I write this here, because I know i will need it again sometime, and I prefer to have it written down.
Find {xyz}, the revision in which you deleted the file by looking at:
svn log –verbose
Then recover the file:
svn up -r {xxx-1} your-file
While working on the thesis I discovered the beauty of ausing a thesaurus. I used to go to http://thesaurus.reference.com/ which has a good selection of synonims, but I disliked having to switch contexts from the document on which I am working. Since I use vi i tried the technique for enabling the thesaurus in vi presented here but was not completely sattisfied with the free thesaurus I found.
Finally I discovered the perfect solution: the dictionary application of OS X can be invoked from some text editors by pressing CTRL+COMMAND+D. The problem is that it defaults to dictionary not thesaurus, so normally you get the definition and then you have to explicitly choose the thesaurus. To change this you have to go to the preferences panel of the dictionary application switch the order of the dictionaries, and make thesaurus the first. Once this is done,
Like in many other circumstances in life.
A study performed in Japan in ‘95 showed that perceived usability of an ATM user interface is correlated to its aesthetics. The study was two year later re-iterated in Israel in order to verify if the results hold across cultures. And the results did hold. See the results in the original article here.
The article is enjoyable to read. One paragraph from it talks about one cultural difference that the experimenters had to adapt for:
“The Japaynese interface included an image of a lady who is presumed to bow repeatedly to indicate that the system is processing. This concept was totally foreign to Israelis and potentially would have looked odd. Therefore, the image was replaced with a an image of an hourglass which is a more familiar representation of an active system in Israel.”
Somebody should someday do a study whether a bit of fun or witty content in an article is correlated with a higher perceived interestingness, importance or usefulness of the article :)
Ah, and the SF Moma zoomable UI is here
Alex Blaj, one of my historical friends just released a fun application for OS X. Listomator lets you do any operation with lists you ever dreamt of, and some that you didn’t dream about. It is not targeted at a programmer audience who would probably be more confortable doing some command line magic or firing up their favorite IDE, but I think for the non-geek it can be pretty useful.
So if you ever wondered about, the list of the top 10 longest words in english, here they come, brought to you by /usr/local/dict/words featuring Listomator :)
thyroparathyroidectomize
tetraiodophenolphthalein
scientificophilosophical
pathologicopsychological
formaldehydesulphoxylate
transubstantiationalist
thymolsulphonephthalein
scientificogeographical
pseudolamellibranchiate
Pseudolamellibranchiata
Funny how many of them are chemistry and medicine.
Actually it turns out that the longest word in a major dictionary (which does not exist in /usr/local/dict !!) is also a medical term:
I am currently in the middle of the process of writing my thesis dissertation. It is a very interesting experience, at times I am enthusiastic about it and at times I feel overwhelmed by it. One thing is clear though, after having written a document of hundreds of pages, one will have developed a methodology. Today I was tinking about two of the practices that I like in my methodology:
1. Use vi. The efficiency that it gives you when writing (especially latex) is out of this Word-ish :)
2. Write and meta-write about a chapter simultaneously. While I have my chapter open in front of me, I also have another document open which is the document about that chapter. Every time I some idea that passes through my head that I would like to pursue further in this chapter, I write it in the meta-chapter document. I write test paragraphs in the meta-chapter: if I like them i put them in the chapter, or I leave them for later; if i don’t like them it’s easier to delete them, they were never part of the thesis anyway :) If later I will be writing a different chapter, or when I will be reading some paper, and I will have an idea about this chapter, I will dump it here, and come back to it later. The main goal: download as fast as possible ideas from my head :)