pancake theorem a blog by jenn schiffer

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Convert your math scribbles to LaTex and MathML with Web Equation

Just saw this on Google+, posted by my friend and CS dept. adjunct, Lukasz (yes, Luke, you have your own tag, now). It’s a cool tool that takes your chicken-scratch handwriting and converts it into LaTex and MathML code, which you can just copy and paste into your respective editors. Unlike Lukasz, who probably tried it out with an actual math equation, I drew a pig.

Cut me some slack. I’m home dealing with neuropathic back pain and my wisdom tooth is ripping the right side of my bottom jaw off. LET ME LIVE A LITTLE.

On a related note, WordPress.com, and the .org plugin Jetpack, supports LaTex:

-\dfrac {.i_{1}\min_{\cos }} {y}\dfrac {1} {1}..

That’s my piggy LaTex code. You probably can’t see it in the RSS feed, though. This is the first time I’ve posted LaTeX on this blargh. ~*MILESTONES*~

posted February 3, 2012 2 Comments

Change your Mac’s screenshot cursor to something other than that boring black camera

I take screenshots all the time, and I hate the default black camera that Mac OS X has when you do selection captures. I figured it would be easy as hell to replace it: just find that icon, then switch it with the one I want. So while Jimmy made the world’s best grilled cheese sandwiches last night, that’s exactly what I did.

The first task was finding original camera image. I actually lucked out by assuming it was in a folder of cursors, since that’s what it technically is. I searched my Mac for “cursor” and it fortunately popped up pretty quickly (my machine is running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2, by the way). You can do the same (search “cursor.png”), or go to the patch of the folder it resides in. See the following screenshot to see what I mean – it’s quite a mouthful:

Once you’re in the folder that contains cursor.png, you want to open that image in a graphics editor to add a layer for your new camera graphic, then delete the original layer. This way your new cursor is in the same mode and format as the original cursor. Bill Brown’s Camera Collection is hands-down the best place to go if you want to find 8-bit-style camera icons. Since I love my Diana+, I grabbed that illustration to be my new screenshot cursor.

Save the new cursor you made to your Desktop, as the cursor.png’s folder is not editable without authorization. Name it “cursor.png” and drag it into the cursor.png folder. The OS will most likely bark at you and make you log in.

I renamed the original cursor to “cursor-original.png” just in case I wanted to revert to it in the future. Once you’ve replaced “cursor.png” with your snazzy new icon, restart your machine to watch it take effect. No more boring camera cursor!

How I ever slept at night before I did this, I’ll never understand.

posted February 1, 2012 Comment

Cry me a river, e-book haters! or how I never manage to ride the bus without someone aggravating me.

Technological evolution is about efficiency and convenience. Instead of going out and buying a newspaper or talking to neighbors, we watch the news on TV or online. Instead of going to the library, many of us do research on the Web. Most markets have worked to adapt as new technologies made their in-place operations obsolete (think music and film), and obsoleteness unavoidable. Not that something being obsolete means that it won’t exist anymore – Nicholas Carr buys albums on vinyl because it also comes in digital format, and I do the same.

What a dream it would be for me to buy a print book and it come with a voucher for a free digital copy!

It’s the Internet for crying out loud, and we all know it’s not going anywhere, no matter how hard some may try. Just like programmers use magnetic or solid-state storage devices to save their work instead of punched cards, the publishing industry now needs to make changes to the way they operate. Giving the option of an e-book or print book doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

You may be asking “why all this angst today, Jenn ‘the destroyer’ Schiffer?” This morning, a woman on the bus saw me reading with my Kindle and said uninvitedly “You like e-book readers? Well, I like the genuine feeling of a printed book in my hands.”

Okay, awesome. Then why don’t you marry it buy printed books. Books are still more available in print than in digital form. But you cannot deny that there is a market for ebooks, just as you cannot deny that big names in the book industry (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) and outside the industry (Apple, Google) are putting a big focus on ebooks and e-book readers.

When people get on e-book-reader owners’ cases about how it’s ruining the publishing industry, I can’t help but think that it’s publishing houses that are causing the harm. They let e-book retailers, like Amazon, bully them into unsatisfactory (to them, at least) pricing models, and then they try to fight the e-book trend while playing along with it by offering their titles in ebook form – even having the authors they sell ebooks of going to the press and misguidedly crying about how ebooks are damaging society.

Perhaps big money-making publishers and authors are just getting the chills when they imagine the next great American novelist releasing their first novel independently on iBooks or Amazon.

posted January 31, 2012 Comment

Use Structurer to create base file structures, the quick and easy way

Structurer (I think “rural juror” is easier to say) is a free little Mac utility that lets you type out a file structure, and then it creates the directories and files you typed out.

Great for when you want to start fresh with a new directory, but you know the files you’re going to be creating.

You can also save your templates to use later.

Click “Create” and Structurer builds your directory in the base path you provide.

posted January 30, 2012 1 Comment

Spring semesters

Funny how we call them “spring semesters” when they start in late January. When I tell folks that I’m too busy to take on new freelance work because “I’m busy this Spring,” they get all confused and respond with “well, you can work on it now, right?”

This semester is my last as a graduate student. I had taken a couple of years off after finishing my coursework to take care of some thangs. Now that I’m back, I have just my culminating experience, ie. a project, to complete. It has only been 2 weeks, and I’m totally pumped about what I’m working on.

When I get excited about a project, it usually leads to a total code binge. I redid my entire portfolio, redesigned my 8-bit site, and I just activated the new theme I built for this site. It’s interesting how much more inspired I am to get this Master’s degree today than I was a couple of years ago. Of course, back then the job market sucked, people told me I was an idiot for going to graduate school, and h8rs made fun of my MacBook because for some reason they think you can’t program with one. Where does that idea even come from?

Here’s hoping that I (and you) stay inspired and get to keep working on cool stuff this Spring-but-actually-it-is-winter-right-now semester.

PS. I’m looking for an intern.

posted January 27, 2012 7 Comments

Override user agent to test mobile sites on Chrome Canary

Chrome has a Canary release (for Mac OS X 10.5+) that added an “Override User Agent” setting in its developer tools, allowing you to set the user agent for testing mobile sites. If you set it to iOS and go to montclair.edu, for example, it will be seen by Montclair’s web server as an iOS device and be sent to its /mobile directory.

What’s cool about this release is that you can install it and run it side-by-side with your usual install of Chrome – no need to overwrite it. A-O RIVER!

posted January 19, 2012 Comment

Going from Finder directory to Terminal with Go2Shell

Go2Shell (← iTunes App store link) is a cool little Mac app that lets you add a button to Finder that, when clicked, takes you to that same directory in Terminal.

Installation isn’t as straight forward as just getting it from the App store. After installation, you need to drag the app icon from your Applications folder to the buttons on a Finder window.

I hope that a future update will make the button the same size as the other Finder buttons in Lion, as it’s beginning to drive me crazy. Regardless, it’s quite useful, and it’s free.

posted January 10, 2012 Comment

Add permalinks to the end of your WordPress RSS content

I did some much-needed cleanup of my server over the holiday break. One of the main tasks was removing this blog into a different directory and out of a former WordPress multisite network.

While playing around with the “new” site, I did some small changes that I’ve been meaning to do for months – changes as simple as adding my post’s permalink to the end of each post in my RSS feed.

You can do it, too. Just add the following function and filters to your theme directory’s functions.php file:

<?php 
 
// add permalink to end of each RSS post
function permalinksInRSS($content) {
    $content = $content.'<p><a href="' . get_permalink() . 
'" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to \''.get_the_title().'\'">[permalink]</a><p>';
    return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_feed', 'permalinksInRSS');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'permalinksInRSS');
 
?>

You can change “[permalink]” to whatever text you want to show. For example, my feed now says “[View this post on pancake theorem.]”

I’m assuming there may be a plugin out there that does this, but I’m not down with OPP (other people’s plugins) when it’s as simple as this snippet.

Note: If it doesn’t work after adding the code, you should refresh your blog’s cache, (and re-ping it on Feedburner if you use it).

posted January 9, 2012 3 Comments