@egreg (This is a linguistic/folk geographic question I guess.) How do Italians generally describe the relations between places in the country, given that it's actual orientation is on a NW - SE diagonal.
@AlanMunn Genoa is in Northern Italy, Rome in Central Italy. We don't use cardinal points very much.
Our roads rarely keep one direction.
@AlanMunn East and West are meaningful only for small sectors. For instance, Trieste is the far East of Norhern Italy, but it's actually West of Naples
@egreg Ok, that's what I'm getting at. In North America, cardinal points are used a lot, but there never absolute. For example, the island of Montreal is on a SW - NE diagonal, but the roads that head roughly W are called N and the roads that head S are called E, to line up with the general flow of the St Lawrence river, which the island is in.
@egreg Yes, I find this interesting. I think most North Americans would conceptualize Italy as being on a N-S axis, and so use that to describe relative locations, hence my surprise that you described Vernazza as east and not south.
@egreg Sure, but on the N-S axis it's south. By that, I mean, straighten the whole country so that Milan is due north and Catanzaro is due south. This is the conceptual axis. Now Vernazza is south of Genoa. :) As I said, this is not a question of actual geography.
Evidence for such a conceptual axis is that you don't call Southern Italy, Eastern Italy.
@AlanMunn Well, this is the North-American way of thinking. We don't think this way. “Why on earth should Milan be the reference?” would say somebody from Turin or Venice.
@AlanMunn And Milan is definitely not the midpoint of Northern Italy; it's the Garda lake, 200 km East of Milan. ;-) And, for us, 200 km are a distance.
@AlanMunn We do think of the peninsular part going N-S, but that's all.
The non peninsular part is visualized roughly as a rectangle. So, two big blocks.
any one here knows something about how to tell htlatex which image format to use for the mathematics it generates for display in the HTML? It seems to always generate .png now. I wanted to if it possible to make it generate some other format, say .jpg.
@StephanLehmke, I actually do the same as @Werner (which is comforting, because I thought I was just chickening out). Very rarely do I note dissent, and that is only when I have a very firm grasp of the topic at hand. Community agreement is important here on TeX.SX and we're all generally very nice. A question will be closed if and only if it really needs to be.
And my math soul just cringed; I doubt that there isn't a single case where a question is open where it should be closed (or vice–versa).
@DavidCarlisle Minecraft is a bottomless sink of time and a well for unsung creativity. I'm blessed to have a computer incapable of running it. :-)
Oh helpful people of the TeX chat, anyone around to help me figure out what I'm doing wrong in implementing the suggestion in the (sort of) answer to my question here?
@SeanAllred I'm not sure where the nicety (niceness?) argument comes into play. Closing a question or flagging an answer is not inherently a nice thing to to.
@SeanAllred I'm not completely sure how you define "community". Considering how many people have the required privileges, if a handful of them vote to close or flag a post, they could as well be an extremist minority ;-)
@StephanLehmke If there is dissent on something, a meta question is usually opened about it for more general discussion. Having a 3/5 majority is what you hope for in a last-ditch effort of rock-paper-scissors—not in closing a q.
I feel it's important to really try to judge the case at hand when reviewing. Of course there will probably be a lot of people who agree most of the times, but instead of just saying "the community will know best" it would probably be better not to review at all.
As someone whose primary SE experience comes from another SE (Phil.SE) I'm always very impressed with how y'all deal with new users and the closing process. It seems to me that a relatively small portion of questions are closed when compared to my other experiences. claps for TeX.SX
(on another note...it seems to me that a lot of other stacks use .SE to indicate .stackexchange, whereas TeX seems to almost universally use .SX)
@StephanLehmke Sorry, I was TeXing. (Or rather, editing a question.) I can definitely see your POV, and so does the great majority (I presume) of the SE network—the functionality exists for a reason! If you feel strongly and disagree with a vote, vote against it.
@StephanLehmke Their intended meaning is always among the possible assignments of meanings to variables, and I can't read greek anyways, so I think they're coming out ahead!
@PauloCereda so I wrote to the shop that either they solve the problem or I return the notebook (which I can do in 2 weeks after purchase, by the Czech legislation)
@PauloCereda well, I have F20 and it's fine. But I paid for the windows and I want to use it when we have a LAN party with friends. However, some things obviously don't work without registration.
@FaheemMitha Basically, yes. You get 1 non-win PC offer for 10 yes-win ones (of course modulo ignore Apple)
@tohecz Ok, I see. You can't easily get one without Windows installed. But (stating the obvious) because the thing is installed, it doesn't mean you have to use it.
@FaheemMitha yes, but I want to use it (from time to time) once I have it. And it should work, as I said, they are MF idiots that are not able to make it work with dual-boot
@FaheemMitha We are always behind in terms of hardware, so sadly the better offer is always get a pre-built stuff instead of a custom one, or we will end up getting an overpriced hardware. :(
Here in India the situation is not good either. Poor choices for hardware, and overpriced. But I still prefer buying hardware of my choice than an pre-assembled machine.
@FaheemMitha remember that in the notebook, may things are hard-wired: CPU, GPU, wifi card, USB ports, card readers, display. Basically, you can opt for different HDD/SSD and RAM
@PauloCereda My workstation's motherboard died in June 2013. So I had to replace the mb and the processor and the memory. I have a computer person, but they don't have very good customer skills - most of the time they just ignore you. So it took me like 2 months to get the parts replaced and the machine back up and working.
@JosephWright: even the Sony CEO said he didn't want to sell any PS4 in Brazil because of the price. Sony is actually ashamed of how Brazilian market is full of taxes -- that increases the final price a lot and the company loses their market share. :)
@JosephWright well, it was an "ivalid flag" I issued on a post that should have had a "not an answer" flag, so I think it's fine. It's just that I hate doing these mistakes and that I'm a stat-hunter too :)
Hello everyone. Belated Happy New Year! Procrastinating on TeX.SX, I wondered, if there is a way becoming a certified TeX user, similar to becoming a certified Linux professional. Does anyone know something about it?
@tohecz I'd really prefer your proposal. If I was to hire a TeX consultant, I'd do it this way. But unfortunately the most personnel managers want to see "official" document.
@JosephWright I'm definitely interested in other opinions on this.
@HenriMenke @Joseph I'm thinking now whether a question "How to convince a HR manager that I'm a TeXpert?" would be suitable for TeX.SX. I've surely seen questions of this kind on Acad.SE and Workplace.SE
There're users here who are TeX consultants, they might have some insight in this
@JosephWright: perhaps the biggest problem about TeX certification is: in which levels are we talking? Being the visual appearance the most subjective one. :(
The “TL;DR” is at the bottom of this posting, which reads:
So did SE change its Q&A policy, is Sound Design a failed beta, or are there just different rules there than on all other SE sites?
The reason for the question in my title is because of the Sound Design SE site. I looked it over a...
@PauloCereda what are you talking about, madman? :D
@JosephWright and in this sense, big-list questions are good, as long as they're not too subjective. Listing all LaTeX editors and their features is not subjective itself, default packages are.
@JosephWright the problem is that new users tend to post big-list questions thinking "how cool that question would be", not realizing that the question is really bad. It takes a lot of experience (and discussion sometimes) to make a good and useful one.
@tohecz That's partly why the main site has a different approach to main things: lots of new users, lots of low quality or repeated questions, far fewer people to answer (relatively), no real possibility of anyone watching most/all of the questions
I compile a large song book, and for that I would like to have many local definitions of fuctions, that will, in the end, be in an \include d file, but that makes no difference here. For this, I need to define the functions inside \score{ ... } scope. However, LilyPond keeps throwing errors.
The...
@StiffJokes The mechanism is there only to prevent too many 'me too' answers. To be honest I'm not sure it's that useful to us: much more important on the main site where they have lots of new users with low rep and a tendency to post 'junk' answers.
@JosephWright This kind of filter should be more meaningful if enabled by default to all questions I think. Or without this we can still be able to flag such "bad" answers. :-)
@StiffJokes well, protect on our site is more like "Please do not post more answers unless they bring something completely new". It should be used only on question that already have a handful of answers
I was thinking of posting this to the site, but I'll ask here in case the question doesn't make sense. Suppose there is a table, each row associated with a label. Is there some way of compiling the table on-the-fly to include/exclude only certain rows? Conceptually, one might have in an enclosing file, something like - "include only the following rows, using these labels". Similar to SQL's select * from foo where foo not =....
@JosephWright well, I'll likely change my workflow. The current one is just ridiculous
@FaheemMitha Have a look at datatool package. It would IMHO make a sense as a Q, as long as you formulate it very clearly: What is the input, what should be the output.
In datatool, is it customary to edit the data as an ascii file? It seem one can save the database as an LaTeX file too. Does it make sense to edit the latter?
@FaheemMitha R doesn't count as quick and dirty, and for doing the kinds of things that Excel is good at, it's not really practical. R does lots of things really well, but it's not a spreadsheet.
@FaheemMitha I guess this depends on the nature of your work: for me, data sets = files from instruments, almost always exported as CSV or similar and plotable quickly in Excel without being great looking. For fitting lines, I use an Origin knock-off (SciDavis)
@JosephWright Ok, I see. Plotting in R is actually pretty fast too. I assume you have not tried it? You could try ggplot2 which is pretty much the hot thing right now. Actually, for a few years now. It has like fanboys.
@FaheemMitha The other thing that pisses me off about R is that most of the packages persist in using inscrutable syntax which is totally unnecessary, and unless you use it really often you end up forgetting everything. R package writers should take some lessons from TikZ in terms of user interface.
@AlanMunn Yes, I guess the syntax is not really very user-friendly. But I had in mind a case where you are basically doing the same thing over and over with different data, in which case you could automate your script.
It is odd to see someone on tex.sx arguing against scripting, frankly.
@AlanMunn Well, I can't be too critical of Hadley. I did a patch for ggplot2. It took me a month. It's horribly complicated. I'm surprised it even works.
Though he agreed the patch was probably correct, he's ignored it. ggplot2 is not very actively maintained, unfortunately.
@FaheemMitha Yes, at that point, R is really great. But neither Joseph nor I were arguing against scripts at all. You were just asking what people use to manipulate their data for use with datatool, and we both use Excel for lots of things like that. For example, I recently organized a conference where all the program, name tags etc. were all done with datatool. The data came from Google docs imported into Excel.
@FaheemMitha Depends on the case: for my publications I always use pgfplots and set up the scripts. It's the very quick 'what does this look like' stuff I do in Excel, then I decide whether it's worth the effort to plot properly.
@AlanMunn Yup
I do the UK-TUG membership database in Excel, saving as a CSV. For things like postage labels I use datatool, but adding lines to the CSV by hand would be a bit of a pain.
@FaheemMitha One other concern is that much of the experimental data I collect is collected by students, bot graduate and undergraduate, who all have differing skill levels, so Excel is a thing that pretty much everybody can use without too much difficulty, at least for organizing initial results.
@FaheemMitha Various sorts. Judgments of the acceptability of sentences, eye tracking data of people looking at scenes while they listen to sentences, comprehension experiments with children. Lots of things.
ggplot2 is a striking example of software used by lots of people, but is basically unmaintained. Issues piling up like nobody's business, but almost no commit activity.
@JosephWright And it sometimes extends into faculty too. I was preparing a budget with a collaborator and they added all the amounts up by hand and entered them into the Excel file...
@FaheemMitha You can edit by hand, but if you miscount the commas life is tricky. Then there is the 'quick sort' issue: I often need an overview of people in some category in a really fast way.
@AlanMunn Oh, certainly. One might though expect younger people to be more computer-competent. My experience suggests this is a false assumption!
I'm making a calendar. The calendar will be for TUG, 2015. Last year I also made a calendar but because of time constraints most examples were graphics.
Since this is a lot of work, I need your help.
If you can/want to help out, the following are the requirements for contributions:
Your contr...
@Joseph, @Alan: my dad is an accountant. Think of the living hell of having him doing financial maths all day long with several books, spreadsheets and drafts. :P
@PauloCereda My PhD advisor (who is very wealthy (the modern half of the Montreal Museum of Art is named after his parents)) once said to us "Semanticists are like accountants: everyone needs one, but who would want to be one." Of course as poor grad students, I don't think we really got the 'everyone needs an accountant' part. :)
StackExchange continues to support TUG with corporate membership (many thanks). With that come eight individual memberships, that were given out to some members of the community. The time has come to select our representatives for 2014.
Following the model from previous years, I'd like to ask pe...
As I mentioned to Paulo, I expected this response, but your enthusiasm and speed were a (pleasant) surprise. Consider your membership renewed. And keep up the good work!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)
In this wiki page, static, dynamic, strong, safe, nominative, partially inferred are listed, but duck typing is not. Why is that?
class Duck
{
public String Quack ()
{
return "quack quack";
}
}
class Hello
{
pu...
hi does anybody know how to make a pie chart in which i can label the pie pieces/sectors with both the category and percent number without using a legend? That is, I'd like for either the percent or category name to be on the pie the other to be just outiside of it
@TorbjørnT. yes that one would be great although I had no idea how to implement it. it did not seem to be a standard package from cpan unless i'm mistaken
The dimensions of the painting are surprising, considering the level of detail. Unfortunately this was not at the exhibition, it remained at the National Gallery in London.
The “TL;DR” is at the bottom of this posting, which reads:
So did SE change its Q&A policy, is Sound Design a failed beta, or are there just different rules there than on all other SE sites?
The reason for the question in my title is because of the Sound Design SE site. I looked it over a...
I'm making a calendar. The calendar will be for TUG, 2015. Last year I also made a calendar but because of time constraints most examples were graphics.
Since this is a lot of work, I need your help.
If you can/want to help out, the following are the requirements for contributions:
Your contr...
As I mentioned to Paulo, I expected this response, but your enthusiasm and speed were a (pleasant) surprise. Consider your membership renewed. And keep up the good work!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)
In this wiki page, static, dynamic, strong, safe, nominative, partially inferred are listed, but duck typing is not. Why is that?
class Duck
{
public String Quack ()
{
return "quack quack";
}
}
class Hello
{
pu...
