Making life easy for academics

I'm writing a paper: a process that is long, stressfull, and fun. Paper-writing also reminds me why I love linux so much, and specifically Latex and Bibtex and all that good stuff that makes life easy for academics. Of course, they work on Windows and Mac too, but Linux is the ultimate enviornment.
I share my office with several coleagues and I constantly hear them grating their teeth, pulling their hair, and complaining loudly about MS Word and such. They spend so much time editing, formating, losing images, changing font sizes, and typing out bibliographies by hand. What a waste of time!
I'm not a Linux evangelist. I don't hide it, but I don't try to push it on people either (mostly for selfish reasons; I don't want them coming to me to solve all their problems if they do decide to try it). But I'm working on another paper that's mostly written by one of our PhD students, and I asked him if he would be willing to write it in Latex. Apparently several other students started looking into it and got hooked. Now if I could only get him to actually sit down and write!
Latex and Bibtex work best with a good frontend. I started out using Lyx, which is nice, but then I switched to Kile which I've been working with for years and really like. (I'm an avid KDE fan so Kile is a natural.) For bibliography management I use Jabref which is a Java Bibtex frontend. It's awesome!! It integrates well with Kile too (ctrl+L pushes a citation to Kile). It can do all sorts of neat tricks, like direct Medline search and import, journal abbreviations, automatic local PDF searches, custom Bibtex key automatic generation, and other cool stuff.
Having the right tools for the job makes life easy. But at the end of the day you still have to write the paper yourself!

Sometimes I need something to remind me why I love Linux

I've had the unfortunate need to use a couple of our Windows workstations for some serious number crunching that I had to do. What a pain in the neck! Jeeeez! I forgot how much grief working with Windows can bring.
On my desktop running Linux, I could open 2 files and crunch them at the same time. It took many hours, but it crunched until it was done.
On Windows, with much better hardware (an extra CPU, tons of memory), it would crash half way through one number-crunching session. And no, it did not save anything.
Luckily I'm married to a genius programmer who wrote some code to bypass the need for this time-consuming and cpu-consuming stuff.
So now I'm back with my lovely linux, and enjoying every bit, even though I do have to work on the weekend.

Two amusing things I saw today

1. A geek at uni with a tee-shirt that says:

> cd /pub
> more beer

and then hubby says that it would have been funnier if it said "cd /usr/local/pub"

2. A cheap plastic mobile phone toy with a picture of a Barbie-like doll, and written above it in pink swirly letters:

Benign Girl

I'm sure it sounds better in Chinese.

New SUSE

Yesterday I decided to be brave and upgraded my SUSE 9.3 to the new 10.0.
I had read all sorts of differing opinions and was a bit scared that I might mess everything up and have to reinstall from scratch. Happily this didn't happen, and except for a few dependency issues which I sorted out to the best of my abilities, it went rather smoothly.
Sure, I had to reinstall Thunderbird, xine and a couple of other things, but that wasn't too bad.
The reason I wanted to upgrade (well, one of the reasons) was to see if the new version with the new kernel would help my sound card work. It didn't...
In other new and exciting computing news, I just figured out that I can use the Ctrl+L feature to push citations from JabRef to Kile! Yay!

Reading through this post, I suddenly had this feeling of being a total pathetic geek. This is what gets me excited?? Oy.

One Small Step on the Road to Linux Legend

I've been using Linux for several years now, but since I always had the help of Linux Gurus every step of the way, I never really needed to learn anything beyond basic usage stuff. But now in my new job, I'm the only Linux user in the entire department and so I've had to learn quite a lot in the last few weeks. I've done a lot of reading and Googling, and also posted some questions on various forums, and slowly I'm beginning to learn how to do all sorts of things. This is done mostly by trial and error. The biggest mental leap I had to do was to not be afraid to try things out, even if things might break, you can always set things right again and hopefully you will have learned something along the way.

So today I did something that I never did before. I used grep.

Grep has always been this vague Linuxy concept that scared the willies out of me. I know it's a totally useful command, but it just always seemed like something that only Linux experts knew how to use and I, a mere n00b, should not be going around using it. Maybe it's the weird name.

Anyway, today I was looking something up and the output of the command was so huge, and I just wanted to see a bit of it, so I stuck a | grep at the end and it worked!

This was a huge mental leap for me.

It reminded me of cheese.
All my life I have hated white cheese. I don't know why, it must be some childhood trauma or something. But last weekend we went on a romantic getaway to Hunter Valley, and stopped at a gourmet cheese shop and I tried all the white cheeses. And they were yummy!

I know it sounds silly, but it's such a great feeling to get over little mental blocks like these.

w00t

For the first time in my life I was excited to go to work on a Monday morning. My new computer arrived, very snazzy with a huge monitor and best of all, the little green box with SuSE Linux Pro! I'm so excited, I'm walking around with this huge grin on my face all morning. The IT person is installing Windows on it now (tfu, I don't know why I'm installing it but they are pretty adamant that I should have it there, oh well). Then it will be my turn to get the Linux going. I've never actually installed Linux before so this will be a learning experience. Everything I've read about SuSE has calmed my fears though, it should be a breeze. Plus I have the book and also installation support if I get stuck. I can't wait. I've been using this tiny little Mac iBook and I'm about ready to chuck it out the window.