General Disarray

I like to use WordPress as my free, hosted blogging platform, but I keep a Blog*Spot blog around so I can play with templates, Blogger integration from other services/apps, and for when I want to post something that's too mean for my primary blog (haha, it's a secret blog, you'll never find it). But today I noticed that one of my blogs has been identified as a Splog by Blogger. It only has two posts, neither of which contain advertisement. And for a long time, I assumed that I deleted it, since it wasn't showing up on my Dashboard. Then out of the blue it appeared, disabled, with a message on how to restore it. How inconvenient — if I actually cared about that blog, that is.

CiteULike is basically del.icio.us for researchers. Articles are tagged and include all author information, links to related articles, links to other articles by the authors, and links to download pages. Not all of the articles listed can be downloaded for free (many of the links appear to be to Science Direct and similar sites), but most people within academic institutions have subscriptions to the services that host the articles.

 Very cool. I love to see worlds colliding.

So, they added:

• A spell checker
• Coding support, so I can say <bold>
• Advanced editing, with heading and preformat modes
• New pop-up based source and link editing modes

I love this frequent-release model.

OpenOffice.org - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

* By going into Calc and putting =Game(”StarWars”) into any cell, a version of Space Invaders is playable. Although if you try to play it again too soon you will be greeted with the message “oh no, not again”. To play again, you must fully close OpenOffice
* By going into Calc and putting =Game(A1:C3;”TicTacToe”) into cell A4, a version of Tic-tac-toe is playable.

Unfortunately, the Star Wars game doesn’t work in NeoOffice, but Tic Tac Toe does. I played Space Invaders on a PC running OpenOffice; it’s cool because the directions are still in the original German.

NeoOffice 1.1 has been patched again. I’m not sure exactly what was fixed, but I noticed that some bugs relating to table menus have been fixed.

First, a cool article on the Social Science Statistics Blog about research tools, that refers to [Stata+Word] as low-tech and [R+LaTeX] as high-tech. As usual, I can’t make up my mind. Somedays I’m all open-source, somedays I like the canned stuff.

Second, a new version of LyX Mac came out recently, and it fixes all of the problems that I was having before (namely inserting math). If you’re not familiar, LyX is a WYSIWYG front-end for LaTeX that can make using LaTeX for serious or even casual typesetting a lot more convenient.

I had two problems with the Simpla theme:

1. No search bar
2. Random sidebar movement to page footer

Both have been fixed. Thanks WordPress.com

I’m always writing about open source and free software, but I use commercial apps a lot too. Thought I’d spend a minute meditating on the commercial software that I rely on:

• Microsoft Office: Still the standard, although OpenOffice is catching up. Even though there’s probably 95% compatibility between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, people still freak out whenever I say I wrote the document in OpenOffice, mostly because they’re afraid of computers. Plus MS Office is quite a bit faster… All I really use is Word and Excel, though I’d say I use OpenOffice about 60% of the time.
• AppleWorks: Sometimes I use it. I like it for its simplicity.
• SAS: Great statistics app, especially for working with large datasets. I wish they’d make an OS X version.
• Stata: Another great statistics app, makes econometrics really easy. I can run all sorts of weird logit models without having to search the web for complicated tutorials. R has all the same functionality, but it’s a little harder to access.
• OS X: Best OS ever. Open-source fanaticism aside, the operating system is a good place to spend some money, and OS X works seamlessly. I also use all of the other applications that came with OS X, such as Mail and iLife.

That’s about it. Any time I use a commercial application regularly, it means that either (a) I use an application of that type regularly, so a small improvement in interface or speed is worth a lot to me, or (b) the application has functionality that open-source alternatives just don’t. That being said, in a pinch, I could live without all of the above.

Update: Can’t believe that I forgot Ecto, the application that I used to write the post… There are various free/open-source blog editors, including Deepest Sender, Performancing, Qumana, Bleezer, w.blogger, etc. But I had trouble with them all, so I bought ecto, which was well worth the money. Before I always thought “who needs a blog client, the in-browser editors are so good,” but since WordPress.com rocks so much, I run multiple blogs on it, and having a client means I don’t have to constantly log in and out. Mail.app solves the same problem for me on Gmail.

Stolen directly from lifeofexile.com, you can easily download all files with a certain extension from a webpage using the shell command curl. Type:

curl -O “http://blahblahblah.com/filename[0-10].gif”

to download all of the gif files starting with filename from blahblahblah.com. Note that the option is “minus uppercase o”, not “minus zero,” which tripped me up, because I forgot that the terminal’s 0 has a line through itt.

I turned off the del.icio.us daily blog posting feature. I didn’t feel like it was adding much to the blog. And all of the bookmarks are always available here.

Oh yeah, and I forgot that there’s a del.icio.us widget for WP.com now anyway. I set mine up to show the last 5 bookmarks, and you don’t have to wait until 7:40 for the new bookmarks to show up on this blog.