February 3, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

The procrastination exercise for today involved converting my thesis into a more readable form than requested by the graduate school. I find double-spaced text and narrow margins to be rather irritating to read. And the surprising lesson of the exercise was that good typography and margins does not necessarily save you much in paper. What you save by single-spacing is lost to the sensible margins. (I could go even more sensible, but I really don’t want to plow through and reformat all the tables and graphics.)

In the process I found TeXniscope which is a nice pdf/dvi viewer for OS X. It automatically reloads changed pdf files, an issue that drove me crazy with OS X Preview, and it has functions that allow to click on a section of a PDF document and automatically open the LaTeX source file. There is also a function that will automatically open a PDF file to the proper section from an Emacs LaTeX buffer. Unfortunately this doesn’t quite work out of the box with Aquamacs. I hacked together an alternative configuration file (11KB zip) that should do the trick. Unzip and follow the directions in the txs-search.el header.

Posted in software, geekstuff, the dissertation | No Comments »

November 29, 2006 by kirkjobsluder.

Just before T-day I finished the first full draft of the dissertation. It’s crufty and not ready to be seen outside of a small circle of people, but it feels so good to get this part done.

Meanwhile, I’m using the slack to pick up some hobbies, revamp my web presence, and hit the academic job search.

Posted in the dissertation | No Comments »