launching abilities of LaunchBar and QuickSilver, so naturally I’m always on the look-out for similar launcher utilities for Windows.

Launchy is a promising start. It was written for fun by a guy who just wanted it for himself, then shared it with friends, then shared it with the world. Despite being so young, it has three of the best features I deem necessary in this strain of program:

  • blazing fast speed
  • almost non-existant UI (it only shows up with a keyboard command, Alt+Space)
  • partial pattern matching (typing “mword” matches “Microsoft Word”)

I would be very happy if only someone could add a bit of:

  • manual match tuning
  • learning (remember manually tuned matches)
  • custom matching (I want to launch stuff that is not in the Start menu)

As for now, I ran it for a few days, but ultimately turned it off.

/mac   〆   permalink