Category Archives: Tech

Tech

LaTeX Word Count

I’m working on my graduate thesis in the LaTeX document mark-up format, and trying to apply Anthony Burgess’ Martini Method. Basically, set a certain desired word count and let yourself relax after you’ve achieved that word count every day. I started off pretty well with this method, but the next day my wife Amanda went into labor, and my productivity has basically been a train wreck ever since.

I’m getting back on the horse.

Anyway, it’s a little tricky to apply the Martini Method when using LaTeX — as a markup language a bit like HTML, it’s full of special words, symbols, characters and whatnot that are not actually part of what you’re writing. A simple Emacs word count will not do the trick. Much as I’d love to count all of those extra words, the point here is to produce a certain volume of output and that would miss the point. Plus, it’s dishonest. There exists a PERL script that will parse LaTeX and count the non-special words. However, someone’s gone even a step further and made a nice web interface for it, with color coding and everything. That interface is here, apparently hosted by one Einar Andreas Rødland in Norway.

So far, it’s working quite well for me. Unfortunately, it just informed me that I’m not quite to my desired word count yet. More writing!

K9

So, you haven’t heard much from me in a while. The little one has been using up great amounts of my time and attention. (And she’s totally worth it).

However, I’m finally getting back into the swing of things with work, around the house, etc. I’ve started roasting my own coffee, which is great, and Amanda got me an espresso machine that should be arriving within hours in which to use my freshly-roasted beans.

The thing that has been using up the greatest amount of my “free” time (whatever that means these days) has been hacking on an improved email client for the new “Google Phone”, the G1. The included email client was utter crap, to put it kindly, not even as sophisticated as the client on my little Razr2 v8 flip phone. However, someone forked the open-source email client that came with the device into a project called K-9. The name is derived from that of an old UNIX-y email client called mutt, the idea being that K-9 (canine) is a sort of androidy name for a dog, I guess.

Anyway, the client has been rapidly improving. I haven’t done much — just a few bug fixes here and there, and possibly the addition of some bugs (hope not) — but several people are working on it. It’s already getting rave reviews in the Android market, particularly since people have only the crappy built-in client an an alternative. Heh. I don’t know Java, really, but that hasn’t been stopping me. It’s not that different from Python and C++. Anyway, if you have a G1, check it out. We’re improving performance, fixing bugs, and adding features all of the time.

SWPL – Facebook

I avoided reading it for a long time — Stuff White People Like — I was above that. Sure everyone talked about it, but there are so many internet fads these days, one can’t just run after every one and try to understand it. That’s a good way to get shoop-da-whooped.

However, at some point Maryana‘s references to SWPL convinced me to check it out.

Overall, I think the proper name for it would really be, “Stuff American Liberal Yuppies Like”, but I digress.

The point of this long-winded introduction is to lead to this statement: I have to say that the analysis of the social networking site progression in this SWPL post is spot on. I mean, can you argue with stuff like this?

For a brief period of time, MySpace was the site where everyone kept their profile and managed their friendships. But soon, the service began to attract fake profiles, the wrong kind of white people, and struggling musicians. In real world terms, these three developments would be equivalent to a check cashing store, a TGIFridays, and a housing project. All which strike fear in the hearts of white people.

(For the record, I only every created a MySpace profile to contact old friends.)

Ramsey County Library Lookup

While doing my weekly review, I found this page that I made a while ago for someone. It has a pre-made “library lookup” bookmarklet that allows to to look up books from Amazon.com at Ramsey County Public Libraries in one click.

Instructions for use are on the page. I originally created it using John Udell’s LibraryLookup Project.