WordPress 3.2

I’m trying the new wordpress 3.2 and without any doubt the feature I like the most is the full screen editing feature, ala scrivener and many others. This should be mandatory in any blogging platform. I still don’t like the fact that wordpress pounds your database with so many requests, but I’ve already managed to live with it without worrying to much (html caching of the posts removes the DB pain).

I still feel that some other bits of WordPress 3.2 are rough as for example the field “Enter title here” in full screen mode didn’t disappeared after I wrote my title (this in Firefox 5). Therefor I suspect that in no time will see a minor release coming out. But in the end I’m loving it and recommend for anyone who wants a distraction free writing environment for blogging.

update: Seems that some plugin was breaking my wordpress installation. The ajaxy features are working correctly now.

Mac OS X Finder Tip – Free your memory

If you leave your Mac on for long periods or if you browse a lot of pictures for example, the Finder will start using more and more memory and if you run top you’ll see that the resident memory is very high. To do a quick release of memory (sometimes over 500MB) just do Alt+RightClick on the Finder icon on the Dock and hit Relaunch. Usually Finder will go back to using 20-30MB instead of that half-gig.

First Impression: Moshi iVisor Pro 15

Bye bye glare…

Just bought a anti-glare screen for my macbook pro… what a difference! I do recommend anyone with a glossy screen to pay what ever is necessary to remove the mirror in front of your eyes! The Moshi iVisor Pro 15 is money very well spent!

How To Merge Two Bibtex Libraries with Bibi

klane asked: Hi, I have two BibTeX files and need to merge them together without ending up with duplicates. Can you give a good suggestion on how to merge two BibTeX files?

One of the problems with working in my non-linear way is that I end up with many BibTeX files that have different papers and even different versions of the same paper. From time to time I need to merge and consolidate my BibTeX libraries into a single main BibTeX library.

merging BibTeX with Bibi

For merging BibTeX libraries I found a java bibliographic manager that is very useful. It is called Bibi and is a full bibliographic manager that has a powerful merge function. It does exactly what it promises: you just open two .bib files and then merge from the menus.

BibTeX duplicates

The great thing about bibi to merge is that it also resolves duplicate entries in your bibliographic entries. This means that when bibi detects a conflict, it pops up a diff window. It allows you to chose which bibliographic entry to keep (on the left you have the first .bib file, on the right the second .bib file), and you can choose the BibTeX entry that is most accurate (you can even choose to keep both BibTeX entries).

With a few clicks you can merge two BibTeX files easily without trouble. The Bibi application is really a great time saver.

Merge two BibTeX the hard way

As BibTeX are text files the hard way to merge them is to open both files in a text editor and then copy and paste then entries from one file to the other. The problem with this approach it that you need to then use your reference manager (Bibdesk, Jabber, etc…) to find manually the duplicate entries.

WWDC11: I’m so not excited about Apple

“We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device.”

This sentence is what any respectable geek wasn’t expecting to hear from Steve Jobs in the WWDC. This is the sentence that finally corners Apple completely in the no computer world. Apple is making itself irrelevant in the computer business by insulting its heritage and its history. Apple is now just a gadget company with manufacturing in china not different from any gadget company. Although they have announced amazing growths in the number of Mac sold, the fact is that this sentence points Apple into a future of Macs as terminals of services and not as machines capable of allowing its owner of producing computation according to their needs.

Obviously that what they are selling is very well packaged, is full of chromed bevels and 3D glamour. It has animation, movement, bling! But in the most fundamental basis it is forgetting all that Computer Science is all about. The ability to create exciting algorithms and programs that are able to compute things unimaginable for the time. WWDC as become a consumer show and not a developers conference. Apple announced services for the general public, and worse, it announced APIs for developers. Apple didn’t present any new innovation to help developers compute. The new APIs that developers can use are just services on top of which developers mash up. It’s programming as a service and not as something really intrinsic to computers. That’s why apple is “demoting the PC and the Mac to be just a device”, dumb terminals where users will use endpoints of APIs centrally controlled. For apple, computers are two dangerous if their owners can run things on their own without any central monitoring and control. It is symptomatic that the climax of their Keynote ends with a new data centre and not with “one more thing” for users or developers. That’s their vision of computing: Control.

6 June 2011, a very sad day for computing.

David Hales: why computer people need to think about political economy and other issues

Today at ISCTE-IUL we’ll have a seminar by David Hales. David Hales is a researcher at the Open University in the United Kingdom. His research is at the overlap between computer science and social science. He has a background is Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence but he has spent a lot of time with Sociologists, Philosophers and even lapsed Economists doing simulations.

He has been doing a lot of interesting research and his talk today is about “The socio-economics of distributed systems (why computer people need to think about political economy and other issues)“.

The seminar is Friday, 3rd June 2011, 18h00 at ISCTE-IUL, building 2, room C402

Later this year, he will also be the Keynote speaker of the PhD in Progress Workshop that I’m organising in Vienna during ECCS’11, so if you can’t see him talk today, you can always joins us in the European Conference on Complex Systems and have a good time!

I really like the future Windows 8…

Windows 8 is still ahead, but Microsoft released a first video showing the tiled interface… and it looks great. Influenced by the ideas they started in the Phone Series, the tiled manager looks very promising both to use on the desktop and on tablets. In the end it will all depend on the implementation details, the system requirements, and the number of bugs… One thing that I like about this interface is that it runs away from the 3D chromed interfaces that other OSes are using (iOS and Android come to mind). If microsoft doesn’t clutter this system with “stuff” I think they might have a successful product here.