Mailund on the Internet

Ok, it turns out that the pre-conference meeting we were sure would be held today is not until tomorrow … guess we will go sightseeing today then

I converted some old slides from OpenOffice to Keynote for my lecture this morning.  I had to go through a PowerPoint format for this, since OpenOffice cannot export to Keynote, but Keynote can import PowerPoint, but that wasn’t so much of a problem.

However, the conversion messed up one of the fonts.  In particular, it replaced a mono-space font with a proportional font, which messed up my pseudo-code examples completely.

Changing the font to a mono-space one isn’t much of a problem, except that there are tens of pages where I had to do this.  Plus, I couldn’t simply change it on one page and copy it to the other, since I’m changing the colour of various parts of the text between the pages.  You can see the slides here if you are interested.

So I had to click all the text boxes one at a time, go to the font drop down, and select the new font.  Not only is this rather tedious but for someone with RSI like me it is actually physically painful…

Do any of you Mac folks out there know if there is a way to search and replace a font in Keynote?  If not directly, then how about through Automator or AppleScript?

Here’s a picture of my iMac from my office:

“Where’s the screen?” I hear you ask.

Here it is:

on the floor!

Last Thursday, while I was out of the office for about 30min (and having forgotten to lock the door) someone came in and tipped it on the floor, where I found it when I came back.

I still have no idea who did it, but at least it gave me an excuse for ordering a new Mac Pro…

I’ve never been a big fan of comments in code.  Mainly because I too often have seen comments explaining the trivial and ignoring the complex…

In most cases, clear code eliminates the need for comments, as discussed here.

I used to think commenting my code was the responsible thing to do. I used to think that I should have a comment for just about every line of code that I wrote. After my first read of Code Complete, my views changed pretty drastically.

I began to value good names over comments. As my experience has increased, I have realized more and more that comments are actually bad.

Actually, Code Complete has a more nuanced discussion on commenting code, but still…

Comments are often not needed, because they just rephrase what you can already read in the code. If at all possible, make the code easier to read rather than explain it in code.

When comments are needed, they explain design decisions that are not obvious from the code. Then there is too often the risk that the design has changed since the comment was written and that is really worse than no comment.

Still, it is when it comes to design decisions that I often miss documentation. Especially when it comes to complex class hierarchies and object interactions where there is clearly some underlying design decisions about how the objects are suppose to interact and how new classes should be added to the hierarchy to extend the code.

I rarely find that stuff documented, though.  At best I am told that for function add(a,b), “a and b are input” and “add(a,b) returns a+b” or something obvious like that…  or that the class “AbstractVisitor” is an abstract visitor class.  Duh!

I would love it if people would stop commenting the obvious but start explaining their design decisions…

I just got two research grant applications rejected this week.

Nothing wrong with that, really, the success rate where I applied is less than 10% so I couldn’t really expect to get the grants.  Still, it annoys me a little bit that the letter I got back is just boiler plate.  “We receive more applications than we can fund, and unfortunately we could not fund yours.”

That doesn’t tell me if I was close to getting funded or lightyears from it.  It certainly doesn’t help me improve on the application if I want to try again.

Some feedback on the applications would really be nice.  If not a full reviewer report, then at least a score or something…

Oh well, I still have one grant application under review, this one for the EU Research Council, and here at least I’ve already gotten a review report back, with scores and everything, and it looks really nice, so I have my fingers crossed…

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342-339=+3