I am currently teaching a course on programming for linguists. We are using python, but for the first few classes, I have been going over some standard UNIX utilities like cd, ls and such, plus using regular expressions with grep and sed. I actually don’t use sed that much. I tend to reach for perl, since I know it better, and it can do pretty much all the same stuff that sed can plus much more. But sed is simpler […] (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)

Recall from a previous post that I was playing around with Filevault on Mac OSX not too long ago, which encrypts your home folder on the fly. I ultimately decided that it was not worth it, since it messed up a few programs, and most of my data is not very sensitive. However, I do have some sensitive data, like bank statements and such, that I keep on my computer. And now that I am mostly using linux, but still […] (Read more)

Which operating system? This was kind of a no-brainer. I was definitely not going to buy Windows, so it was going to be Linux. (I did think about something in the bsd family, and might still consider it at some point. I read a nice article comparing linux and bsd recently, which was informative and fairly unbiased. My take is that one of the biggest differences is that most people compile their own stuff for bsd, while most people get […] (Read more)

Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) has the neat Spotlight feature which allows you to find all sorts of files very quickly and easily. It even allows you to search the contents of many files, including e-mail messages, pdf documents and Microsoft office documents. There is one flaw however. To do this it creates a database, which it updates periodically. That is all fine and dandy. But if you use an external hard drive from time to time, say for backups, it […] (Read more)