During my talk to the local Linux user’s group the other night, I spent a few minutes introducing Scribus.   Scribus is a marvelous tool and fills a much needed void in the world of Linux writing/publishing.  It brings a robust layout and pre-press design tool to the Linux desktop, with the additional benefit that it’s easy to use.  (At least when compared to professional grade tools on other platforms such as Quark XPress or Adobe...

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been wandering about in a daze.  (This often happens when I’m doing too many things at once.) I’m trying to get LyX-Outline done, finish my book, and draw up plans for  Time Drive.  I’ve also got dozens of ideas for blog posts, scientific studies, articles, software projects, and even books dancing about in my head. (I wish I could figure a way to make some of these ideas pay for themselves, as...

From a structural standpoint, memos are interesting documents.  They share some attributes in common with a letter, and others in common with a structured report.  Because of this, LaTeX uses have historically used a document class meant for one of those documents when composing memos.  There isn’t anything wrong with that.  It’s very easy to begin a new “article” and then add the needed “To”, “From”, “Subject” and...

Ever since posting “Hannibal, Napoleon and Joseph Charles Minard” in February, it has consistently been one of the most popular posts on this website.  Along with “Eragon Shadelayer: Sociopath” and the project pages for Time Drive and LyX-Outline, it accounts for about 60% of my overall traffic; which is pretty impressive since there are nearly 150 other posts, an image gallery and several content pages vying for people’s...

No study of the history of scientific communication can be complete without mention of Joseph Charles Minard, a 19th Century French civil engineer and cartographer. At the end of his life, Minard created two very famous examples of statistical charts, called flow maps, that every scientist, engineer and student should be familair with.  The first showed Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps (218 BC, Second Punic War), and the second describes...

When I graduated from college and had to choose between a career in industry or academics, I found it to be an easy decision: I stayed in academics.  I like to have my head in the clouds and enjoy the intellectual lifestyle.  (I actually consider the label of “absentminded” to be a compliment.) It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing a book has been the opportunity to research my...