Goodbye is not enough

I just finished backing up all my files on my Laptop with Windows as OS and checked if my wife’s BSc thesis written in WORD on Windows can be opened on WORD on MAC without damage. And it can, EXCEPT that the images appear inverted. Apparently a known problem between Windows-MAC, but still good enough for me to spend angry hours fighting against it. But these will hopefully be my last hours with Windows. I have hated a lot of companies and Software products so far, but Windows and Microsoft have been the worst of all of these. I don’t know how many months of my life I have struggled with these buggy software products. Although I am using MAC since 4 years I still was using Windows on a part time basis at home. But now its final: You are dead to me Windows!

I just converted my wife, by buying her a new MacBook, to a happy MAC user. She just has to finish her thesis and then it is time for her to get to know LaTex and all her troubles (at least the Windows related ones, the once with LaTex have at least dignity and system behind it) will be over.

For all of you who still uses Windows and MAC, try to avoid the drag-and-drop options and ALWAYS insert figures by inserting the image as a file, otherwise you will end up with inverted images, which can’t be re-inverted. The solution, although quite simple, has taken hours for me to find out, namely safe the WORD files as a WEBPAGE (nothing new so far, I suppose), but prior to that do some simple steps outlined here. And when doing so increase the pixel and select the largest possible resolution of the image. I was able to extract the original image quality (few MB big PNG images), which I haven’t thought were possible, because so far I was used to get crappy JPEG images.

I am heading towards an anger-free-world, by killing Windows and Microsoft as much as possible in my world, and so far it helps. Now it is time to install XUbuntu on my own laptop and everything will be fine. I hope!

LaTex troves

You probably have experiences several of the moments where you have tried to find a solution for a simple/stupid problem in Matlab or LaTex. From now on I will try to post them here from time to time to share these troves with the other nerds out there. Enough baby stuff for now, back to the real life

Ever wondered how to insert a figure in a two or multi column paper, without being creative? Thanks to this guy who showed me how to do it:

\begin{figure*}
\end{figure*}

PS: Almost everything one has to know about figures and LaTex can be found in this German manual: ***** (PDF file)

LaTex editor

Thanks to Alex for a freeware replacement for WinEdit. Since I use TexShop on MacOs I don’t have to deal with Windoof (that how we smart Germans call Windows ) stuff anymore, but sometimes it might be of use if you do not have your PowerBook close to you.

Waste of time

More than a month has past since I started worrying about the huge file sizes I got with MATLAB when saving figures with huge datasets (is that even an English word?) as EPS files. Luckily I had the time during my parental leaves to search and seek for a solution. The solution for now is

a) instead of pcolor use contourf, which amazingly reduced the file size a lot.

b) seperate the fancy figure into a bitmap and ps file, where the first contains the fancy image and the latter the text, axis, labels, etc. and then combine both to yield a new EPS file, which can be edited by LaTex afterwards and is as small as a normal high quality JPEG figure. Luckily someone has written a short MATLAB routine for it.

c) avoid fancy 3D surfaces plots, they look nice, but are not suitable for papers or reports. They are rather helpful for PowerPoint presentations and then simple bitmap figures are better than EPS images.

Now, after several parental leaves and many hours of neglecting my son for stupid figures, it is time to rule of (Schlußstrich ziehen?) and go over to the real problems, namely interpreting the figures.

Swedes are funny!

Although hard to believe, Swedes are funny. I mean if my high-school and university time in Germany was fun, than almost anything can be fun. You might remember the funny clips in Swenglish I posted view weeks ago. Today I found this clip, which is from my favorite TV comedy show Kvarteret Skatan. It is not the funniest one, but at least with English subtitles:

Right now I am quite busy trying to become acquainted with a Stereoscopic PIV system, organise our stay in Italy over the summer, get a conference paper and my first journal paper ready as well as learn how do deal with a son, who still pukes around and doesn’t listen to me. On the bright side, he sleeps more than 4 hours during the night. Great Success!

Apropos conference paper: Does anyone have experience with WORD templates? I am not a fan of WORD, unless for personal use. But for a conference it is rather embarrassing to use a WORD template, where figures and equations look so fake and destroy the layout. Is there anyway to get the line spacing right in WORD without making the equations too small. I don’t wanna write my own LaTex template for this particular conference.

Eastern

As usual we received a packages for my wife from her parents. I expected some chocolate Easter eggs, but this time we got more stuff for our son than for me. This is the second disappointment during this week, but as a grown up I can handle such situations with bravery (or how to translate the German phrase “mit bravur meistern“?), e.g. I can buy my own sweets and I don’t need them. Not anymore at least

Apropos Easter eggs: During my undergraduate studies I learnt to look for virtual Easter eggs, which were – at that time – very amusing. I haven’t check since a long time for such hidden routines in programmes, but I don’t thing there are such things in Matlab or LaTex? Or are there?