I recently found a subtle bug in biber 2.1 that drove me crazy. It seems that biber 2.1 silently fails for certain Latex macros that it should convert into UTF-8. In particular the “\l” macro (Polish ł) is one; I’m still finding more. Here’s a minimal working (well, failing) example: \documentclass[12pt]{article} \usepackage[american]{babel} \usepackage{csquotes} \usepackage[backend=biber,style=apa,doi=false,url=false,hyperref=true,apamaxprtauth=100]{biblatex} […]
I’ve recently had need to compile SRILM on my Mac, which runs OS X 10.9 (Mavericks). I have Mac Ports installed but found that I had to change to the out-of-box C/C++ compiler in order to get SRILM to compile. It was simple: in common/Makefile.machine.macosx I simply changed CC = cc $(GCC_FLAGS) CXX = c++ […]
My laptop died recently, and I am stuck with a new hard drive and a fresh OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) installation. I wanted to install lme4.0. This turned out to be trickier than I’d expected, because Xcode 5.0 doesn’t include a Fortran compiler. This can be solved by installing a Fortran compiler from http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/tools/. Many […]
I often want to make a PDF version of Word documents I’m writing, but when there are differently formatted sections the Word document spits out multiple PDFs. To fix this so that you get only one PDF out, do the following: 1) Open File->Page Setup… 2) From the “Settings” dropdown box on the resulting window, […]
Despite all the advantages of pdflatex, I still do a lot of LaTeX writing in which I take the latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf route. This is primarily because of pstricks, which I use for drawing syntactic trees, dependency graphs, and various pictures that I’ve already written out. (I’ve never had complete success with the […]
Dear Senator Kyl: I grew up in Arizona and now live in California. My mother and many of my childhood friends still live and vote in Arizona. Today on Face the Nation (about 6:45 in) you criticized Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for suggesting that vitriolic public discourse may have played a role in inciting […]
Dear Sheriff Dupnik, I grew up in Tucson, graduated from University High School in 1991 (I overlapped with Gabrielle Giffords for one year in high school, though I didn’t know her), and now live in San Diego. I have been following media coverage of the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and others, and I have listened […]
Today’s New York Times Grammar Blog critiques an article for the following circumlocution: He is on a pace to finish with more than 1,800 yards for Stanford, which hosts cross-bay rival California on Saturday, is 7-3 and guaranteed its first bowl appearance since 2001. Parallelism problem; in this case, we needed to repeat “is” before […]
Here are some slides that I wrote on the current UC budget crisis — what it is, how we (and the state of California) got to where it is now, why you (the student) should care, and what you can do about it. My goal is to be informative rather than polemic — the underlying […]
Over the past several weeks there’s been a lot of talk in the media and at the University of California about the origins of the current budget crisis. One of the prime suspects has been Proposition 13, which passed in 1978 and capped real estate taxes by limiting appreciation of the base for property taxes […]