This guy has some issues with Office 2004. Read through his Macintosh and see what what I mean.
From Betalogue:
I knew that Word’s grammar checker was bad, but I hadn’t really tried it in years. Well, I must said that its degree of failure exceeded all my expectations.
Precisely why I don’t use Word anymore; LaTeX all the way. I’m actually going to do my APS poster in TeX this year too1, finally shedding PowerPoint.
1 I’ve been playing around with the beamer package for LaTeX. Quite nice.
Oh my god. I just had to take my GET1 again today. Every national lab requires training for all employees that work there; hence the name. At the end of the training, one takes a multiple choice test. This training has to be renewed every 3 years, so mine was up again this month.
Anyway, the training “class” used to be nothing more than a booklet of PowerPoint slides. It was pretty dumb, but you could skim through the book, take the test, and be on your way.
Now it’s all changed. Gone is the booklet, in comes the multimedia extravaganza. Otherwise known as a PowerPoint presentation with a narrative. I had a couple beefs with this format:
Unlike a good presentation, the voiceover usually didn’t mention the points in a given slide, but instead brought up points that were semi related. Thus, one was forced to either listen or read. Nevermind that fact that when the audio was following the slide, they were often out of synch with each other, kind of like watching a film strip with the audio one frame behind.
The slides themselves were poorly organized. There was one sequence talking about the ethical use of computers, and then bam, a slide on precautions one should take when traveling abroad, only to return back to ethical use of computers.2
Since the presentation progressed from slide to slide on its own, often times it advanced way too quickly for me read the full slide.
The content of the audio track was quite poor. The lady reading the script didn’t go back to correct any of the numerous mistakes she made, nor did were her lines timed right. More than once, her audio was cut off as we moved to the next slide, or there was a long pause (as in a good 10 seconds) at the beginning of a slide before she started speaking. I also heard phones3 ringing in the background. Several times.
How stupid can you get? Then again, on my way out of the testing room, I did see a training booklet called Laser Pointer Safety. Wow.
1 General Employee Training.
2 I heard at least 2 distinct ring tones.
3 To be fair, when I went to the internal Human Resources website and downloaded the training presentation, the slides were not in this order. Something must have gotten munged in the copy on the training computer.
I was thinking that it would be kind if Bö could insert the footnote text into the title attribute of the footnote link in the body text. You could then just mouseover the link and read the footnote without leaving your place in the text. This idea could be taken one step further by adding a note like “Return to body text” in the title tag of the footnote link at the bottom of the page.
I took a look at the PHP code for the Bö plugin to see if I could modify it myself for the above mentioned behavior, but it appears to me that the plugin doesn’t slurp the actual footnote text until after it writes the footnote link in the main body. This makes it a little difficult to insert that variable into the link. Of course, hardcoding the “Return to main text” in the second link of each foot note should be straight forward. (I’ve actually decided to do exactly that – changes have been made.)
Try the two examples below to see what I mean.
[0] This footnote is hand coded, with the footnote text in the title attribute of the link.
2 This footnote is made with Bö.
Being new to the scene, I’ve just recently started to play around with some of the tools of the trade. I’ve added a combination of Markdown1, SmartyPants2, and Bö3 plugins to my WordPress installation. I must say I’m really impressed.
SmartyPants is just plain cool. No thinking, just type and nice “edumacated” quotes come out the other end. And it works in BBEdit too. Nice.
I played around with Markdown about 2 weeks ago. It didn’t strike me as anything that great as a BBEdit plug, but now I am beginning to see its power. It really does make posting much easier. Another score.
Bö is very well done, but at first, I wasn’t sure if I would really use it that much. Now that I think about it though, I do use a lot of parenthetical remarks that would be much better if relegated to a footnote.
I’m really looking forward to using these tools more. Hopefully Bö will grow into a BBEdit plug just like Markdown and SmartyPants are.
1 PHP version of Markdown for WordPress is available here
2 PHP version of SmartyPants for WordPress is available here
3 PHP version of Bö is available here
I’ve been thinking about mail a lot recently. In 1997, I started out in Eudora. I used it all throughout college and for the first year of graduate school.
I was always impressed by Eudora’s unblinking speed when handling mailboxes with thousands of emails. I was also always fond of the interface. I know many thought the interface was horribly outdated, but it made sense to me. I really don’t like the preview pane found in many mail clients; I don’t want to scroll by a message and have it marked read if I don’t open it.
The last killer feature of Eudora is its ability to option-click (I think thats the right combo) on a message and have all of the other messages from that person group around the highlighted one instantly. No fiddling around with sort methods when you need to find other emails from a particular person, just bang!
Anyway, Eudora was the center of my mail universe for a good 5 years. After graduating from college, where a Eudora license was provided for free, I purchased a copy of it for the then new OS X.
A year later, I became displeased with Eudora. My license that I had purchased had run out. An update to Eudora was released (the first major update in more than a year) which finally fixed SSL compatibility with OS X. Qualcomm wanted me to pay for said upgrade. I wrote and complained to them, and to their credit, they extended my license by a couple months. However, my eye had been on Apple Mail for a while.
During that first year or so of OS X’s existence, I tried Mail a couple of times. Each time, I got fed up with how Mail would choke on my large mailboxes. As much as I liked the idea of a system wide address book and the cool little label on the icon displaying unread emails, I always came running back to Eudora, usually in a matter of days.
The release of OS X 10.2 changed all of that. Mail got faster. Mail got junk mail filtering, which at that point in time was becoming a large problem for me. I switched over to Mail and became relatively happy with it.
Life with Mail was good. OS X 10.3 rolled around and Mail got better. Faster, highlighted threads, etc. At times I felt like I was missing being a “power user,” whatever that means, but Mail did most of what I wanted. I started to play around with running scripts in my mail filters, but it just left me wanting for more.
Recently, I got sick of Mail. I got sick of the interface. It was too much of a fight all the time. That damn mailbox drawer got annoying. Scrolling through messages didn’t have that “just hit the spacebar” feel that Eudora had going for it. Then I read about MailSmith. I already liked BBEdit (though I did skip out on the upgrade to 7, BBEdit 8 is great), so I thought I’d give it a shot.
MailSmith has some neat features. I liked its text-only attitude. I could take or leave the whole distributed filtering paradigm, though it does have fantastic filtering capabilites, as well as most of BBEdit’s text capabilites (mmmm, Regex…) and amazing apple scriptability.
Most importantly, it’s being actively developed. The Eudora development cycle has slowed down considerably in the past few years, and let’s face it, Mail get’s a face lift with every .1 update of OS X, but that’s about it.
That’s not to say that I am completely happy with Mailsmith. Its POP3 only, but I ran my IMAP accounts pretty much like a POP3 accounts anyway. (That’s not to say I don’t want IMAP support in MailSmith – it certainly does make multi-computer use easier). It can also be a bit slow with some tasks. I think the interface could use a bit of tweaking as well.
While Eudora will always hold a warm place in my heart and Mail is a great client for the normal user, I think I will be sticking with MailSmith for the forseeable future.
Recently I’ve played around with Gmail. Its not bad. Certainly better than many of the free web-based email services. Its fast, has lots of space, and has a clean interface. The labeling thing is nice, but the only real difference from traditional mail boxes is that it lets you categorize messages with more than one label at the same time. Perhaps this biggest feature of Gmail is it’s phenomenally fast searching. Of course.
I’m interested in seeing what OS X Tiger’s Mail will be like. Smart folders could end up being very similar in one sense to Gmail’s labels, though even more useful in others. Hopefully this is something other clients will adapt.
Two things to state here. First, a mail client I used quite a bit while hopping around from dorm room to lab to home was Pine. I know one can get into quite a debate about the UNIX mail clients, but Pine in conjuction with a couple of IMAP accounts can go a long way. I have a lot of respect for this client.
Secondly, the dreaded spam. When I first started to get a noticeble amount of spam, the University had SpamAssassin already in place. It merely took a filter on my part to trash anything marked as spam. The unfortunate part of this setup was that SpamAssassin never learned from its mistakes.
Mail’s junk filtering was better, but it never really took care of the whole picture. Enter SpamSieve. SpamSieve comes free with the Mailsmith license, and the two are really integrated nicely. Though I’ve never tried it with other clients, SpamSieve is supposed to play nicely with them as well, so I thoroughly recommend checking it out. Since SpamSieve is run locally, one can really tune it to your mail patterns. In the six weeks I’ve been running it, its filtered about 10,000 messages, with an accuracy of 99.1%. Not too bad considering that it was a bit inaccurate at first when I was training it. A really quality product.
I work at PPPL, known to the outside world as the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. When I say “work,” I really mean slave away at graduate student wages, fixing all sorts of broken equipment that is usually older than I am. Seriously. Well not about slaving away. I know a lot of graduate students who do put in 14 hour days, but that is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of a government workplace. Nine to five is the rule around here.
The part I was serious about is the fixing of broken equipment that is older than I am. I’m 25. I know its not that old, but when most the equipment you use has an FY-78 sticker, you get the idea that your place of work isn’t exactly bleeding edge. Shit, we run our research project off of a Sun Ultra 5, Bullwinkle. You can buy these guys on E-Bay for pennies. Well, maybe not pennies, but 2 for $30?
We used to have a second one named Rocky. Rocky started getting mighty flaky about a year ago, so we set off on a search to replace it. Someone at the lab had another Ultra 5 lying around and just gave it to us. That one died too and was replaced by PIII Dell.
Anyway, I’m sure I will talk about crappy old equipment quite a bit in the future. To go on a bit more about my research, I should mention the research project that I am a part of, CDX-U. CDX-U is about to be no more as we move onto the next phase of its lifecycle, LTX.
CDX-U is a tokamak, or technically a spherical torus. To the outsider, the distinction between the two is small, but there are some differences in the physics that occur in the two configurations. Think of a standard tokamak as a donut, where as a spherical torus is more like a cored apple. Small aspect ratio.
The CDX-U site I linked to above is pretty bad (and ancient). I’m not on there, but my advisors are. I should really get around to changing that…
This is a quick first entry. I just want to mention some of the topics I might be covering in the next couple of weeks. One can see from the categories already set up that I have an interest in physics, being that I am in graduate school for it. Come here for the lowdown on what its like to work at a gov’t lab.
Music will be another topic of discussion. Since there’s not a whole lot of current stuff that tickles me right, most of the posts in this section will probably pertain to the music that Mike and I create and the processes that we use.
I’ll put up some more categories as I see fit in the future – expect lots of random reviews on random things. Cuz that’s what the world needs; more reviews.