Ganesh Swami

Superhacker Federico Mena-Quintero talks about using Emacs for GTD. I do something similar but in a less organized fashion. He mentions that it would be nice if it were better integrated with the desktop. For URLs, I’ve been using the browse-url package for many years. Dropping the following line into your .emacs enables the feature.

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b") 'browse-url)

Pressing C-c b parses the text around the cursor for a plausible URL and uses that as the default. Pressing enter will open the default browser with the chosen URL.

Pretty cool, huh?

I’ve written previously about Mathematica. I’m going to describe a really cool feature that none of the other symbolic manipulation programs have.

Integrating

depends on the value of n. If n equals 1, then the integral value is Log(x). Otherwise it’s just x^(-n+1)/(-n+1). Mathematica allows one to manipulate the value of n in realtime. Here are three screenshots with n={0,1,2}.

I wish I had this when I was studying Calculus for the first time!

I was unhappy with the default wordpress pagination style, until I found a plugin that did exactly what I wanted. You can now do non-consecutive jumps between pages. The plugin is called wp-pagenavi.

You can find tons of styling with CSS here.

SIGGRAPH has to be the most prestigious conference for graphics research. While preparing for my talk last week, I came across this incredible resource for papers on the web. This is in many ways so much better than the official conference proceedings (links to the official homepages for example.)

SIGGRAPH 2007 papers on the web.

My talk at the CUMC last week was well received. It so happened that it was scheduled on the last day — I got a chance to see some of the other presentations and assess the level of depth presented.

I was surprised to see that variational calculus and some analysis material is optional in the undergraduate curriculum, but we’ll debate that some other day…

The problem with conferences is that you tend to become mentally exhausted towards the end of four or five days of absorbing information non-stop.

Anyways, check out the outline of what I presented, geared towards a general audience. Someday, I’ll learn how to upload presentations…