I was recently delighted to receive an email from someone saying that he'd just started a PhD with my old supervisor, and did I have any advice for him? You'll be unsurprised to learn that I did; I thought I'd post it here in the hope that someone else might find it useful. Some of what follows is specific to my supervisor, my field, or my ( Read more... )

It occurs to me that not enough people know about TeX's line-breaking algorithm.

Take a paragraph of text; this one, for instance. Form a graph whose vertices are possible line-breaks, and whose edges are the words (and part-words, in the case of hyphenation) between two possible breaks. For instance, if your text is "Fred loves Wilma", then you'd ( Read more... )

In my thesis, there are a lot of places where I write expressions like
f1 x ... x fn or
(Σ y1, ... , Σ yn) or something similar. The code to generate this is repetitive. It would be nice to abstract out the general pattern of "list of things indexed from 1 to n, combined using some binary operation". But there's a problem: the indexing can occur ( Read more... )

I've been collecting some more data on the thesis:
Wed May 7 23:45:49 BST 2008
4741 lines 23246 words 163656 characters
thesis.log:Output written on thesis.dvi (84 pages, 643096 bytes).
33 fixmes
80 definitions
141 term-definitions
24 theorems
21 lemmas
6 corollaries
30 examples
143 bullet-points A "term-definition" is a call to the macro \defterm, ( Read more... )

My post about design patterns and if-statements in Smalltalk yesterday got a very pleasing reaction, garnering some informative comments from knowledgeable people and making the front page of programming.reddit. I guess I should have checked my facts on Smalltalk semantics more carefully before clicking "Post" :-) One comment that particularly ( Read more... )

For reasons that are increasingly unclear to me, I've been using the TeX package XY-Pic for the commutative diagrams (of which there are many) in my thesis and papers. If there is one and only one Right Way to do something, you can pretty much guarantee that XY-Pic will:

1. do something else by default, producing horribly ugly output;
2. only do the Right ( Read more... )

About a month ago, wormwood_pearl and I went to see the fantastic stand-up comedian Daniel Kitson (who you should all go and see if the slightest opportunity presents itself). One thing that he said really struck me:If you ever think you've had an original thought, put it in quotation marks and type it into Google. Now that's a humbling experience.
So I really ( Read more... )

Emacs users: how would you do this in Emacs? I've included a vi solution under the cut, but I suspect (based on the kind of thing we've been talking about recently) that, while the vi solution would work within Emacs, the most natural Emacs solution would look rather different ( Read more... )

This morning I wrote a TeX macro using \expandafter (ie, I had to muck about with the order in which the macro engine expands things). Possibly this makes me some sort of l337 TeX h4x0r, but mainly it makes me unhappy with (a) TeX and (b) XY-Pic for forcing me to do such an ugly thing ( Read more... )

It seems someone's already done something similar to what I mentioned a while ago, namely rewriting TEX (or something like it) as an embedded DSL in Caml or some such, so that extensions could be written in a Real Programming Language (and so that other DSLs could be embedded more easily). It's troff rather than TEX, and Scheme rather than Caml, ( Read more... )