The Akashic Field Chronicle

Click here to read other Pick-of-the-Week (POW) entries

As promised, I’ll be trying to blog with a little more semblance of regularity. I figured, what better way to get back into the zone than by bringing back a regular blog segment. Fortunately, I had just the thing in my archives, the AFC Pick-of-the-Week (P.O.W)!  But a weekly segment seems completely unrealistic at the moment. Perhaps bi-monthly sounds a little more practical (we’ll see). Anyway, it’s still a week and I still pick something, just not every week, so there.

This week, I’m picking…

Beamer

LaTeX Beamer to be exact. What’s Beamer you ask? Well technically it’s just another LaTeX package, but a pretty awesome one if you ask me. A friend introduced it to me while I was doing my MS at  UP Diliman and I’ve been a huge fan ever since.

It’s basically a package (i.e. an extension) to LaTeX in order to make presentation slides using standard LaTeX syntax. If you already write papers or dicussion notes in LaTeX and you’re familiar with its syntax then Beamer is definitely for you. If not, then it’s a perfect opportunity to start learning LaTeX. I previously wrote about how useful it is in this post, and I still believe so.

Why Use Beamer

Here are some reasons why I’d recommend using it:

• LaTeX – It’s built on top of LaTeX and if you think LaTeX is great (esp. for rendering math) then this reason is pretty self-explanatory.
• It Looks Great – It’s hard to sell this claim, esp. to people who are obsessed with PowerPoint. But you have to see it to believe it. Here are some great Beamer examples:
  • A Sample Presentation by Till Tantau (creator of the Beamer class)
  • Demo of different features
  • My MS thesis defense presentation (ok, maybe it’s not great, but it has sentimental value)
• Portability - A Beamer presentation is essentially a PDF file so it will work almost anywhere (and preserve ‘animations’).
• Reusability - the LaTeX code in your paper, discussion notes, book or whatever, is exactly the same code used in Beamer. Including the structure (section, subsection, etc.). This means formulas will render perfectly whether you originally used it on a paper or a presentation. If you’re cramming a presentation, you can even make it straight from your paper (just put \begin{frame} … \end{frame} on certain segments)
• Structure - Beamer, without messing with the nitty-gritty, enforces a certain style to your slides as you will see if you look at the examples I have above. Some PPT users might see this as very limiting, but after a while you begin to realize that this actually forces you to adhere to certain rules (font size, image placement, margins, etc.) that actually make your presentations look very professional.
• It’s Free - and not the ‘illegal’ kind of free

Did I mention they look great?!

Who Should Use Beamer (and who might not want to)?

If you regularly write research papers and make presentations (Faculty, Grad Students, Researchers, etc.) then I definitely recommend you at least try it out. If you’re already familiar with LaTeX then I recommend it even more. Also, if you find yourself rendering mathematical formulas very often, then the LaTeX equation rendering is the best there is.

Still, there are some who might not see the point of using Beamer and might not necessarily benefit from the things I listed above. These include:

• People who can’t invest time learning LaTeX - I admit, the learning curve is a little steep and for some people it just isn’t worth it.
• People who want their presentation to focus on the animations – although beamer has some animation capability, it won’t give you that nasty ‘Swivel” animation. Sorry.
• People who need their content to  be accessible to their superiors - and by this I mean, people who are expecting their bosses to re-purpose their hard work to please their respective bosses (you know who you are). You can’t expect the bosses to learn LaTeX. Sorry.

How can I learn?

I won’t go into a tutorial of Beamer, much less LaTeX. Fortunately, Google is your friend. To save you a little effort, here are the tutorials I really like:

• A Beamer Quickstart – this should get you started real quick (huh? wait?)
• Beamer v3.0 Guide – the most comprehensive one I’ve found besides the user manual (also, it’s made with beamer)
• Beamer User Guide – the manual
• LaTeX Tutorial – by Eudean Sun, presented (using beamer!) in a seminar sponsored by the UCLA Graduate Students Resource Center. Specially targeted to Grad Students.

So there. Start making professional looking presentations and make your adviser think you’re actually making progress on your research

Click here to read other Pick-of-the-Week (POW) entries

Click here to read other Pick-of-the-Week (POW) entries

For this week’s Pick-of-the-Week, I’d like to veer away from consumer gadgets like my previous POWs. I mean, there’s only so much gadgets I can personally review (Oooh! Unless manufacturers start giving me samples! That would be neat.) and besides, that’s why there’s Engadget. This week I’ll be reviewing, what is in my opinion, one of the best free and open source, personal accounting software out there. The one I personally use and of course the one that I recommend that everybody should use.

It’s kinda like Quicken (if you’ve ever heard of that), and it’s very simple to use. Okay, I’d admit that its not really the easiest program to learn, but a little patience is all you need and you won’t regret putting in some effort into learning this program.

Do I Need Accounting Software (even a free one)?

The answer is yes! Hmmm… Ok, maybe it isn’t yes to absolutely everyone, but I’d say a majority of the population needs accounting software. Maybe you run a business, even a small one. Or maybe you just got your first paycheck and you wanna budget properly. Maybe you want to track how much you spend during the course of a week or a month. Maybe you just want to make sure you don’t overspend and end up with a negative balance. Or maybe, your like me and you really fancy seeing neat graphs and charts showing you how much money you have (or don’t have).

Or you probably have money on different investments and you want to track them. Maybe you owe a lot of money and you want to budget your earnings so that you can pay for your debts. What ever the reason may be, it’s always best to have data regarding your money.

You Should Learn Accounting

Besides the obvious practical reasons I mentioned above, I also believe you should learn to use accounting software because in the future, you will inevitably be dealing with it directly or indirectly. If you want to be successful, then you have to master the basics of accounting while you’re still young and only need to account for a small amount of money. Good luck managing your potential millions when you can’t even manage your monthly salary.

It’s all about being the boss of you. Maybe you are an employee right now. Maybe you’re at the lowest point in the corporate hierarchy. That doesn’t stop you from being the boss of yourself. Learn the tools of the Big Boss and you won’t stay down there for long.

So How Do You Use It?

Go on over to sourceforge and get your copy of GnuCash. Now, I don’t usually recommend learning open source software from their own documentation (help files, etc.), but this one’s an exception. Usually FOSS software come with sucky (almost unusable) help files, but this one is a diamond in the rough. I learned the entire program from the help file which acts more like a tutorial. Actually it is a tutorial. It guides you from creating your initial accounts, filling up your data, even up to using GnuCash to track your stock investments. Simply amazing!

Head on over to the GnuCash Website to see some screenshots and also see the entire feature list.

(Unfortunately, I can’t really post screenshots from my account because that’s a bit confidential, you might discover how rich I am and have me kidnapped )

Click here to read other Pick-of-the-Week (POW) entries

On my previous post, I showed you why you should be ditchin’ MS Word and instead learning LaTeX. In this post, I’ll give a very short glimpse of my basic workflow when using LaTeX. Which programs I use? Is there any particular way I use them? Hopefully this will get you started (if you haven’t yet) on mastering LaTeX for those technical papers.

I run all these programs in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), either on my laptop or on a desktop PC. They are all free and open source software (FOSS). Don’t worry if you don’t use Linux (although you should), because most, if not all of the programs run in other platforms (Windows, Mac, etc.). That, or they probably have counterparts that behave very similarly.

PDFLaTeX

This is the program I use to generate the actual PDF file from the .tex file. Yes it’s command line only and doesn’t have fancy graphics. But if you’re converting a .tex file, do you really need fancy graphics?! Just run pdflatex [filename] on your trusty console and voila! You’ve got a perfect pdf every time. I also like the fact that it’s very fast and simple and could easily be added into scripts for batch jobs or what have you. You can even run it remotely if you ever find a reason to do so. Try that with a graphical program!

Vim

This is what I “should” be using to type the actual .tex manuscript. This is the editor that I’m trying to master. As of now, I suck and would rather edit my manuscript in gedit. I have to admit, Vim is very very very powerful and once you learn most of the tricks it has up its sleeves, then you’ll definitely regret not having learned it earlier. So this is what I’d recommend for the people who are willing to invest some time on learning a true blue text editor. There’s a pretty good tutorial here.

LyX

Although we love the CLI and would love to master LaTeX in its raw and true form, there are just some tasks when a graphical interface is best. One very good example I’ve seen, is trying to create tables. If you’ve ever created tables in HTML then you know that it can be a pain in the *rse.

There are also some formula formatting whose syntax are really hard to remember in LaTeX. For these special circumstances, I use the program LyX, which I’ve mentioned on my previous post. It’s a GUI for LaTeX and it does a very good job at it. However I seem to get better looking results as well as more customization when using PDFLaTeX. What I do is to use a raw .tex file for the stuff I know, and then use LyX to create tables, formulas and such. These snippets can easily be exported to pdflatex by going to File > Export > Latex (PDFLatex) in LyX.

JabRef

Now this program is seriously a Godsend. No more worrying about whether a reference was cited properly. No more fumbling around at the last moment for a reference that you forgot to jot down. This program will keep a database of all your BibTeX entries. That is to say, all your reference including most data required for a citation. It has all the powerful features of most databases, such as searching and replacing. Did I mention that these BibTex entries are available from CiteSeer and IEEEXplore? Head on over to sourceforge to get your copy.

OpenOffice.org Drawing and Dia

The easiest and best way to embed pictures onto your PDF document is to also have them in PDF format, or some other vector format such as EPS. This way, you don’t get pixelized output even if you resize your pictures unlike when using bitmap based pictures (.bmp, .gif, .jpg). These formats are frowned upon by journals and conferences because they don’t scale well.

For my drawing needs, I use OpenOffice.org Drawing, as well as a very neat diagramming program called Dia.

That’s all there is to it and you could have this system up in a few minutes. I recommend that you install LyX first because this would install all the required LaTeX components. Also, if you are in Windows, you could also try out TeXnicCenter according to a comment from my previous post.

Happy TeXing!

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P.S. I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.6 (from 2.5.1). So far I haven’t noticed anything different. But at least I learned the upgrade process and didn’t mess it up.