I gave a presentation at the Utah Elixir Meetup this February. Here’s the recording of my presentation:
I’ve posted the slides as an HTML file, along with some materials to follow along with, on my GitHub account. Check it out!
Today I figured out how to get Pandoc to automatically generate MLA citations for me!
I used Pandoc and the Biblatex bibliography format. What’s nice about this is that you can enter in all the information you know about the source, keep it nice and organized in a file, and then change the citation style on the fly. Imagine if you thought you had to use MLA, but then realized you needed to switch to APA citation styles. You can do that instantly with Pandoc and Biblatex.
...Marked Man (mm) is a little program I wrote to view Markdown files like UNIX man pages. (Because who wants to leave their terminal just to open a file?)
It uses Pandoc to convert between Markdown and the groff format. As a happy side-effect, this program can read basically anything as a man page: HTML, LaTeX, Word files (seriously), ePub, etc. Anything that Pandoc can read, Marked Man can handle.
I’m working on getting this set up with Homebrew. For now, check out my GitHub repository here.
...DuckDuckGo is a search engine. Like Google Search, you just throw some keywords into a box and get a list of results. Lots of people use Google, but I don’t. DuckDuckGo works better for me, and this is why.
Did you know that Google will give you different search results, based on who you are and what you have searched for in the past? This is called a filter bubble, and it’s annoying and dangerous. DuckDuckGo doesn’t put you in a filter bubble.
...Life is messy. We devote a lot of time and effort into managing that chaos. I thought of a little “theory”, if you will, that helps me.
Everything needs a home. The class of things that need homes is broad. It includes:
The home needs to suit the thing that goes there. I have found that getting this right is really tricky. But once you have a home for a thing, you never loose it. You will want to put things back into their homes when you are done using it, because it will feel right. If the home doesn’t fit the item, you run into a bit of friction—that slows you down and makes you more likely to put the thing where it’s easy.
...I finished the semester! This is how I feel:
Don’t you?
Well, I still have finals. But those are easy compared to the projects I’ve had to push out. I’ll probably write about my escapades later. :)
I spend a fair portion of every day writing programs. As with all professions, using the right tools makes a huge difference in my productivity and general happiness. Having good tools helps me keep my gumption up.
One of my favorite books is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Contrary to what the title suggests, this book is actually not about motorcycles. It’s about a lot of things; one topic is about tools and caring about your trade.
...Today in my proofs class (MATH 290 at BYU) we talked about the concept induction. I like this, because it sounds a lot like recursion.
On the Wikipedia article, there’s an excerpt from a book that illustrates the principle with an analogy using a ladder:
Mathematical induction proves that we can climb as high as we like on a ladder, by proving that we can climb onto the bottom rung (the basis) and that from each rung we can climb up to the next one (the step). — Concrete Mathematics, page 3 margins
...
So many notifications come to us in the form of an audible alert, and this can sometimes be inconvenient. Who likes having their phone go off in church? The problem is that sound propagates regardless of the intended target. Touch, on the other hand, is an inherently personal sensation. Setting your phone to vibrate lets you know you’re being alerted, without notifying everyone else in the room as well.
...Deutsche Übersetzung folgt.
I’ve left* Facebook.
There’s an asterisk there. I’m not going to delete my account, but I’m no longer checking Facebook more than once or twice a month, if that. I’m not trying to be a recluse—below are a few ways to contact me that I do check far more often than Facebook. I want to be your friend, but I’d rather that friendship be through a real connection rather than some online “status”.
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