computing « Logbook

Posts Tagged: computing

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21
Mar 09

Research into Writing

As the research for the boat book began to pile up — goodness, especially the things in the “need to read” queue — and I felt the urge, or need, to begin writing, I felt I needed to revisit my “workflow”, workflow here being “how I do what I do.” One of the conclusions I came to, comparing how I did things ten or fifteen years ago with how I am doing them now was that I got a lot accomplished using paper. Perhaps more than I am getting accomplished digitally, which makes no sense because digital notes are a lot more searchable. What’s the problem? I wondered. I think it all comes down to interface. I really like working with paper. I like pens, pencils, and paper. I like working on my Mac, but I haven’t found the interface that works the way I do.

Here’s how I understand my process:

Inputs are all the materials that I collect: books, articles, tear sheets, field notes. These are raw.
Intermediate forms are summaries, quotations, and responses to topics and arguments found in the texts above.
Output takes the form of chapters in a book (in the current moment.)

As the materials travel through their transformation from raw, unprocessed texts into useful summaries or quotations, they need to have, at the very least, be tagged with citation information. Other tags — by topic, area, etc. — would be useful, too.

A number of folks I know are very fond of DevonThink, and DT2 promises to have tags, which might make it useful for me. I can almost see the interface and the data structure that would work for me, but I do not have the time, at the moment, to hammer it out. (I would need not only the time to code such a thing but to learn how to code.)

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1
Mar 09

Free Fonts

Most people I know are content to use the fonts that came with their computer, and thus the ubiquity of Times and Verdana. Occasionally you come across a Mac user who cannot let go of Palatino. There are people, like me, who can’t quite seem to give up Helvetica, which I use on this blog if only because one can be fairly certain that almost every computer in the world has it or the Microsoft equivalent, Arial.

Most Macs also come with a few nice looking faces like Gil Sans, Hoefler, and Garamond. Over the years, I have also invested in a few faces that I regard as basic: Adobe’s Minion Pro, for a change of serif face, and Myriad Pro, because it is a nice sans serif alternative to Helvetica and is in widespread use on signs and diagrams: people respond to it well.

Too many people I know take type faces for granted or, perhaps worse, don’t realize that type faces are not necessarily to be shared liberally. There is a way around this: acquire and use quality free type faces. And since you asked, I do have some recommendations:

Gentium is an open source font — using something called the SIL license — that allows for a wide range of uses, including commercial applications, that comes in both a a face that contains a full range of glyphs as well as Gentium Basic which has the most commonly used glyphs found in Western European alphabets. There is also a slightly heavier version of the latter, Gentium Basic Book. Download it. Use it.
Another open source font collection is Bitstream’s Vera. It comes with a full range of faces, including a monospaced face that I use on my Macs while working in Textmate. Here’s the Bitstream sampler graphic:

Bitstream’s Sampler of the Open Source Vera Type Face

In addition to these, what I could consider core, faces, I also recommend checking out the following sites or pages:

Smashing Magazine’s list of free quality fonts.
Web Developer Vitaly Friedman’s list of 25 free best quality fonts.
The Font Diner has a number of free fonts as well as great deals on a few collections.

And, of course, you can always make your own free font.

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16
Feb 09

AppleScript Resources

I spent part of my time with the flu trying to figure out how to convert a collection of old Word documents into Markdown-fomatted plain text files. I determined that textutil is close to useless in this regard because it does not maintain headings, instead preferring to collapse headings into a styled paragraph. To get to HTML, then, I will need to use Word itself, which means AppleScript or Automator. I need to first open a document, then save it as HTML.

Microsoft’s Site for Mac Developers is here.

UPDATE: It looks like Microsoft does have an Automator Workflow that does what I want, but the bundle of workflows does not come with the Student and Teacher Edition. Thanks, MBU!

Here’s a guy who’s written a book and released some podcasts on automating Office.

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2
Feb 09

Ruby 1.9.1 Released

More news is available at Ruby Inside. With all the changes, maybe it was a good thing I put learning Ruby on hold. Maybe?

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2
Feb 09

Hard Drive Housekeeping

Every once in a while you have to figure out where all the space is going on your hard drive, because 250GB seemed like a lot when you ordered the machine a year or two ago.

Work iMac

Specifications	Size (GB)
Capacity:	232.57
Used:	203.41
Available:	29.15

Folder	Size (GB)
Archive-ALL	18.98
Archive-DOCS	5.35
Desktop	10.97
Documents	3.87
Downloads	30.20
Library	2.69
Lr	35.19
Movies	3.97
Music	6.86
Pictures	6.55
Public	0.00
Sites	0.57
Total	125.2

30 gigs of downloads? There’s some space-saving right there. 11 gigs on the desktop? Half of that is probably downloads I haven’t sorted yet. Sigh. Yes. I use my desktop all too often as a giant inbox. The two Archive directories makes me wish OS X had an easy “merge” command.

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30
Jan 09

Pinching in iPhoto’s Map View

Pinching in iPhoto’s Map View can be enabled by opening a Terminal window and typing the following:

defaults write com.apple.iphoto MapScrollWheel -bool YES

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30
Jan 09

Flickr apps for iPhone

Macworld has a review of three iPhone apps that allow you to work with your Flickr account. I don’t see anything that transforms my current workflow, but it’s nice to know they are there. Here’s the review.

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24
Jan 09

Quick Video Resolution Guide

This post is really for my wife, who is helping to organize a conference. A number of presenters want to use media as part of their presentation. The problem is that everyone brings not only a range of equipment but also a range of expectations and knowledge about what it is they are doing and what can be done. I passed onto her a recent development in my own professional organization: in the last year, the American Folklore Society has recently decided to standardize what audio-visual equipment it can afford to provide to its members at our annual meeting. The core of that equipment is an LCD projector with a VGA connector. (No resolution is provided, I suspect, because that would require more sophisticated conference/convention AV vendors than currently fill those ranks — feel free to correct me if you’re a vendor and you do provide resolutions: I’ll write about you and I’ll suggest we have a meeting in your town.)

In the particular case of this conference, they will be using two projectors that I know fairly well. Both of them are XGA resolution, or 1068 x 764. A quick run-down of 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions is as follows:

Name	Resolution (pixels)
VGA	640 x 480
SVGA	800 x 600
XGA	1024 x 768
SXGA	1280 x 1024

The 4:3 aspect ratio is the one we are all used to seeing everytime we look at a regular, old television — the resolution of which, in case you wanted to know, is something like 720 x 480, but what was actually viewable was something less — remember the black bars you would see when adjusting the Vertical Hold knob (usually awkwardly located on the back of the set)?

Now, as if all those acronyms aren’t bad enough, especially for people who still think PowerPoint presentations have to have bullet points, there is also the matter of how you connect your computer to the projector. Here’s the port that most Windows laptops have on them:

Windows PC VGA Port

The VGA port will carry all of the resolutions above, despite the fact that it seems like an acronym mismatch. My advice to her and the conference organizers was to say something like this to presenters:

The conference will provide an LCD projector capable of 1024 x 768 resolution in the room in which you will present. The projector will be equipped with a VGA cord. Please plan accordingly.

So, presenters will have to determine two things:

Are my materials in a format that will view well at 1024 x 768? and
Do I have a way to connect by VGA?

If they have a port on their laptop like the one above, they’re in good shape. If they have any other kind of port, they are going to need to bring some sort of dongle.

Mac users, who have suffered the slings and arrows of Apple trying either (a) to advance video display technology and/or (b) look for ways to sell add-ons, are long used to the idea of dongles. My new MacBook comes with the new mini-DisplayPort port, which, with any luck, just might stick around and become a standard. For now, however, every time I travel to a conference, I have to carry around this dongle:

My new conference companion: Apple’s Mini-DisplayPort to VGA adapter

This conference attendees will need to make sure they are similarly equipped. Some new, higher-end laptops may very well not possess the blue VGA port above but may, instead have a white DVI port. They make converters — or, if they bring a cord, our LCD projectors also have a DVI In.

Good luck!

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23
Jan 09

Still Wanted After All These Years: A Simple Database App

It’s been years now, and I still haven’t found a simple database application that gives me two things simultaneously: (1) a nice GUI and (2) the ability to get to my data from a number of places.

For a long time I was content with Filemaker. It allowed me to create my own databases and my own interface. It eventually even grew the ability to create relational databases, which was a good thing despite the fact that I was mostly happy with flat ones. The down side to Filemaker was that you had to run your own web server if you were going to be able to access your database anywhere else, or sync a copy and then sync it back. (What’s the name of the process whereby one can sync two sets of records for the same database and add any new records to both sets simultaneously? I want to call it reconcile but that isn’t it, I think.)

Summary: + easy to use, – difficult to access

When I got myself on-line five or more years ago and set up this site, I became much more aware of the power of PHP and MySQL in terms of database creation. Unfortunately for me, PHP and I don’t get along, and working with a webapp is not so good when you don’t have access to the web — as our recent experience with the hotel flubbing the data line at the Project Bamboo third workshop emphasized. One can run an AMP stack locally on a Mac, but then I still didn’t know how to sync the local MySQL database with a remote one — I never even figured out, really, where the local copy of the database was stored to know how to do the syncing by hand.

The same goes for Ruby and Rails. Rails makes it easy to get up and running, but syncing the MySQL database remained a mystery to me in the Summer of 2008 when I explored this option. Oh, but the allure of using XCode to develop a front-end for the local version of the app — with a spiffy sync button like Evernote (more on this in a moment) — was deeply appealing.

I’m still thinking about Rails, but along the way I came across an article on CocoaDevCentral that promised I could roll my own Core Data Database application. Well, that’s too cool to pass up.

It’s a great idea, but it looks like going that route had one big bump: It doesn’t seem like, from reading the questions and answers that followed another article over at MacGeekery that you can use this method for developing a custom front-end for a MySQL database. CoreData has its own preferred data store format — I forget what it’s called — or it can use XML or SQLite. No MySQL for you! (I suppose one could write a script that would find the SQLite store and copy it up to a server.)

What I really want, to get back to Evernote, is something like, well, Evernote that I can store data in. I suppose I could use Evernote, but that would probably mean breaking out the checkbook and setting up more than one notebook, which is all I have with the free account that I am currently still trying. This doesn’t mean that one can’t use XCode to develop a MySQL front-end, just not go the CD route.

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19
Jan 09

A Tale of Two Online Book Sites

For both personal reasons and for professional reasons, I recently signed up for O’Reilly’s Safari Online Books service and I purchased an Amazon Upgrade¹ of the Robert Coles’ book I am using in my seminar this spring, Doing Documentary Work.

Personal reasons aside for the moment, my professional reasons were twofold: I wanted both access to the content the two services provided and I wanted to try out the services themselves:

I needed immediate access to the Coles’ book because my own copy went missing and I wanted to finish preparing for my seminar before our first meeting tomorrow. A subscription to O’Reilly’s service would give me access to a number of titles that might play a role in my teaching now or in the future, and the chance to access those books for a relatively small sum — O’Reilly graciously admitted me into their defunct $9.99/month subscription plan while their SafariU goes on holiday — was too nice to pass up. The two titles I am reading now are: slide:ology and The Lean Forward Moment.
As the humanities in particular and all of us in general slowly rumble towards a digitized distribution scheme for practically everything — well, let’s hope nutrients stay off-line (though there’s enough effluvia already passing through the internet’s “pipes”) — I wanted to try out two of the possibilities currently being deployed in the mainstream.

O’Reilly is usually a bit ahead of the mainstream — and often fairly smart — but in this instance, their online reader looks, and acts, a lot like Amazon’s reader. Here are some screen shots:

<img src=”http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3104/3223617178_90b391f677.jpg” width=”500″ height=”347″ alt=”reader-amazon” title=”Amazon’s Reader: Cramped />
Amazon’s Reader

Safari’s Reader

Safari’s Reader scrolled to maximize the page.

As can be seen in all the screen shots, but perhaps best in the last (bottom-most) one above, there is no way to see a whole page on a MacBook screen. (And I had no better luck when I had a 15″ MBP.) There’s a zoom option, but there is no way to zoom out, only zoom in. Safari is a bit more advanced in offering an HTML option for reading, but it doesn’t work on any of the books I have checked out yet. So, it’s an offer, but one you can’t accept.

All of this might be mitigated by the option to go full-screen with these readers, and I hope to explore some way to do this in Firefox, but it’s not built into the readers themselves — if Youtube can do this for videos, why can’t we do this for books?

I tried to link to a generic page about the upgrade program on the Amazon website, but all the URLs I could find were very long and very ugly. Bad, Amazon, bad. ↩

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17
Jan 09

More PowerPoint Frustrations

So I’m reading Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte, and I’m also trying to figure out how best to work with PowerPoint. In one of those weird moments of synchonicity, one of my PowerPoint searches lands me on Duarte’s website, on a post that is singing the high praise of some new PowerPoint transitions. Hmm, I think and I click on the link, which takes me to the PowerPoint downloads section of Microsoft’s website.

What do you know? There are some nice-looking templates on the website, too. I mean templates that don’t look like they were designed in the 1980s or by a group of adolescents. Great! I think. I can download these and really get moving along.

But, wait! You can only download all these great things if you have an ActiveX control and you’re using Internet Explorer. All these great things are for Office 2007. If you’re looking for stuff for Office for Mac, you click on a link that takes you to some really abysmal offerings for Office 2004. (Click on that link to see for yourself.)

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13
Jan 09

PowerPoint Frustrations

I recently saw a really nice Word document with PowerPoint slides in it that made me curious enough to try using PowerPoint again. (I’ve been using Keynote since 1.0.) I’m at the Project Bamboo meeting in Tucson, and I’m knee deep into a presentation I want to make at some point while I’m here, but the following things are driving me nuts:

Thank goodness there are some barebones themes — are these fugly ones some sort of commitment to legacy users?
Modifying a theme in PowerPoint is not quite as intuitive as Keynote, but it works once you “get it.” PP has this nice option to replace fonts, but I can’t seem to get it work.
PP objects don’t seem to be too aware that one often wants to align them in reference to the slide itself — you can do this through the palette but not DEPENDABLY by dragging the object itself.
One of the brilliances of Word is the ability to create custom keystrokes. Why does its sibling not have this? Something one does regularly, like moving objects backwards and frontwards, is only available as a submenu off a contextual menu or as a drop-down menu on the palette — which can be torn off, but who really wants tear-off palettes lying about a screen — especially the smaller screen of a laptop computer that one travels with? CMD + SHIFT + B for “Send Backwards” is far easier and faster.

All of this because the Mellon Foundation representative at Project Bamboo, Chris Mackie, did a fantastic print version of a talk he gave. I had the chance to ask him yesterday how he got his slides over — because dragging them from the left-hand pane into my Word document consistently gives me a “you’re out of RAM” warning with no results, and his response was he:

clicks on the slide
selects all
copies
pastes into Word

And the cool captions he has in his document like “Slide 1, Animation 1″? He did those by hand! Where’s the smart interaction between suite apps? (Is Pages good about handling Keynote slides? Because I don’t use Pages, I haven’t tried this — the new outlining function has me looking twice, but I live in a world of document exchange built on Word.)

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8
Dec 08

Throughput Speeds for the Rest of Us

As I anticipate moving from my MacBook Pro to one of the new MacBooks, one of the things I have to consider is that I am losing not one but both Firewire ports. I have come to depend upon Firewire — also known as IEEE 1394 (1394a for Firewire 400 and 1394b for Firewire 800) — for moving data back and forth on hard drives. In particular, I use a small LaCie Rugged drive to hold my Lightroom library. It has a USB port on it, but I don’t know that I still have the necessary, and awkward, power bricked cord. Will I be able to use my Netgear network hard drive instead? Loyal readers of this log want to know, and so let’s do some math:

The table below lines up the protocol, its claimed throughput speeds in bits, and then a more realistic speed in megabytes. (As a reminder: there are 8 bits in 1 byte.)

table{border:1px solid black}. |_. Protocol |_. Speed |_. In Use | | USB | 12Mbps | n/a | | USB2 | 480Mbps | 20-25 MBps | | FW400 | 400Mbps | 40MBps | | FW800 | 800Mbps | 80MBps | | Ethernet[1] | 1000Mbps | 47 to 60 MBps |

The important difference between USB and FW is that the latter does not require a computer host port, and, I believe, it is capable of bidirectional traffic. Firewire ports can also carry enough power to support 2.5″ drives, which makes it extremely useful for moving large chunks of data by sneakernet. Newer iPods, however, can be powered off USB ports, and so I’m guessing that USB carries enough power for 1.8″ drives. (Time to down-size my portable drives, I guess.)

fn1. These speeds are based on using a wired ethernet connection to an Airport Extreme gigabit router hooked up to the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo drive unit which also has gigabit ethernet.

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4
Dec 08

Two More Text Analysis Tools from HDG

Coh-Metrix

Has anyone here experimented with this tool (http://cohmetrix.memphis.edu/cohmetrixpr/)? It is described as follows:

Coh-Metrix is a computational tool that produces indices of the linguistic and discourse representations of a text. These values can be used in many different ways to investigate the cohesion of the explicit text and the coherence of the mental representation of the text. Our definition of cohesion consists of characteristics of the explicit text that play some role in helping the reader mentally connect ideas in the text (Graesser, McNamara, & Louwerse, 2003). The definition of coherence is the subject of much debate. Theoretically, the coherence of a text is defined by the interaction between linguistic representations and knowledge representations. When we put the spotlight on the text, however, coherence can be defined as characteristics of the text (i.e., aspects of cohesion) that are likely to contribute to the coherence of the mental representation. Coh-Metrix provides indices of such cohesion characteristics. http://141.225.213.52/CohMetrixWeb2/HelpFile2.htm

The tool has recently been used to analyse (surprise, surprise) the language of the candidates in the US Presidential election (http://wordwatchers.wordpress.com/). It would be particularly interesting if this had been tried on more demanding text or with more demanding questions.

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)

LIWC (http://liwc.net/liwcdescription.php) seems at first glance to be methodologically much simpler. As far as I can tell from a quick reading, it computes scores based on occurrences of target words pre-defined to belong to different affective categories, plus scores based on counts of sentence length and the like. It depends centrally on a dictionary of 4500 words:

The LIWC2007 Dictionary is the heart of the text analysis strategy. The default LIWC2007 Dictionary is composed of almost 4,500 words and word stems. Each word or word stem defines one or more word categories or subdictionaries. For example, the word cried is part of five word categories: sadness, negative emotion, overall affect, verb, and past tense verb. Hence, if it is found in the target text, each of these five subdictionary scale scores will be incremented. As in this example, many of the LIWC2007 categories are arranged hierarchically. All anger words, by definition, will be categorized as negative emotion and overall emotion words. Note too that word stems can be captured by the LIWC2007 system. For example, the LIWC2007 Dictionary includes the stem hungr* which allows for any target word that matches the first five letters to be counted as an ingestion word (including hungry, hungrier, hungriest). The asterisk, then, denotes the acceptance of all letters, hyphens, or numbers following its appearance.

Not being up-to-date with research in this area (psycholinguistics?) I don’t know how this tool compares with affective research via text-analysis that has been going on for decades. Perhaps someone here can say. How reliable is such research?