Archive for February, 2006|Monthly archive page
links for 2006-02-27
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Introductory econometrics notes(tags: econometrics lecturenotes)
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This guy is an economics Prof at UNC. He does interesting research on file sharing. In addition, he likes DJ Shadow, Wilco and the Mountain Goats. The world needs more of these guys.
Set up Word for academic papers
Economist Allin Cottrell is an amazing guy. He wrote GRETL, an open-source, graphical, cross-platform econometrics package. He’s also the author of “Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient,” a widely disseminated article in the LaTeX community. In the article, he essentially makes the case for using LaTeX over word. A case with which I almost whole-heartedly agree. The crux of his argument is that in LaTeX you compose — write the words and structure of your document — while in Word you typeset — fidget with formatting, etc.
It is right to prefer composition to typesetting if you are a serious author. Yes, typesetting matters because a readable document is more likely to be read completely. But form should really be an afterthought.
He acknowledges in his article that one can use the composition mode of writing in Word; the problem is that few do. Since Word is probably the most common format for collaborative writing, however, it pays to be able to use Word like a pro. And if you prefer composing to typesetting, then you need to learn to use Word like it was LaTeX. Here’s how:
Use the styles that are built in to word. When you want to insert your title, use the title style. When you want to insert a top-level header, use the Header 1 style, etc. Customize these styles to your liking, then save a blank document containing these styles as a Word template. That way you only have to mess with the typesetting component once. Making custom Word templates is actually much easier than creating custom style files for LaTeX (at least in my opinion).
LaTeX does a great job of formatting papers to look like journal articles. Many journals use LaTeX to make their articles, so this isn’t surprising. The default Word files aren’t so professional. These tips will help you make your document look more like the journals:
- Change the fonts for the header styles to Times New Roman. To do this, open the style palette, select the style you want to change, and click on modify. From this dialog, you can change the font face, size, weight, etc.
- In the same dialog, you can turn on automatic numbering. From the Format dropdown menu, select numbering, then select outline numbering. There are several styles to choose from (1, 1.1, 1.11; 1, 1.A, 1.A.1, etc.)
- Tell the header styles to change to normal paragraph styles upon a carriage return by setting “Style for following paragraph” to normal.
- Tell the normal style to change to a normal indented paragraph upon a carriage return by setting “Style for following paragraph” to normal indented. This way, the first paragraph after a header will not be indented, but every subsequent paragraph will, similar to the style in most books and journals.
- Set your table styles by selecting the Table Grid style. Within the style dialog, there is a dropdown menu named “Apply formatting to.” You can use this menu to change the formatting for header rows, left-most columns, etc. To apply this style, you must select your entire table, not just the next in the table, then click on the Table Grid style.
- Optionally, decrease the line width by changing the margins. Notice that most journals use much larger margins than Word. This is partially because reading long lines is tiring to the human eye.
These are just a few general tips that will help you have (a) more control over the formatting of your document and (b) a more automated writing workflow, so you’ll be able to focus on writing and not formatting, after the initial template is created. Learning how to use Word’s styles well is a good idea; you can format elements well beyond the ones outlined above. If you know how to customize styles, you’ll be able to quickly make global changes to your template, and never have to worry about manually formatting a long document again.
WordPress.com widgets
WordPress.com introduced a sidebar editor today, which allows customization of the sidebar for many themes. As I mentioned before, when I was considering the optimal hosted blogging solution, I decided that a customizable theme based approach was the best, since it would allow those without coding experience to change the look of their blog, while still hopefully satisfying those that could, if they were so inclined, go in and change the HTML. The sidebar editor idea helps WP.com move towards accomplishing that balance.
They also added three really nice themes recently: Simpla, Jentri, Quentin and Treba. These are all more minimalist and highly stylish. So expect me to rotate from theme to theme endlessly. It’s fun — and it’s a lot easier than completely redoing a custom Blogger template.
Piano tabs
I’d heard of guitar tabs, but never piano tabs. They are a really easy way to transcribe (easier) piano parts, and represent a way to encode sheet music in plain text. Here’s an example that I found on MyGuitarTabs.com:
Tiny Dancer
5|--ce>b>>|c-----e-|--ce>b>>|c-------| 4|eg---a>>|aa-f>a--|eg---a>>|aa----a>| 4|-----f>>|f-cc>---|-----f>>|f-cc>cf>| 2|a>>>>>>>|a>>>>>>>|a>>>>>>>|a>>>>>>>| 2|--------|f>>>>>>>|--------|f>>>>>>>| B|1+2+3+4+|1+2+3+4+|1+2+3+4+|1+2+3+4+|
It looks like the “>’s” mean to keep hold that note or chord. From other piano tabs I saw, it also looks like a capital letter means sharp. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to know that the b’s in the tab above are all flat (I guess just by listening).
I don’t think piano tabs are very popular — most piano players know how to read sheet music. But I’m into the simplicity of these tabs — I often want to write out a quick melody but don’t want to spend all of the required time inputting the actual sheet music in Finale Notepad.
It is impressive how many kinds of documents we can find simple ways to present using only the characters available on a standard keyboard — kind of a sign of how pervasive computing has become.
links for 2006-02-25
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Mc. Hammer’s Blog*Spot blog
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OS X troubleshooting utility
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Switch to a specific window within an application
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A simple text-formatting language and a Perl script that converts between said language and XHTML
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The syntax reference for Markdown
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Malcom Gladwell has a blog(tags: blogs interesting)
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A blog about wordS
Bloglines rocks more now
I’ve been using Bloglines for about 1.5 years now. The interface was clunky before, but it was still faster and easier to use than Google Reader.
Now they’ve implemented inline drag-and-drop feed organization that makes it about 400% easier to customize your bloglines account. Nice job guys. By doing one thing and doing it really well, they’ve out web-apped Google.
Witch
This is another cool tool for OS X. On the Mac, you can hit Apple+Tab to switch through applications — a quick, mouseless way to switch through applications. But you get the front-most window of the application that you switch to. Then you have to use that programs command for switching windows, if it has one. For example, I’ll type a Stata program in TextWrangler, then switch to Stata to submit it. When I return to TextWrangler, I don’t want to look at the original program, I want to look at the output, which is in another window. So I have to hit Alt+Apple+] to cycle through the open TextWrangler documents.
But not anymore. Now I can hit Alt+Tab to scroll through every open document in every open program.
It sounds subtle, and maybe pointless. But try spending 8+ hours writing code, switching back and forth between different applications. Those little annoyances become big ones, and simple conveniences like Witch become very useful.
Markdown
Markdown might be the coolest programming/writing idea I’ve ever seen. It is
- A plain-text formatting language that lets you include headers, lists, blockquotes, links and inline formatting
- A Perl script that translates the above-described language into XHTML
The syntax
Two header styles are supported:
Header 1
————-Header 2
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and
#Header 1#
##Header 2##
Lists are easy:
* List item 1
* List item 2
You can also use (-’s or +’s to denote list items)
For blockquotes, just use:
> This is quoted text
And for horizontal lines
* * *
- – -
or variations thereof.
The full syntax definition can be found here.
The script
In addition, there is a Perl script which plugs in to Movable Type, Blosxom and BBEdit/TextWrangler to turn text formatted in Markdown into XHTML.
To use the BBEdit Script with TextWrangler (and presumably BBEdit, too), just copy the file into Home/Library/Application Support/TextWrangler/Unix Support/Unix Filters. Then just select the text that you want to convert, and choose Markdown.pl from the #! menu.
~ ~ ~
I’m going to try to use markdown for both note-taking and structuring programming documents, like SAS, Stata and R files.
