Quantum Forest logs are written by Luis A. Apiolaza in Christchurch, New Zealand and powered by TextPattern.

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Non-blog (Wiki)

Somewhere else

Concentrating all work in my wiki
Published Friday May 4, 2007 · Permalink

From now on I will post most updates to this site in the wiki side of things. The blogging thing will continue, but most of it will be done in the new version of Quantum Forest . For technical details of the—granted, very basic—new blog functionality please check the gory details.

In summary, I installed a PmWiki ‘recipe’ that provides basic blog functionality and, most importantly, makes referencing other pages in the wiki fairly easy. This provides me with more consistent ways of managing my information, and will also allow me to work a bit more in the ASReml Cookbook.

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Testing new design
Published Tuesday May 1, 2007 · Permalink

I have uploaded a new design that I am testing for a few pages, including the about section of the blog. Once I get rid of all the little bugs it will become live.

I made available the colour scheme in kuler, a color scheme site owned by Adobe. Just search for ‘oldtimers’ and you will find it.

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Finished moving hosts
Published Wednesday January 17, 2007 · Permalink

I needed to move a wiki (PmWiki), a blog (Textpattern) and a content management system (Drupal) to the new host.

Most of the move was relatively painless: downloaded the file structures from the original host using Transmit (FTP client for the mac), exported data bases from the old host (for Textpattern and Drupal), uploaded the file structure to the new host (using Transmit again), created databases in the new host, imported the databases in to the new host, and checked that things were working using a mirror of the new site. The latter was to avoid down time while changing the name servers.

Moving files and creating databases went without problems, but there were a few hiccups:

In all, my three sites in the domain were not working perfectly well for around 12 hours. Completely painless? No, but perfectly acceptable.

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The effect of community
Published Saturday October 7, 2006 · Permalink

(Or why do I prefer software where I do have a say)

Recently I was commenting on some software that I use for writing. I think that one of the main reasons non-strictly related to software usefulness is the quality of the community around the software. This has two elements:

As an example, I like using Journler to keep track of odd ends in my mac computer. I also like using Writeroom when starting to write, because I can focus on my ideas only. Both programs have relatively active groups of users (here and here) and receptive developers, who are looking for feedback. The feeling is of people who care about a product, which in general is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for good programs. By comparison, I struggle with Copywrite, because there is no public feedback mechanism: I do not know what other users think or what are the projects of the developer for this software. Is he (or she) still developing it or now he is moving to live in Vanuatu to enjoy the rest of his life?

An interesting element is that both Writeroom and Journler are free (sensu gratis)—although the developers ask for donations—while Copywrite costs US$30 or so. There is a psychological element on paying for software; one thinks that the programmers must be working on the product. However, there is no feedback to confirm this assumption in Copywrite. In addition, I expect more activity from smaller companies: they are supossed to be more agile than, say, Microsoft.

Thus, if you are a small company I expect you to show some changes here and there. If you are a small company and charge for your product I better should have a say on what is going on. If you are a large company, most likely I will buy your software only if I need to, because most probably you are developing not very interesting products (there are exceptions1 of course).

1 Wolfram’s Mathematica is an example. Insightful’s Splus is not: R is much more active, there is plenty of feedback and it is free.

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Sending large files
Published Wednesday August 9, 2006 · Permalink

Most of the time I work with small files, mostly text, even if they have a fair amount of equations. Equations are not a big deal, particularly if I am using LaTeX (with TeXShop in the mac or MikTeX in PCs). Nevertheless, some times I have to deliver presentations or—in this particular case—receive someone else’s presentation for my classes.

If I am producing teaching material I use Keynote, which is a sucker for file size (my main pet hate with it), but it looks great. I can go for Keynote because I am using my Macbook Pro. If I am giving a presentation to industry I normally have to put my presentation in to someone else’s computer, so I go for PowerPoint (and do not use any compressed images), to avoid errors.

Anyway, this time I was supposed to receive a PowerPoint file from a guest lecturer, so I could print copies of the presentation for the students. The problem was that the presentation was 16MB (not big for these days, mostly pictures), and the university has an attachment limit of 6MB. Google mail has a limit of 10MB and I wanted to avoid taking time for the guest lecturer partitioning his presentation in to 5MB chunks.

I tried using Mediamax, which allows anonymous uploads to registered users. It did not work that well, because the files would take several hours to show up in my Mediamax file manager. Then we tried with a much simpler solution: Mailbigfile. This worked flawlessly, I immediately received an email with a web address from where to download the files and the interface was quite clean. There were only a few text ads to support the service. Simple, reliable and free: what else do I need? In some cases encryption could be a concern, but they do offer a ‘pro’ encrypted version for USD18 a year. That aside, I do not need hosting big files in a permanent basis, so Mailbigfile has spot on features for me.

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