After being slightly disappointed by the quality of some Bibtex citations I copy-pasted from Google Scholar (covered in a previous post), I went searching for another resource. Since I’m currently a master student in informatics (read computer science) I bumped into the following: Computer Science Bibliographies. The bibtex citations I have attained from this resource up to now, have been of much higher quality (more detailed) than many of the ones I found using Google Scholar. Unfortunately (for others) it only covers computer science (and largely mathematics (I suspect)).

Initially my figures were floating around in a half-organized manner. The figure interface is quite ok in itself, but when it comes to arranging related figures next to each other, there appears to be better options.

This week I’ve discovered the LaTeX subfig package. I had been using the subfigures package, but this I noticed has been deprecated in favor of subfig.
My humble need for this package up until now has been numbering parts of figures, for instance by letter a), b), c) and so forth.
There’s of course lots of other nice option which may suit future needs.

Go figure!

Tired of converting eps files to pdf by command line utilities? I had made a nice little bash script (essentially a for-loop) to convert mine. As I’m using pdflatex to compile my documents, eps is not supported.

Finally, I discovered the latex package epstopdf, which does the conversion painlessly when compiling. It even checks if an eps-file has been changed, saving compile time.

If it isn’t already in your LaTeX distribution, download it here. It does require that the eps-to-pdf converter is installed on your system. If you haven’t got a distribution, try for example Miktex if you’re using Windows

Today I discovered the ease of making a diagram with Dia. Dia is a GTK-based application for Linux distros (and there’s also a Windows port!) It’s like GIMP with structure. Compared to MS’s Visio, it does not include as many predefined shape-sets, but I did find the ones I needed for my predictive control lab setup.

To install Dia in a debian based distro, just type “apt-get install dia”. If you’re using windows, follow this link.

A great combiner of IM protocols, with just enough functionality to do just about everything useful. Available for Windows and Linux.

Today I tried out the final release of Gaim, which apparantly has mutated into a Pidgin due to some AOL branding disagreement. As for the new name; I like it. Gaim was implying the use of AIM, (which I’ve never even used) and that was, at best, misleading.

Comparing with the beta versions of Gaim 2.0, the design is more pleasant, otherwise everything is more or less the same.

Get your copy of Pidgin here. (This instant! =))

My second most favorable Firefox add-on, CustomizeGoogle, makes some of Google’s less wanted features optional. The most notable is the option of removing ads from most of their services. As a frequent Gmail user the option of removing the “Invite” box and, most of all, remove the spam counter is immensely welcomed. (I couldn’t care less about how many times I’ve been spammed, but thank you Googlists for filtering most of it!)

Securitywise the option of turning on https-communication (= encrypted communcation) with services such as Gmail, Calendar, Reader etc. (Indeed, I’m using most of them.) is greatly appreciated and somewhat comforting. Also the add-on that makes it possible to anonymize some of the information Google stores in cookies and to prevent sending cookies to Google analytics. (Better not voluntarily approach 1984 too fast.)

The most advanced (GUI) feature (the one that’s not a check off box) is the option to filter away some results from search results. I haven’t tested it, nor do I need it (for now), but I’m sure someone has some annoying results popping up one too many times and would like to remove them permanently.

So, what’s my most favorable Firefox add-on? Maybe it will become evident in a later posting …

Update: (An empire strikes back?) CustomizeGoogle is currently unstable in Windows XP (at least my install). Hope the developer(s) will be able to fix this soon. The Linux version seems to be just fine. In the meantime I’m forced to send all kinds of nasty =) information to the Google empire.

Today I tried out the blogposting tool ScribeFire. It seems to be quite reasonably integrated with WordPress and some other blogging sites too. One problem I encountered was that when wanting to update a previous post, a new post was created instead. This is (very) unfortunate. Otherwise everything is working as expected (more or less).

A link advertising the blogging tool is added to every post, which to say the least is annoying. Luckily this “feature” can be disabled in the Settings menu. I’m back to editing my blog with WordPress’ (better) editor.

Today the beta version of the Opera web browser,version 9.20, was released. It didn’t take me much time before I was eagerly adding my most common visited sites to the new speed dial feature.

Basically the speed dial tab appears whenever a new tab/page is opened (for example by Ctrl + N, keyboard shortcut). In addition the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + 0, Ctrl + 1, …, Ctrl + 9 has been made available for instant speed dial.

More about the changes since last edition can be found here.

 Update: 9.20 is now out of beta and available at www.opera.com.

Today is the official -day, March 14 (or 3.14.07). This was of course celebrated at the institute of mathematics. It started by the screening of the rather weird film and continuing with a competition in reciting the most decimals of . Afterwards we had PIzza and PIls (a Norwegian word for beer) and a -quiz. Finishing the whole thing with a PInata formed like .

More information about this exciting number here.

Today I discovered a nifty feature on Google Scholar. In the Scholar preferences there are a option under Bibliography manager where you can choose between (at the moment) five different citation systems. Turning this feature on for BibTeX gave me a Import into BibTeX option under each hit in the search (as illustrated below). How useful and efficient.

EndNote, RefMan, RefWorks and WenXianWang is also supported.

In addition to this, I also discovered JabRef. This is a Java BibTeX manager which has built in citation search. Combining Google Scholar and JabRef somehow would be perfect (until I think of anything else to improve on).