Well, my Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Canonical Behavior Patterns”, is nearly finished. If you want a preview of what I’ve been working on all this time, I’ve put a draft of it online. It’s fairly big, and my net connection is fairly slow, so please be patient while it downloads.

Just about everything is there, but there are still a few small parts that need some work. I’ll be continuing to edit it for about another week and a half or so. I might post some updates from time to time, but the URL will stay the same. (It’s also not in the final format my committee gets, but it’s easier to read this way than when it’s double-spaced.) I’ll post the final version of the document after my defense and take down the draft.

Of course, if you spot any typos or have any comments or questions, please let me know.

Yesterday I discovered what I thought was an odd bug in BibTeX. For one of the journal articles in my bibliography, I had the BibTeX entry

journal = {Human–Computer Interaction},

but it was appearing in my bibliography as HumanComputer Interaction.

The error turned out to be that the innocent-looking hyphen between “Human” and “Computer” was actually a Unicode en-dash. I didn’t intentionally insert it, but I guess I must have copied that bit of text from a Unicode-enabled website or email. LaTeX and BibTeX are happiest plain ASCII characters, and once I changed that character, it looked fine.

But that got me wondering if I had anymore Unicode characters in my dissertation project. They’re nearly impossible to find by hand, so I wrote this little perl one-liner to find them for me:

perl -ne "print if /[^[:ascii:]]/" *.bib *.tex

I discovered 3 more bad dashes, and also a smartquote tossed in as well.

Highlight of my day so far: getting an undergrad to use the phrase “kids these days.”

The regular season of Major League Baseball started this week, and that means it’s time for the annual free preview of MLB Extra Innings. The idea behind MLB Extra Innings is that you pay Comcast some extra money and you get to watch nearly every major league baseball game for every team, all season long. (There are similar packages for the NBA and NHL.) They always have it turned on for free during the first week or two of each season to try to get baseball fans hooked on it.

Yesterday was opening day for some teams so as I sat down to eat dinner I went to that block of channels to see what was on. The only game they were still showing (all the other games were day games in the east) was the Dodgers-Padres game. It was the Dodgers feed, and the play-by-play guy was Vin Scully.

Now Vin’s a legend — he’s been calling Dodgers games since 1950 when they were still in Brooklyn — but he’s also 84 years old and he’s not as sharp as he used to be. At one point the Padres sent in a pinch hitter by the name of Kyle Blanks. Blanks, Vin tells me, is originally from outside of Philadelphia (he was born in Souderton, the same hometown as the great Jamie Moyer) but he currently makes his home in Moriarty, Mexico.

That’s interesting, I thought. Since he plays in San Diego I figured maybe he was living across the border to try to save a little money. I’d never heard of Moriarty, but I assumed it must be a suburb of Tijuana. Must be hell trying to cross the border everyday to get to the ballpark, but whatever.

After the next pitch, Vin continued. “Moriarty, Mexico,” he said, “is a tiny town of about 2,000 people. It’s about 40 miles east of Albuquerque.”

Aha.

Last night, as I was working on my dissertation, I noticed that LaTeX was giving me a warning message:

LaTeX Warning: There were multiply-defined labels.

Since LaTeX didn’t feel the need to tell me which labels were multiply-defined, I had to find them myself. As anyone who’s ever used LaTeX can tell you, finding them by hand in even a moderately complex document can be next to impossible. I wasn’t even sure if the the duplicates were in something I’d just added, or if they’d been there for a while. I didn’t even know how many duplicates there were.

Fortunately it’s easy to find duplicate LaTeX labels with a perl one-liner:

perl -nE 'say $1 if /(\\label[^}]*})/' *.tex | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Tonight was the second time in a week I’ve wanted to calculate something semi-complicated in SQLite for my dissertation, only to discover that I’d already done the work months ago for something else. The perl code I found tonight was written back in August and contained this amusing comment:

1
2

# I'm sure I could do this with a single SQL query, but I don't know
# how.  So instead I'm going to brute-force it with some perl.

That was exactly the conclusion I’d reached tonight before I found this code. Instead, all I had to do was a simple select on the precomputed results. Thanks, past me!

John Siracusa’s Hypercritical has quickly become my favorite geek podcast. It’s primarily an Apple podcast, but the topic the last two weeks was file systems. Mostly they were about why HFS Plus sucks and ZFS is awesome. He also described SSDs as a “computational skeuomorphism”, which I think is nothing short of brilliant.

I ran some errands earlier tonight, and when I got back home I rode up in the elevator with a neighbor who’d just returned from grocery shopping. This woman has lived in my building for years, and she’s always struck me as a bit crazy. She seems like she has a kind of reverse autism, in that her poor social skills manifest themselves in approaching anyone she sees in the building and talking nonstop about whatever happens to be on her mind.

What was on my neighbor’s mind tonight was the high price of whoopie pies.

“The whoopie pies at the Giant [a local supermarket] have been Obamaized,” she said as the elevator doors closed.

She was bringing in her groceries in a large wheeled suitcase. The whoopie pies didn’t quite fit inside and were sticking out the top. She’d bought half a dozen of them at the store’s bakery. The cake part was red velvet instead of the traditional chocolate. They looked pretty tasty.

“Obamaized?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied. “They used to be $5.99, but now they’re $6.99.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re blaming President Obama for raising the price of whoopie pies at Giant?”

“Yeah, they’re so expensive now.”

With that we reached her floor, and she wheeled her suitcase of groceries out of the elevator.

While I’m not a huge fan of the Academy Awards, I once rode on an elevator with an Oscar (and its winner, a documentary filmmaker). It was while I was an undergrad at Penn. They were screening the film (I think it was 1985’s Broken Rainbow) in a lecture hall in Logan Hall. I had a meeting with a professor on a different floor of the same building.

The film must have just ended when I arrived. I got on the elevator, went up one floor, and the doors opened up. In walked a group of people, one of whom was carrying a familiar-looking golden statue.

It’s shiny.

So now Penn has beaten Princeton and Harvard, both of which have beaten Florida State. Florida State beat Duke. Duke beat Michigan. Michigan beat Indiana. Indiana beat current No. 1 Kentucky, giving them their only loss of the season.

Obviously, then, the Ivy League is the best conference in the nation, and the Quakers should be No. 1 when the new polls come out.