Do you need to write code in your academic work? Have you read someone else’s code? Did you just get a code attachment with a warning like “this is a mess, I need to clean this up someday?”. Well, you are not alone. It seems that in the industry, telling someone that you plan to [...]
Archive for the ‘Computing tips’ Category
February 11, 2008
8
Common practices that scientists don’t use when writing code, and why we should
By jose in Blog, Computing tips, Resources
October 7, 2007
8
Speech to Text: timesaver or time waster?
By jose in Computing tips, Software, Time management, WritingWe academics should be obsessed with the amount of stuff that we write, and it could be that one bottleneck of our output is simply the speed at which we type. We have provided some tools to help you write faster (see our review of an autocompleter here), but actually audio could be a very good tool [...]
August 7, 2007
22
Living with Microsoft Word: Tips for survival
By shane in Computing tips, Software, WritingI have been using Microsoft Word for 12 years, but having just written a 75,000 word document, I feel I am just starting to learn how to use it properly. MS WORD is open to abuse and I guess that many, if not most, of its users don’t get the most out of the program. [...]
May 2, 2007
4
comparing different pdf readers
By jose in Computing tips, Reading, Reference management, SoftwareThere is a nice pdf reader comparison at donationcoder.com. Since most academics rely on pdf quite a lot, choosing the right tool may save a lot of time and frustration. The idea here is to have a tool that opens up as fast as possible, uses as little memory as possible, and lets you move [...]
March 25, 2007
0
Comparison of academic search engines and bibliographic software
By jose in Computing tips, Reference management, Resources, SoftwareThe “beyond my mind” blog has a post comparing different academic search engines. The author also describes his search strategy: The way I search for scientific articles is pretty simple. Say I have a problem to solve that was assigned by some course teachers or my research supervisor. I mark some keywords and Google for them. [...]