RogBlog

I’m using the Papers program for the first time, on a 30-day trial basis.  It seems like one of those programs whose benefits aren’t totally obvious until you really have been using it for a little while.  The problem for me has generally not been having papers scattered on my hard drive — I already have a “papers” directory for this — but rather things like multiple copies and, most crucially, BibTeX export.  I’m banking on BibTeX export saving me enough time to make Papers worth it for that feature alone.  Some thoughts:

• Computational linguistics conference proceedings papers should be obtained through the ACM repository
• Psycholinguistics journal articles work well through Google Scholar.
• JSTOR doesn’t work yet
• The journal Language can be obtained through Project MUSE.
• I prefer Skim to Preview for PDF reading.  Cmd-Alt-O will open the currently displayed paper in Skim.

The CUNY 2009 conference schedule came out a few days ago, and UCSD is pretty well represented among the talks (this is a single-track conference).  Here are some quick numbers:

UCSD: 4

Rochester:4

MIT:2

Dundee:2

USC:2

Glasgow:2

Stanford: 2

MPI – Nijmegen: 2

UC Davis: 1

Wisconsin: 1

UMass: 1

UIUC: 1

Ohio State: 1

Penn: 1

NYU: 1

York: 1

Maryland: 1

San Diego State: 1

Tied for #1 with Rochester…not bad…:)

I’ve decided that the best get-started tutorial for WinBUGS is this one:

 http://mathstat.helsinki.fi/openbugs/data/Docu/Tutorial.html

Also, kudos to Yarden Katz for publishing a webpage on how to use WinBUGS under Darwine on OS X:

http://web.mit.edu/yarden/www/bayes.html

(of course, I am actually using JAGS for most things these days.)

I’m learning how to use JAGS for a variety of hierarchical Bayesian models.  I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to install it on my Debian (etch) server, so I thought I would share how I got it to work (thanks to Brian Ripley and Martyn Plummer for suggestions):

# 1. configure and install JAGS
./configure --with-jags-modules=/usr/local/lib/JAGS/modules --libdir=/usr/local/lib64
make
make check
sudo make install

# 2. install rjags

sudo R --with-jags-modules=/usr/local/lib/JAGS/modules/ CMD INSTALL rjags_1.0.3-4.tar.gz

And this worked.  Critical was to make sure that the JAGS .so files wind up in /usr/local/lib64.

I’m a big fan of Sweave for writing LaTeX documents with R code embedded inside.  But there is a really annoying gotcha, which is that if you use statements that return R objects inside a figure, the resulting latex won’t compile

Examples pending…

I usually write my presentations in PowerPoint, but I use LaTeX to generate good-looking equations.  I’d been looking for a way to generate equations from LaTeX that are trimmed to a tight bounding box, so that they paste into PowerPoint properly (uniform size and transparent background).  And I found what I wanted: pdfcrop.  Yeah!

OK — I have a new favorite app: Air Sharing.  Allows you to use the iPhone as a wireless hard drive.  What’s the first thing I do with it?  Naturally, put a bunch of my own PDF papers on it   Powerpoint file viewing still has some issues.  But that’s just one more reason to go with PDF as universal standard, I guess.

Way cool.  Now I’d just like to be able to save files downloaded from Safari directly into Air Sharing.

As of today (10 August 2008), I am told by their customer service people that Capital One credit cards still have no foreign transaction fees.  I am going to at least one foreign conference this academic year, and this time around I have promised myself to be prepared!

You’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing. Believe it?

I downloaded iPhone 2.0 onto my first-generation iPhone yesterday.  I seem to have avoided some of the hiccups that others complained about.  I’ve only had time to explore the new iPhone a bit, but my top 3 impressions:

1. Zenbe lists are pretty cool, and fill the function gap left by the fact that iCal doesn’t have to-do lists on the iPhone.
2. iCal now has multiple calendars.  Hooray!
3. Camera now says “Camera would like to use your current location” — yech.  Has iPhone been geotagging my pictures?  I don’t want this.  At least I can say “no” now, but it’d be nice to be able to turn this off by default.