January 2007
7 posts
2 tags
Book Review: "The Undercover Economist" by Tim...
The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
ISBN 978-0316731164
Recently, a couple of economics books that address the layman without prior knowledge in economics have been published. After their success in the US, these books have reached also Europe’s bookstores. The authors set out to prove the prejudice that economics is a dull and boring subject wrong.
Tim Harford is a columnist for...
4 tags
Wrapper Script for Java Command-Line Applications
Java applications with a command-line interface (CLI) are typically started with a shell script wrapper. This wrapper sets up the environment for the Java application, specifies the JVM that is going to be used, and finally starts the application.
Recently, I learned the hard way, that writing a shell script wrapper for a Java application is not trivial. My application, denoted as myapp in this...
2 tags
Essential Mac Software 2007
The Mac market seems to provide a good ecosystem for innovative software vendors and open-source developers. The following list presents a choice of my favorite MAC applications (in alphabetical order):
Carbon Emacs
Cocoabooklet
Flip4Mac
Kinkless GTD
Macports
OmniGraffle
OmniOutliner
PdfView
Quicksilver
Skype
SSH Keychain
SuperDuper
TeXniscope
TextMate
VLC Videoplayer
Plugins for...
2 tags
Processing BibTeX Files with BibTool
BibTeX can be considered the standard bibliography format for scientific wordprocessing with LaTeX. BibTeX and LaTeX form a very powerful team, but the idiosyncrasies of the BibTeX format (macros, LaTeX syntax, cross-references, and special purpose characters) render automated processing of BibTeX files rather difficult.
BibTool is an excellent tool for processing BibTeX files. BibTool can be...
4 tags
Using Subversion Externals for Reusing...
Since you will reuse your bibliographic data, that is your BibTeX file, for all publications it makes sense to store your bibliography information in one central place. You may have guessed that I will argue that you should store your bibliography also in a subversion repository. The advantage of this method is that you can integrate the bibliography to the repository by reference instead of...
4 tags
Using latexmk and Make for Building LaTeX...
Writing proper Makefiles for building LaTeX documents is a pain, since the steps for creating the final documents depend on the LaTeX features that are used, e.g., BibTeX, makeindex, etc.
John Collins has written an excellent tool named “latexmk” for processing LaTeX documents. It can be obtained from the latexmk webpage. Using “latexmk” simplifies writing a Makefiles for...
4 tags
File and Directory Layout for Storing a Scientific...
In this first article of my collborative paper authoring series I’m proposing a directory layout for storing a single paper. The paper is stored in a subversion repository, thus I assume that you are sufficiently familiar with subversion. A motivation for using subversion and a proposal for storing a whole collection of papers from different authors will be presented in a later installment...
December 2006
2 posts
3 tags
Collaborative Authoring of Scientific Papers...
Writing scientific papers for journals and conferences is one of the most important tasks in academic research. Many papers are co-authored by multiple authors, frequently also by authors that are not even member of the same institution.
Typically, a paper goes through numerous states of editing during the writing process, requiring that changes to the document are shared between authors. Most...