Category Archives: Uncategorized

LaTeX Thesis Skeleton

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As it might be useful for other students (especially for computer science students at the University of Kaiserslautern), I decided to invest some time and create a skeleton for a thesis.

The project can be found on github: http://github.com/joernhees/thesis-skeleton.
I’ll happily include / pull changes.

Quick instructions to get started with your thesis:

  1. Make sure you have git, otherwise install it (e.g., on ubuntu: sudo aptitude install git-core)
  2. Run this: 
    git clone git://github.com/joernhees/thesis-skeleton.git myMasterThesis

    It will create a directory called myMasterThesis in the current directory which actually is a git repository and includes a thesis directory.

  3. Enter it and have a look at thesis.pdf
  4. Insert your name, title, supervisors, etc. in thesis.tex.
  5. Get familiar with git, this is a good start.

That’s it.

Daylight saving time

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Well, you’ll have noticed, in Germany the daylight saving time striked once again… as per Romain I was reminded that many people have a problem remembering when the time is changed in which direction, so here comes my mnemonic (“donkey bridge” 😉 ):

It’s just the same as with garden furniture. In summer you put them in front of your house, in winter you put them back in your cellar.

So this means the time was shifted back one hour from 3 am to 2 am this morning. The only thing when it gets weird if you have a computer which already did the change and something else stubbornly claiming nothing happened.

Beautiful data visualizations and why we need open data

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Today when I attended a talk at LWA 2010 I remembered a nice talk about beautiful data visualization by Hans Rosling, that I want to share with you (it’s worth the time):

When I searched for this talk I also came across the follwing two, the one above is a must, if you liked it, you might want to invest more time with these:

And last but not least another nice talk in this area, this time by David McCandless:

EtherPad: live collaborative text editing

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Ever thought that it would be cool to just collaborate with others while writing a document? Well ok, there are wikis but I mean real-time. Not that it’s new or anything (google docs, wave), but EtherPad recently became one of my favorites for this (thanks to Andreas Wagner).

It’s a no login website, you just need the URL and can start. You can host EtherPad yourself if you don’t trust the server.

It’s a great tool for brainstorming in a group (no more poor guy having to log everything, simply add it yourself), writing down some thoughts, coordinating things in a very interactive way.

Mozilla put up a public EtherPad, just try it here and don’t miss the cool time-slider.

P != NP solved?

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Well, it happens every now and then, that someone finds a proof for a long standing theoretical problem.
This time it’s the famous P = NP or P != NP problem of computer science that Gecko pointed me to:

Let’s wish him luck that his proof is flawless and accepted.
(Who’s the first one to say: “I’ve always known it” ? :D)

Sadly my wishes didn’t help :-/