Hippie-whip: (verb) To exploit someone’s strongly held alternative values and beliefs for the purposes of tricking them into going out of their way to help or support you. The subjects of a hippie-whip are compelled to act in your interests as it is a way for them to demonstrate their commitment to their hippie values.

Their daughter enjoys being a vegetarian, not because of any noble principles, but simply because it’s a way for her to “hippie-whip” her parents into making a fuss over her and her vegetarianism.

Phone leg: A British synonym of phantom phone, the experience of feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket when in fact it hasn’t. You are either imagining it or mistaking other vibration sources for your phone. Commonly occurs when driving in the narrow cobble-stoned streets of London. More likely to occur if you are talking about someone behind their back. You suddenly think they’re calling you, feel an immediate twinge of guilt, followed by immense relief when you realise it was just phone leg.

Ed: “Hang on, my phone’s going. Oh no it’s not. It’s phone leg. I thought it was my daughter. Do you get phone leg?”
Rob: “Yes, but I try not to keep it in my leg.”
Ed: “What are you, a terminator?”

ESL speak: The change in speech that happens (sometimes unconsciously) when an EFL speaker is talking to an ESL speaker. The EFL speaks louder & slower, uses clearer syllables and sometimes adopts the accent of their ESL audience. Useful when ordering Chinese or Indian takeaway over the phone so it is more easily understood. Has no racist motivations at all but is simply a practical way to assist communication.

EFL: “I have one beef-a-black-been, laaj spesha frai raice, tree dim sim.”
ESL: “Ok, be ten fitteen minnas. Ba Bai.”
Friend-of-EFL: “Dude, that was some nice ESL speak.”
ESL: “Tayn-you. Mehbe I shudda orda sam sprin roos a well.”
Friend-of-ESL: “OK you can stop now you friggin racist.”

I’ll be the first to admit that if you can be bothered getting your hands dirty, LaTeX makes documents look pretty damn sweet. But there are times when the fuss of setting up distros and then beating LaTeX into submission just isn’t worth it (positioning figures, anyone?). If you just need to throw a quick document together, but want people to think you’re a LaTeX pro, you can get passable results using Word 2007 with a few tweaks:

1. First, download the Computer Modern and Latin Modern fonts. Word 2007 supports the OpenType format so get that. Don’t be disheartened by how these fonts look onscreen – some look like total arse, but let’s face it, these fonts were not designed for the screen at all. They look fine when printed or even in a PDF if you zoom in far enough. And stick with “LM Roman 12″ as it has the proper bold font, others may look strange. You can find even more fonts if you install a LaTeX distro like MikTeX and search the installation folder for *.pfm files.
2. If you want to approximate BibTeX-style references, get the IEEE citation stylesheet for Microsoft Word 2007 and extract to
   C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style.
3. Set up your heading sizes and turn on 1.2.3 section numbering. I can’t be bothered explaining how so here’s a sample word document to get you started.
4. Make sure you use the LM fonts for all figures and diagrams for consistency. However, for built-in equations, you’re stuck with Cambria Math, which Microsoft built especially for equations, but it doesn’t look too bad.

When you’ve finished your document it should look something like this PDF of the sample template linked to above.

The interface is simple. You can click an “I like this” button for each item. This is the most important UI feature Reader has introduced to date. Using the shortcut keys, I can read articles with acceptable speed and use the L key to quickly flag interesting items. However, what Google does with this “user X likes item Y” training data needs a lot of work.

Here’s some improvements that need to be made, ASAP:

• It shouldn’t show me items from feeds I subscribe to and have already read (syntactic duplication).
• It shouldn’t show me reposts of news stories I have already read (semantic duplication). If a story is deemed relevant, show me the most authoritative reporting of it.
• It shouldn’t show me useless no-content feeds that require you go to the original site to view the story.
• If it’s going to recommend YouTube videos, then it should use the mountain of data it already has on the YouTube network already, not just recommend based on popularity.
• Recommendations need to have much higher precision. Currently, I estimate its less than 0.1  (for every 10 items I read, 1 is relevant).
• It should apply the relevance filtering to posts in my existing subscriptions, most of which have similarly low precision.
• However, there are some feeds such as web comics which should not be filtered. I want to read every single XKCD whether I find it funny or not. If a system could predict which I find funny before I read them I’d be thoroughly impressed!
• Ranking of items (by “magic”? please…) is NOT important. I want to read stories from oldest to newest. I want recall of 1.0 and precision of at least 0.8 or I’m not interested.

To be successful, it needs to merge StumbleUpon’s classification system (which has the logic right) with the Google Reader framework (which has the interface right).

To make a parallel with Gmail and spam classification, the reason Gmail’s anti-spam shits all over other spam classifiers is that Google added a simple “This is Spam” button to the web interface, effectively outsourcing the training of spam messages to its enormous user base. Similar techniques can be applied to Google Reader, but on an individualised basis.

Key to the success of such a classifier is social analysis, which is used by StumbleUpon and Last.fm recommends music I might like, based on what people with similar taste listen to.

OK, so this is pretty old news but I hadn’t really noticed until recently as they don’t show a link for all documents. But why is this so awesome? PDF is a rich format that offers many features not really relevant to web search. Most often searchers are just looking for some information, like MSY’s latest price on that Hot New Intel CPU.

But this only affects search results. But you can install a Greasemonkey script which opens all links to PDF, PPT and DOC files using the Google Docs Viewer. We’ve had online apps for a while, but I consider Google’s  step of opening up the GDocs Viewer to be THE official singularity, or “beginning of the end” for the humble desktop application. After this, there is no turning back. And I for one, want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Or as a friend of mine once said “Firefox + Internet = Operating System”.

That said, one feature that needs improvement is searching within documents. This is only enabled for some documents, presumably the one Google has had time to index the metadata or OCR. And search hits are only highlighted with no feature of iterating through them.

http://userstyles.org/styles/20377

Stylish is a Firefox Extension that can apply custom CSS styles to certain webpages, in most cases fixing a user-identified problem with the design. DJBullwinkle has written a custom style called Google Reader Absolutely Compact which does exactly what it says on the box.

Basically, it makes several improvements on the much bloated default interface, allowing you to maximize the efficiency of your screen real estate.

• Article text spans full width of screen
• Compact no-frills borders around items
• Almost all heading stuff removed, save for the search box
• Narrower left-hand column

Visit the link for a preview of the changes, or just try it out! This has been added to my list of essential Firefox tweaks; it’s a godsend.

I should mention, this also removes some navigation buttons, so you’re gonna want to get up to speed on the keyboard shortcuts by pressing “?” in Google Reader.

My only real criticism would be to increase the size of article headings so they stand out a bit more, which you can do by changing the font-size from 100% to 140% as below:

/* shrink titles, but add underlining for visual identification */
.entry .entry-title {
    font-size:140% !important; }

I will conclude by remarking on a trend I’ve noticed in online interfaces since using websites which tailor their design to the iPhone and iPod Touch. These interfaces are some of the most efficient and user-friendly I’ve used to date: Google Reader, Google Talk Gadget, Gmail, FaceBook, Last.fm, ANZ Internet Banking, there are more.  Web designers should be reminded that only when forced to trim a design back to the bare essentials, do you realise what those essentials actually are. You discard all those tacked on superfluous features (Google is notorious for this, just look at Gmail), until only the functional ones remain.

Happy reading!

Word is being funny, you are messing around with equations that aren’t behaving right. You try to save and it won’t let you save for some reason. You think “Oh I’ll just restart to make Word all better again.” You restart and your effing document won’t open with an error something like:

The Office Open XML file FileName.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents.

WTF!? This was your only copy of the document! OMG! After you have taken a vallium, do the following:

Click Details on the error dialog and note down the location of the error (e.g. /word/document.xml, Line: 2, Column: 65946).

Rename your faulty document to FileName.docx.zip and extract it into some folder.

Open up the XML file listed in the error message and locate the offending column. For this you might want to download XML Copy Editor or any other editor that has the features we need. You can see the column number in the status bar.

The offending error will probably be an XML tag. In my case column 65946 was at the * below (* has been added)

... </w:t></m:r><m:ctrlPr*><w:rPr><w:rFonts w:ascii="Cambria Math" ...

So the error is in the <m:ctrlPr> tag. Now you need to add a fake attribute to the tag called a="aaaaa" or something easily identifiable that won’t occur naturally in the Office XML. Your tag should look like this.

<m:ctrlPr a="aaaaa">

By default, the XML is all on one line to save on space, but we need to fix that to delete this tag.

In XML Copy Editor, select Pretty print from the XML menu. Now search for “aaaaa” or whatever you called your fake attribute. You should now be able to visually see the entire tag.

<m:ctrlPr a="aaaaa">
  <w:rPr>
    <w:rFonts w:ascii="Cambria Math" w:hAnsi="Cambria Math"/>
    <w:i/>
    <w:lang w:val="en-AU"/>
  </w:rPr>
</m:ctrlPr>

Now just delete the whole <m:ctrlPr> tag and save the document. You can leave it in Pretty Print, it will still be valid XML.

Re-ZIP the contents of the folder you extracted to and rename document back to FileName.docx.

Try to open in Office 2007. If it works, Hooray! If it doesn’t, and you get another error, repeat this process. Else retype your 10,000 word document!

“The web is a dynamic medium, and one example of this is the discussion features provided by websites. It’s functionality like this that will see readers tearing themselves away from the purity of their feeds. You can’t post a comment without visiting the actual website… yet. It won’t be long before we have … an open standard for abstracting website discussions into the feed reader, possibly eliminating the need for a website altogether.”

This is essentially Google Wave. The demo contained no specific example of abstracting blog comments into the wave client but I’m certain someone will write an extension; after all it’s open source.

I am really excited that Google have decided to push the web in this direction. If you’ve got a spare hour and 20 mins, go watch the demo. You WILL be impressed.

The answer? I googled and was like “why didn’t I think of that?”. The solution was to do it on a Mac. The Preview application lets you “crop all pages”. You select the area you want, hit Cmd-I to bring up the inspector, then click that magical button. Now I’m enough of a Mac fanboy as it is, but after wasting at least 20 minutes stuffing around on Windows, I wouldn’t be exaggerating by saying this is a jaw-dropping feature.

Then just “print” yourself another PDF using Preview, this time in 2-up with 120% zoom or whatever and you’re done. Add this anecdote to the List of Reasons Macs are Preferred by Publishers, if that even is true.

P.S. Have I spruiked Google Scholar yet? I haven’t had to write a single BibTeX entry so far.

If you use Google Reader and want to jump on the sharing bandwagon, click on Sharing Settings (tiny text, easy to miss) on the left-hand side menu, then click on Change next to “You are currently sharing with (whoever)”.  Mine defaulted to “Friends” – I’m not sure where Google gets that subset of contacts. So I changed it to “all chat contacts” and also published my shared items to a web page and feed.