I’m partial to the following WYSIWYG editors for Drupal:

• WidgEditor - stupid simple
• TinyMCE - way complicated powerful

But neither of them work well enough for me to want to use them. The trade-off for using these is that it’s easy to make pretty text, but if you ever need to manually edit, it’s incredibly painful. The biggest problem is that they don’t make new lines for paragraph breaks, smashing everything together into one huge, ugly block. And since Drupal has a nice, built-in filter for creating paragraph elements, it’s redundant (and infuriating).

The only markup you need is bold, emphasis, links, pictures and a way to turn it off. Wordpress seems to get it.

I just started auditing a Mathematical Models in Biology class and Matlab is one of the requirements. I had relatively good experience with the free, open source alternative, Octave back in college, but then I was running Linux, not OSX. It took me about an hour to figure out how to set it up (I was a little worried for a bit).

1. Download the Octave binary for OSX from Octaveforge.

2. Install Octave and Gnuplot (in the extras folder). I just dragged them to /Applications (X11 is required for Gnuplot—should be found on OSX install disk)

3. If you are using OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or 10.5.8+ you may need to perform some additional steps outlined here

4. Set the environment variable for gnuplot (Octave is supposed to do this automatically, but it didn’t for me): `

sudo ln -s /Applications/GnuPlot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot /usr/bin/gnuplot

`

(thanks for the help, Toby)

1. Download and install (again in /Applications) Aquaterm which will actually render the gnuplot graphs.

2. Within Gnuplot, set the renderer: “terminal aqua”

3. Try it out in Octave (I had to restart Octave and Gnuplot to get it all to work): `

x = linspace(-pi, pi, 100);

y = sin(x);

plot(x, y);

`

Thank you: High Performance Computing for Mac OS X, the Octave Wiki and Google for helping me find what I needed.

Update (January 24, 2010): updated the link in step #1 to the latest version of Octave. Added an additional step described by Zack in the comments (thanks!)

I could care less about the politics, but it’s interesting to see that a congresswoman was caught “plagiarizing” (“borrowing” or “incorporating” if you want to play the pronoun game) in a newspaper column via “a program that monitors high school and college student papers for acts of copying and forgery”. (via ThinkProgress.org)

I didn’t realize that people were using things like Turn It In for non-schoolwork.

Not that I’d want to cite Johnny 10th Grader, but I wonder if their algorithm/database would work for looking for references (which then you could *properly* cite).

With our single, double or triple Toe Straighteners, you can align overlapping, crooked or hammertoes with gentle, constant pressure. From Colonial Medical (via a gmail contextual ad for probably “step on any toes” in an email)

Thoughts.

Today I just started computing the relations between groups. It’s been chugging along on my local machine for about 8 hours now, I’m 1% complete and have a table with 5 million entries (at 210mb).

If a word is shared between two groups, it forms an edge between those two groups. I’m storing that edge as the two group ids and the “overlap” value (the number of words shared between those two groups).

My algorithm is iterating through every word, finding the groups that the word is a part of, and creating an edge between them—computing overlap as it goes. I expect the rate to fall off as duplicate edges are thrown out…. but we’ll see.

tee is a Unix command that displays the output of a program and copies it into a file. lint program.c | tee program.lint

1 cup flour (I’ve been using white whole wheat)

1 egg

~2tbps cool water

1. Mix flour and egg, adding water until flour is just moistened and sticks together

2. Let rest for 5 minutes

3. Knead the dough for 2 minutes. Or you can do it for 10 minutes; more kneading means better developed gluten and a “smoother” noodle.

4. Let rest 10 minutes

5. Roll out or whatever

(adapted from a cooks.com recipe

Info on Hemp Milk.

I just bought some of this (Manitoba Harvest brand, the chocolate kind) at Whole Foods. It’s not soy milk, but I’m not sure if it’s any better. I kind’ve got a bit of a choke in the back of my throat on the first sip, though after that it was pretty smooth.

Thoughts of mortality make people entrench their beliefs. (via boingboing). It also makes people act in ways that boost their self-esteem, which, importantly, affects their consumer behavior (via google).

These seem to both be domestic studies. I wonder how the US compares internationally in “mortality awareness”. (I’m guessing pretty low).