Mit großer Freude kann ich verkünden, dass mein Weblog seit Juli 2007 das meistbesuchte von allen unter blogs.ethz.ch verzeichneten ist.
| Monat | Zugriffe |
|---|---|
| Jul 2007 | 13954 |
| Aug 2007 | 19055 |
| Sep 2007 | 19280 |
| Okt 2007 | 17917 |
| Nov 2007 | 34289 |
Allen treuen Lesern herzlichen Dank!
With more and more data being piled up on our groups network drives, it is difficult to find things. Our hope in this data maze was the program Windows Desktop Search. However, I observed for some days the indexing activity (after adding our group network drives) and I had the impression it didn’t get anywhere. It has indexed about 4k files, with millions left.
I tried the alternative program Google Desktop and after only two days it is almost through (80%). The major difference is that it only concentrates on defined file types and items what reduces the amount of files drastically. And so I can conclude in this small and unscientific test, that I recommend to use Google Desktop. It’s interface is very intuitive (as searching online) and it does a much better job at indexing. However, it fills your entire desktop with all kinds of information, so for one time you have to click that away. I only left that pane on the right with weather status, PC resource usage, volume bar and recent files/web pages.
Schaut mal auf blogs.ethz.ch, das ist das Portal zu allen an der ETH geführten Weblogs. Rechts gibt es zum Einen die aktivsten Blogs und auch eine Zugriffs-Statistik pro Weblog. 
In the past I very often had the impression that most of my friends believe I have an easy life as scientist. And I must admit, most things are cool being a PhD student here in Zurich. But some aren’t. And one of the most detestable ordeals on my way to scientific achievement is the IEEE pdf express tool. Because you need to get past that to submit a paper for the conference proceedings.
Imagine you spent weeks and months on something like a optimization or extensive study of a new virtual environment feedback strategy. You worked out all the problems, cheered up your despaired students, tracked down cryptic C++ Compiler errors, spent night after night in the lab to just solve that last problem, kept your boss informed and amused, and finally you have got the graphs and all the knowledge that you want to share with the scientific world. So you select a nice conference (in our field the most important conferences are sponsored by IEEE), and write down your dearly bought knowledge. You even used a template to rule out your inadequate wisdom on the fonts, sizes, margins, and such things. And this is what pdf express sends to you:
Dear Mathias Wellner,
The following PDF has failed the PDF Check:
Filename: Filename.pdf
Title: Great Results in Rehabilitation Robotics
Paper ID: 4491Please see the attached report for a list of the specific problem areas.
And these are the problems, that the report revealed:
And the worst thing is, I was not even aware, that I have links in this Word document, let alone bookmarks. Is this HTML or a web browser? And all this font embedding crap. I told Distiller to embed all fonts. Really all of them, so why doen’t it just listen to me? And in these moments I feel absolutely powerless and insignificant.
Trust me — being a PhD student is not easy!
Note: I finally found a way to get rid of those error messages. Instead of Word, I used IEEEs LaTeX template and created a PDF that passed this test. Yet, embedding fonts still proved problematic, as fonts of included eps figures were not embedded. I used ps2pdf with the option prepress to get what I wanted. And now it is all neatly integrated in my Makefile.
Ein weiteres Opfer der Blog-Hysterie ist zu beklagen. Mein Kollege Alex (dessen Name eigentlich noch viel länger ist, aber das tut nichts zur Sache) hat ein Weblog mit dem erklärungsbedürftigen Namen Kejeblos eröffnet. In seinem ersten Eintrag erklärt er dann auch die Mission seines Weblogs. Er möchte — und dies wohl stärker als ich — wissenschaftliche Fragestellungen in seinem Weblog erörtern, die ersten Beiträge handeln dementsprechend auch von der ICORR-Konferenz und seinem Vorgehen bei der Softwareentwicklung. Auf jeden Fall ein herzliches Willkommen in der Blogosphäre und viel Ausdauer beim Schreiben!