Friendfeed released an API a couple weeks ago. This made me excited, as I figured I could write a wordpress plugin to grab comments people leave on my friendfeed back into the blog. I did not of course find the time to do this right away, as I have already been spending way too much time working on my 2 other wordpress plugins (Collapsing Categories and Collapsing Archives). Today I discovered that someone had already beaten me to the punch. […] (Read more)

I have been working on learning R for several months now, and continue to get better at it and enjoy it more all the time. I am currently working on a spoken word recognition project at work. The task we are using is quite simple. Participants listen to words that have been mixed with multi-talker babble (kind of like background conversation at a cocktail party), and type in what they hear. We are analyzing the errors they make to try […] (Read more)

Awhile ago I started having problems with some of my fonts on my computer at work. Interestingly enough, it only seemed to affect a very small minority of programs and situations, namely on startup, when Fedora is going through and telling me all the services it is starting, the fonts were so tiny I could not read them. This also seemed to be the case for Matlab. For Matlab, I temporarily solved the problem by just changing the settings to […] (Read more)

About a year ago I wrote a post about my frustration with the lack of a good LaTeX to html converter. Recently I found one. It is called plasTeX, so named because it is written in python. Finally a converter which works well with most any LaTeX package or macro you write, and produces sane, relatively standards-compliant html. Best of all, it comes with a built-in if \ifplastex, so you can specify that some things should be in the pdf […] (Read more)

Imagemagick is a swiss-army knife of command-line image conversion, but can be a bit complicated to actually use. I have been making most of my figures with R lately, and printing them to pdfs, which I can include very easily into documents with pdflatex. I like pdf because it is scalable, fairly small file size (smaller than .eps), and portable. But today a colleague wanted to include a few of my figures in her own powerpoint presentation, and powerpoint only […] (Read more)