Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Challenge!

This is a challenge to any and all computer hackers, wizards, geeks
and guru's out there. Below is a link to a LATEX file that was
corrupted by Time Machine. I have an entire hard drive full of files
just like this. If you can decrypt the mess that this file is, I am
offering a $100 reward (assuming the decryption allows me to decrypt
other files on my computer as well) Hey, its not much money, but i'm
a grad student so what can you expect?

Good luck!

Tex File

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Q. How do you delete a whole column of a matrix in Matlab?

A. Use empty brackets!  i.e

A =[1 2 3 ; 4 5 6 ; 7 8 9]

A(2, :) = []

A=[1 2 3 ; 7 8 9]

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Q. What is the equivalent of the Matlab Eval command in Igor Pro?

A.  The simple answer is $  but for more information you nned to see Chapter 1 in the Programming and Reference guide.  section III-16 under Strings, String Expressions, Strings in Text Waves.  

Example:

String Str1 = "Today_is_" + date()
Make $Str1

Monday, January 28, 2008

Q. How do you put an inline reference number into a Latex document?

"For example in reference # you can see that..."  
The problem is that Latex normally uses superscripts everytime you use the \cite command.  

A.  So instead you need to use the \citenum command

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Q. How to create a Graph Style in igor

For journal papers and thesis' it's there is a cumbersome number of graphs that need to be created.  It would be nice to have a style macro that allows you to save a style and then reapply.  

A. In igor, It's not that difficult actually.  Once you have a graph that you want, you simply click on Windows/Control/Window Control  where you can create a style macro.  Search for 'Example of Creating a Style Macro' in the igor help file for more information.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Q. That or Which?

When do you use the word 'that' or 'which'?  

A.  Well, we use "that" when we want to restrict our subject to some smaller subset, by using the descriptive phrase that follows that. Hence:
Please pick up the clothes that you dropped off at the dry cleaners yesterday.
I don't just want you to pick up any old clothes; I want you to pick up the ones you dropped off yesterday. No other clothes will do. Hence, I use the restrictive "that" to tell you exactly what clothes I want you to pick up.

Compare this with the correct unrestrictive usage of "which":
When I was a junior in college I drove a lime-green 1977 chevy, which I bought with the pittance I earned in my summer job with Greenpeace.
The clause following "which" doesn't tell us information we have to have in order to know which car it is. Even if we don't know that you spent your summer haranguing people to wear hemp shoes, we would still know exactly what car we're talking about: your car, the unfortunately colored American gas-guzzler that leaks oil and parallel parks about as well as the Love Boat. The information provided by our descriptive clause is interesting, but not necessary for us to identify its subject.



Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Q. How do I get address line search shortcuts to work in Safari?

For example:  In Firefox I can type "wiki xenon" and it will open the wikipedia page for Xenon.
A.  Install Sogudi

Download a Sogudi that is compatible with Safari 3 here:

Installation for Leopard (from here)

  1. Delete $HOME/Library/InputManagers/Sogudi if it exists.
  2. Delete /Library/InputManagers/Sogudi if it exists.
  3. Expand the "tgz" file above.
  4. Drag the "Sogudi" folder into /Library/InputManagers
  5. Use Terminal to:
    1. sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers
    2. sudo chmod -R go-w /Library/InputManagers
  6. Restart Safari