New Now Know How

I’m not sure if I’m back at this yet. But at least my thesis looks like a thesis now and is being proofread as we speak and will have a final sanity-check from my supervisors eventually.

Then I’ll submit.

Then I’ll move back to QLD.

Then I’ll start my new job. (!) Awesome.

I’m busy finishing my thesis.

Can’t blog. Writing.

Back later.

I use LaTeX to write my thesis in. Like C, it’s user friendly, but picky about who its friends are.

Recently, I’ve been fighting with LaTeX over using the pdftex processor but only while at uni. It worked at home, but not at uni. At uni, to produce PDFs from LaTeX I had to go through the dvips processor. Normally this was not a problem, however, pdftex has the lovely property of being able to insert .jpeg, .png and other graphics formats as pictures, rather than the limited support that dvips offers for .eps graphics files only. When I tried to use pdftex at uni, it would fail with:

! LaTeX Error: There’s no line here to end.

I had put the fact that I could only make pdftex work at home down to some weirdness in the installation of my LaTeX implemention here at uni. However, I was able, recently, to use pdftex to compile a file that was on my flashdrive but I was unable to compile a file that was on my networked drive. Why? Why? Why?

After a small amount of banging my head against the wall, the solution became apparent.

Googling for that error message let me to the TeXFAQ for no line here to end which told me that the error:

comes in reaction to you giving LaTeX a \\ command at a time when it’s not expecting it.

I wasn’t giving any \\ commands as far as I knew! I was at the point of creating LaTeX files of the “Hello World” sort before the penny dropped.

The networked drive I use is (obviously) mapped to a drive letter. It’s also mapped to “My Documents”. I was opening the file from “My Documents”. Apparently, “My Documents” is a convenient fiction that all programs see as a full path. In windows, the path to a mapped drive is “\\name\of\server\to\users\path”. Notice the (un)helpful “\\” at the beginning of that path?

Solution? Open the file from the pseudo-name given to the mapped drive, that is “h:”.

Arrrgh!

I’ve been trying to follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology for a while now. It works, I like it, but I’m slack. I backslide every other day.

GTD relies on lists. Lists of projects, lists of atomic (monadic? ha!) subtasks (called next actions), lists of things you’re waiting on. The problem I’ve had, until recently was keeping those lists in some sort of order that made sense for me. What I wanted, and what I thought made sense, was to tie next actions to projects in some way that I could see all the next actions for a particular project but at the same time just see my whole list of next actions.

I’ve tried keeping the lists in Outlook and Palm’s surprisingly good Palm Desktop, both of which proved too clunky for me. It was too hard to add new projects and next actions and particularly too hard to tie the two together.

MarkTAW’s “Cascading Next Actions” was the next step, and an excellent paper-based solution, but still too clunky for what I wanted when maintained in a series of text files. A “projects” file and a series of files for each project quickly gets out of hand.

Enter wikidPad. WikidPad is sort of like a wiki and sort of like a basic text editor. It’s more like a wiki. It runs natively on Windows and is written in Python. It’s also open source.

WikidPad, out of the box, doesn’t do everything I wanted. As a wiki, It’s great for keeping lists and other information. But it only works top-down. That is, I can keep my projects list with sub-lists of projects but I can’t get a list of next actions out of it. That is, not without a little scripting.

WikidPad lets (nay, encourages) the user to hack it. A number of enterprising people have hacked wikidPad so that it does exactly what I want of it. Lists of projects; lists of next actions generated on the fly. Awesome. And all thanks to a few lines of python.

Occaisionally these emails come around the uni email lists:

We will be running a workshop exploring how to use Word efficiently with long documents. The workshop will look at the various functions you might want to us when writing a thesis, mainly related to formatting the document to avoid having a document that seems to have its own life.

I love LaTeX.

I’ve said to some people that I was being given a car or three. Here’s the only one of them worth saving:

I’ve named it Harvey. You can learn more about Harvey over at my car blog.

Rhys’ recent post on Manila reminded me of part of a story about the demise of the Atari Research Lab. The story takes up on the day of the close of the lab. At 8am word came down that a new boss of Atari was going to close the lab. People were scurrying about trying to rescue some of their personal belongings. Because they were quite annoyed, some large-scale pilfering took place, “chairs, bookcases, sofas, stereo systems and television sets”. This is my favourite part:

Amid the confusion, scurring, shouting and occaisional screams, Larry Bowles sauntered in the front entrance, walked up to the security guard with a comb wrapped in a wad of tissue paper, and said, “I need an equipment pass for this personal item I’m taking inside.”

“What is it?” the guard asked, pulling out the form.

“It’s a Dynair switcher,” said Bowles, naming an extremely expensive, high-end piece of video-editing gear.

“Okay,” the guard said, writing out the pass.

An hour or so later, Bowles came back downstairs lugging a huge, expensive, top-of-the-line Dynair video switcher, went to the door, and handed the guard the pass. “One Dynair switcher,” the guard said. “Personal property. Thank you.” Bowles put it in his car and drove away.

(from “The end of innocence, part I: Cyberdammerung at the Atari lab” in The war of desire and technology at the close of the mecanical age by Rosanne Allucquere Stone, 1996)

On the plane

When we landed at Brisbane airport the Virgin Blue “crew member” asked us over the plane’s PA to help them get the plane turned around faster by putting the emergency safety card in the front of the seat pocket. I had no idea the location of the emergency safety card was so important.

A conversation

Kai: I got new pants.

Ben: They’re exactly like your old pants.

Kai: And you have no idea how happy that makes me. I bought 4 pairs.

Well all my friends are getting married
Yes they’re all growin’ old
They’re staying home on weekends
They’re all doin’ what they’re told

Just awesome. Congrats.

Ah, coffee makes the world a nicer place.

Back from Brisvegas yesterday and M and I were a whirlwind of activity once we arrived home. Well, M more so than me. Unpacking, organising Young Mr D for bed (twice, since he threw up after his “first” feed) and finally just being able to sit and tune out.

In addition to actually doing some thesis work while I was in ‘vegas I started a Certificate IV in Workplace Training and Assessment which is a TAFE qualification in training and assessment (natch) which will expand my options when the time comes to look for a job. It’s basically an essential qualification to teach or even work at a TAFE and there are a plethora of other jobs where some sort of formal tranining qualification gives one the extra edge. Besides, how many people will have a PhD and a Cert IV?

Yesterday I caught up with Ricky, Anna, and Matt.

The wedding went off extrememly well with D and R having a great day. I love weddings.

Sadly I was unable to convince my Dad that he needed an MGB GT. Like me he has very ecclectic taste and could equally well end up in a B GT, Volvo P1800 or a mildly worked EH Holden. He’s a died-in-the-wool Holden man so there’s no chance of a Ford, sadly.

And now, on with the Conclusion! Once the conclusion is out of the way I have some extra stuff to add to the Introduction and I’ll have a complete draft which will no doubt be 50% shorter than it should be and have only 10% of the right references. Sigh.