Mostly Maths

Learning to use vim in my iPad (even if I'm an emacs geek)

2012-01-26T15:11:00.000+01:00

Just in case you don't know, vi is an advanced text editor, drting back from the same era as emacs was developed (emacs started slightly earlier). Sort of the Jekyll to emacs' Dr Hyde. Emacs users despise vi users, and vi users mock emacs users. This is what the editor wars are all about: "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" versus "vi has two modes: writing and beeping". If you have been long enough in this blog, you know I'm in the emacs side, but you also know I'm curious enough to delve into the other side.

My first contact with vi was in our first programming class at the University, Informatica (Computer Science). Vi was the editor of choice for the course, so much that you did not have any other option given. Along with a Linux cheatsheet and a short C manual came a vi cheatsheet. A lot of people came to hate vi, a lot of people came to love it. I was more in the hating side, but it wasn't that bad. After a while I just started using a "normal" Linux editor (it was Kate, maybe?) and kept using it (or UltraEdit when I was in Windows) until the end of my degree.

When I finished my degree I had to be a teacher of Calcul Numeric (Numerical Analysis), the third (and last) programming class in the degree. At home I was still using Windows, because the wifi card in my notebook had no Linux drivers and in my office we were using Ubuntu. I needed a cross-platform editor that was quick, versatile and could last for a lifetime. I tried vi (again) and emacs, emacs won the war for two reasons. First was the fact that it was extensible programming in Lisp, and I had already a decent knowledge of Lisp. The second was AucTeX and its "preview" option for LaTeX editing. Nothing can beat pressing C-p C-p C-d and seeing your formulae come to life in your editor. I became an emacs advocate for this reason, then after 5 or 6 years I've found many more reasons why this is the editor. Or, the operating system, if you prefer.

But advocacy is nice, but knowing all the players in the field is better. My department pals used vi (at least most of them), and it was impossible to convince them to switch. I decided learning vi (or vim, vi iMproved) was something I had to do some day, to learn what was there. After all, if I liked it so much I could set viper-mode in emacs and use vi keys in emacs. The best of two worlds, if that world is so nice.

Then the guys at Applidium released a Vim port for iOS devices. Whoah! Even if I'm an emacs guy to the bone, a modal editor is way better than anything else available in the app store, at least for raw editing power. And I say with knowledge, because I've tried most writing apps for iOS devices (see this post).

As an additional reason, Matt Might posted a New Year's post detailing several resolutions for programmers. Among them was breaking your comfort zone to keep your mind sharp. The first example? Switching to vi from emacs or vice-versa. He used to be an emacs user before getting to use Vi. I don't think I could go that far, but these were enough reasons: advocacy (from me, not against me), iPad+bluetooth keyboard and breaking my comfort zone.

How is the experience so far?

Well, I'm writing this post in my sofa, with my iPad and my bluetooth keyboard sitting in my lap. I'm still getting used to having to exit editing mode to move around: I'm very used to pressing C-a or C-e to go to the beginning of end of line. An additional problem is that even with the bluetooth keyboard, Esc can't be mapped to the Esc event, and I needed something to do it. I have jk (pressed together) for it. It was a suggestiond I saw in Hacker News' comment thread for the release of the app, and it's quite handy. Not so much with the on-screen keyboard, but for now it's okay. To remap this, press backslash (the current mapping for Esc) and then :imap jk . Of course if your usual writting language involves writing the jk combination frequently (I think I could come up with one or two examples in Icelandic), this is not the best combination. The other suggested option is :imap al . Easy to tap in a virtual keyboard, not so straightforward in a normal keyboard.

I found out also how to change the font size, at least for now this works (maybe there will be more fonts available in the future), type :set guifont=Courier:h24 (for 24 pixels)

To round everything, I just installed the famous solarized color theme, dark in vim for iPad. Until now I had just thought it was an overhyped color scheme: I had tried in my emacs and didn't enjoy it that much. But in my iPad it shines with a distinct colour, it's so much easier on my eyes that it hurts to get out and write an email! To install it in your vim for iOS, first download solarized.vim from the git repository, then plug your iDevice and use iTunes File Sharing to copy this file to the vim app. Then open vim, :e solarized.vim and :call mkdir(.vim/colors/) (to create the directory needed for it) :w .vim/colors/solarized.vim This is just because I didn't seem to get iTunes File Sharing to work with hidden files (a file starting with a dot is hidden). Then you have to add the following to your .vimrc:

syntax enable
set background=dark
colorscheme solarized

I recommend using this app for any emacs lover out there with an iPad. Of course, it is not emacs, but vim is a pretty awesome text editor, and it's always handy to learn to use it.

To have a useful list of vim commands at hand I installed the Vimmy app, a universal app with the most common vi commands. I can switch to it via the multitasking gestures in my iPad, or use it in my iPod Touch while I'm using it in the iPad.

Conclusion

I don't think I'll ever switch from emacs to vim any time in the future, as I said AucTeX is definitely too good. Of course since then I've found many more things I love: having a REPL for Python, Clojure or Lisp inside my editor. There's even a REPL for PostScript! Also local remote editing with tramp... There are too many things I use on a daily basis and I can't barely remember, they are so entrenched in my .emacs file I can't even realise what they are. But for my iPad it is an awesome addition to write text on the go.

Again, if you have never used vim before and are interested, give it a try. Of course the first time you open it it will be... a jump into the unknown. Tap the screen, press :e filename and start editing happily. Esc (well, jk or backslash, as the initial mapping) :w to save. And you can even :q to exit to springboard!

Good Books I've Read in 2011: Perfect Gifts for Geeks!

2011-12-11T21:29:00.001+01:00

Taken from Flickr

The links to books in this post are affiliate links! Beware :)

In case you have not realised it yet, I'm a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don't go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I'm nevertheless a frequent reader.

This year I've read several good books that I'd like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap. And then these books will be perfect for you (or for some geek in your life). The books I've selected range from programming, sports and non-fiction. Oddly enough, I don't remember any fiction book I've read this year (not counting some book by Raymond Chandler, which I can recommend each year). Let's go!

Born to Run A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen: I reviewed this book in a previous post here. I found it very good, and urged me to get running. My running frequency is (to put it softly) awful, but I'm trying to improve. If you want to start running or recover some lost motivation, give it a shot, it's a very good read. You can read my review of Born to Run.

Visualize this The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics I wanted a book to help me graphing things in my future work as a freelancer, and after looking around a little I found this *great* book by Nathan Yau, the blogger behind Flowing Data. It's an awesome book, which will help you start kicking around the graphs and tables.

Confessions of an advertising man: An almost autobiographical book by famed ad-man David Ogilvy, if you are anything into copywriting, advertising or marketing, you have to read this book. Not only will it help sharpen your ideas, but it is also a very good and entertaining read.

Moonwalking with Einstein The Art and Science of Remembering Everything: A New York Times best-seller by Joshua Foer. After reading his interview-article there, I decided to buy it (pre-ordered it!), and it was very worth the money. An entertaining read of how motivation can get you a long way, and how some memory techniques work. I have not written a review of it, but you can read my own explanation of the memory palace technique.

Even a geek can speak Low-Tech Presentation Skills for High-Tech People: The best book for anyone in need to give a presentation. Clear, concise and to the point, this should be a forced reading for all technically minded people. You can read my review of Even a geek can speak.

Mining the social web Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites: If I had to try the book I enjoyed the most reading this year, it is this book. Seriously. Even awesome comes short of what I think about this book. I plan on reviewing it, but I've got not enough time yet... With it you'll learn how to mine twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and whatnot. And then process all this data. Easily. Yes!

The AdWeek copywriting handbook The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America's Top Copywriters: Your deep entry into copywriting, from a master copywriter. You'll learn how to shape your online copy, from headline to action. It's very well written in an understandable fashion. Keep in mind that if you buy the Kindle edition, the provided checklists are not that useful.

Thinking Forth: I've had this book for a long, long time and I finally got to read it. I used a simple method for getting me to read it: I left it in the bathroom. When I had to spend some time there (for example, shaving with an electric machine!) I read a few pages. And in no time, I had finished. You don't need to have a computer close to read it, but a little knowledge of Forth is quite useful. It is a clean book, introducing some concepts like orthogonality and testing without even trying.

Power Sleep The Revolutionary Program That Prepares Your Mind for Peak Performance: A best-seller book focused on mental abilities and how sleep affects it. Packed with research results and advice, it was a very interesting book, although a little too long. After all, the best suggestion is to go to sleep each day at the same time and keep adding 15 minutes (weekly) to your sleep until you stop feeling sleepy. Now that you have the spoiler, buy it.

Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion: One of these self-help books that will get you pumping ideas and rocking you off the sofa. According to Gary, now it is time to crush it. And probably it is. If you are a little low on motivation, read this book. Don't expect it to teach you how to do things, just read it as experiences to think about.

What I talk about when I talk about running: Another running book, this time an autobiographical piece by one of my favourite writers, Haruki Murakami. I was expecting a little better from him... But of course, not every book can be Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. An interesting read about Murakami's running experiences, and how he got to run a 50 miler and the "original" marathon in Greece (under a scorching sun).

This month I've started several books that I'm sure would have make this list, and will probably be delayed until next year:

Steve Jobs: I will remember how and when I found out Steve died, and will still be inspired by his commencement speech for a long while. I've gone through almost one fifth of the book (a very thick one,) and it is one of the best biographies I've read (the other is John Nash's). Brilliantly written, it reads like a novel with a fast pace.

1Q84: the recent best-seller by Murakami was the gift from my girlfriend for this year's St. George day, and I've only been able to read a few pages. From the raving reviews, I assume I'll like it (I was deceived by Kafka in the shore).

The memory palace of Matteo Ricci: A classic book for memory techniques lovers, I've only got to read the first 20 pages or so. So far, very interesting and well edited.

Guns, Germs and Steel The fates of human societies: A book recommended by my thesis advisor, dealing with why Europe invaded America and why it was not the other way around. Of course, all is theoretical, but it is amazing nevertheless.

If you find some broken link, please let me know!

Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account

2011-12-03T20:31:00.001+01:00

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. As usual, I only recommend what I've used and like

Inspired by a post by Mark O'Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.

Why 6sync?

A matter of luck. Around 2 weeks ago, I set up my "name domain" at rberenguel.com (currently down, I messed the Apache configuration a few days ago), and I decided I had played with blogger for long enough. Decided to look up an VPS to host that site and whatever I needed to either host or cloud process in the future. Tweeted asking for options, and in the meantime, Sacha Chua explained how she switched to Linode. Linode was going to win...

Until the guys at 6sync (Mario and Rav) sent me a tweet, urging me to check 6sync before choosing. I checked the page, the prices, and was close to sold out. Exchanged a few tweets, read a few reviews, and I was convinced. Reasons? Many.

First, they offer a more basic and cheaper service. Whereas Linode offers 512 MB of RAM, 20GB storage and 200GB transfer for 19.95$/month as the basic plan, 6sync offers a nano plan with 256MB of RAM, 12GB storage and 150GB transfer for 15$. This plan is currently ideal, since my bandwith and RAM usage for the server side is close to nil, and I don't expect to use that much of bandwith in daily doses. They also offer a Mini plan with 2 CPUs, 512 MB or RAM, 20GB storage and 400GB transfer for just 20$/month, beating the Linode offer on its own ground.

Second, they have a very nice website. As a hobbyist page creator, this is important. I like how they have set-up their site, and the pictures they choose to go by. If they are not the designers, the designers should receive this praise.

Third, they are a funny bunch. I exchanged several tweets with them, and they were very supportive. And as soon as I had my server up and running and ran into problems (or more precisely as it turned out, I was not patient enough for the DNS switch) they were extremely quick to help through their in-page customer chat service.

Fourth, they have a lot of server setups ready. Do you want Debian? Check. Ubuntu? Check. Arch...? Yes! I can use me dear pacman package manager and install whatever I want, in the latest version. Cool.

All in all, very happy for hosting. And then, Mark published his post.

The remote and local setups

At first, instead of filling my 6sync server full of software, I tried a simpler setup: using my office computer in the department. I still have an account for using that computer, and I have already everything setup for working remotely. I only needed a decent ssh client for iPad.

Back in the iPod Touch days, I used the awesome (truly awesome) TouchTerm app, which is (was) perfect for the iPod Touch. Offering a wide array of gestures to control it, it is a marvel of usability. But it has no iPad version. For the occasional SSH session I was using the free zatelnet app. But this also was not a good deal.

When Mark published his post, I decided to buy iSSH, and even if the price tag is high for an app, I don't regret it. The freedom you get when only carrying an iPad and a very slim bluetooth keyboard is unmatched. The app is universal, so you have two apps for the price of one. Check the server stats from your iPhone!

Mark is a vim guy... I guess that's okay for a lot of people, but not for me. I could go the vim way (I have been trying to get a basic proficiency of vim in the past), but I'm an emacs guy. Up to the last moment. And I had to cross fingers for iSSH and emacs to play along nicely...

Well, they mostly do (at least with iOS5). The control key works, and so does the option key (as meta). The real meta key (command) does not work as expected, but esc also works as meta, in case of need. The only problem I've found so far is the fact that control-f and control-b are hard-bound (in the iOS level) to advance/go back a word. Thus control-x control-f does NOT open a document. But if you press shift, emacs does not care about control-X control-F, and the iOS bound setting is overriden.

There's a more important problem with these iOS level shortcuts, control-a goes to the beginning of the line... but leaves a nasty [] in the buffer. I have written an abbrev-expansion and re-bound control-a to get rid of it, but it does not work as well as I want yet. Luckily emacs is flexible enough to allow me to solve this in more than one way. Currently almost done anyway.

Installing all the stuff is a breeze. Of course, I had already installed the LAMP setup, although I only have configured Apache so far, but adding the rest of things I use on a daily basis is straightforward:

pacman -S emacs-nox texlive-core

And now... Dropbox or not dropbox? Dropbox from the command line has a slight problem: you need a browser to accept the linking between your new computer and the remote system. And I didn't want to add the complexity of X to the game (even if iSSH has a very cool X server...). So I left dropbox out of the equation. I can always push/pull the files every once and then without problems.

So, I have everything that I need. Now, how does it work in practice?

The daily grind

As you may already know, my daily grind is split between my part-time freelance job as social media manager (among many other things covering get more pageviews and make more money from the sites, mixed with data analysis and copywriting) and finishing my thesis.

Working in my iPad for the freelancing job was already possible. I could access almost all systems from just a browser. Reading and answering mails, the same, although going from the email app to the CRM is slow. So far, the only problems I've found are spreadsheets (solved since I got Numbers) and e-Junkie. e-Junkie has the nice feature of having a flash-based login box. Clever, isn't it? Well, I'll leave the e-Junkie management for my MacBook moments.

For the thesis part, it was harder. There is an awesome LaTeX editor for iPad, TeX Touch. I can't really stress how good it is. Using it with the on-screen keyboard is as close as you can get to be proficient. The drawback is that once you're used to emacs, if you have a solid keyboard, nothing can beat emacs except telepathy.

This is where the iSSH stuff enters into play. Fire emacs, edit all your TeX in console mode (I can somehow live without AucTeX's preview, although it is slightly hard), compile the pdf and move it to the shared folder (all done via an automated script within AucTeX for compiling). Switch to Safari (or GoodReader) and open the document. Check everything is in place and keep going.

The standard TeX based lather-rinse-repeat is straightforward from within an iPad.

Anyway, I'm not using only the iPad day to day. Only those days when I know I don't have that much work to do, requiring heavy task-switching or firing tons and tons of emails with attachments. For slow (or semi-slow) days, it is awesome.

What benefits are in this?

Well, I'm free of carrying a heavy MacBook. Until I get a nice MacBook Air, my current computer is a slightly too heavy MacBook from 2008. It weights quite a lot, and I need to add the charger (even if it is very light, it weights). When I carry the MacBook, I also carry the protecting case (more weight) and a backpack (weight) with some folders with the stuff I'm correcting for the thesis (I could remove this). And I also carry my iPad.

These days I get by with my purse-bag, which is perfectly sized for the iPad+keyboard. I carry the pages I need to check for the thesis, and no more. So I've gone from 5-odd (or 6-odd) kilograms to slightly more than 1.

I also don't need to worry about plugs or battery, the iPad battery lasts for a days' worth of working.

Again and Again: Playing Go

2011-11-23T22:28:00.001+01:00

I’ve been playing the game of Go (also known as weiqi or baduk) on and off for almost 10 years. In case you don’t know, Go is a board game with very old roots, that can be traced back to at least 2500 years ago, probably a lot more. Very popular in Japan (known as Go or Igo), Korea (baduk) and China (weiqi), it has been slowly spreading among the west during the last century. It is featured in the movies Pi and A beautiful mind, for example.

For some odd reason, every autumn I decide I want to play again, and I pick up playing only for it to wane after a while. As every year, I hope this is the last and I keep on playing. What has this game that is so appealing?

Go is a beautiful game. If you are anything into programming, it's like the Lisp of board games. Lisp (at the core McCarthy sketched) is so simple that it is almost like it was discovered more than developed or invented. Likewise, Go is probably one of the simplest games you can define, yet it hides a deepness that is astonishing.

I used to be a chess player back in my early teen years and there was something that always bothered me: why are chess rules so arbitrary? Why does the knight jump in an L shape and no other piece jumps? Why is the rook placed on the sides? I was unsatisfied with these arbitrary rules. In addition to this, even as a very, very early amateur, you could get nowhere without either killer move reading (anticipating moves is usually called reading in the board game lingo) or a quite decent knowledge of some openings. In my days, I settled for the Indian openings, by the way (which then could be stretched into the Catalan opening, which I also used very often).

After giving up chess due to lack of time and drive, I discovered Go, a game where the rules are kind of natural. Although there are some kind of openings close to the sense of chess (known as joseki, which means fixed pattern), they are not fundamental until you are quite a decent amateur, and even yet, are not essential.

For a long time I was member (also was vice-president, accountant and maybe even president for some days) of the club in my maths faculty, where we taught many peope the game. Lack of time and a persistent avoidance of playing, moved me away from the game. Why was I avoiding playing? Fear of competition, fear of losing, fear of making stupid moves and looking stupid. These are feelings I still have, even 10 years later. Slightly less: failing and doing stupid things cures you from this.

This autumn, just a few days after I had joined the baduk subreddit, one of the admins there started a tournament, and I found it perfect to get me playing. So I registered, removing two ranks from what I remembered was my rank. In Go, ranks start at 30 kyu, and progress towards 1 kyu, afterwards you get 1 dan and progress towards 9 dan (there is nothing beyond 9 dan). The rank I remembered (in the online server KGS) was 12k, a rank I held for a long time, and accordingly set my new rank as 14k.

What I did not remember was the fact that KGS had undergone a rank shift. I don't remember the details, but it had something to do with moving the peak of the normal distribution of ranks. After this rank shift (and probably a little improvement while I didn't play) I got to be 6k for a while, maybe even more for short while due to rank drift. What rank drift? When you play a game against a player and win, if the player improves your rank improves accordingly (the effect fades after a certain time, but carries some weight). Since I was playing very little, I was subject to very strong drift effects.

And this is the story of how I have started playing again, and what is this thing called Go. Maybe I'll write more about the game, maybe not. If you are a subscriber you already know how my interests shift from time to time... But I always come back to the basics!

Time Tracking Like There Is No Tomorrow (with Javascript and HTML5)

2011-11-06T13:08:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago I found out the awesome time tracking setup that Sacha Chua has in her homepage. Although I'm a regular at her blog and I follow her RSS feed, I had not seen it "live" yet. My inner geek yelled "gimme gimme" and I asked her what mobile software is she using for time tracking. Sadly (well, sadly), it is Android only app. Oh well. I don't want another device. So how can I track my time always, when the only thing I have always with me is either an iPad Touch or an iPad?

There is a problem with the App Store. Usually, as the advertisement says there's an app for that. The problem is that I'm very picky. I want an app that does exactly this and that, but I don't care about this other fluff or this nice buzzword.

I asked myself what I wanted for a time tracking app. In the end, I want just one thing: timestamps and subjects. Nothing else. Something that may look like:

20111105 2103 2125 blog

Simple, isn't it?

Date | start time | end time| subject

I don't need graphing, or aggregating, or Dropbox syncing, or any other such thing in my iPod Touch. I don't even need length, because this can be recomputed later. I can do all these things far more effectively with Python and R and/or Google Fusion tables in my computer, for example. I could even do it with Python and Gnuplot, or if I was truly desperate, awk and Gnuplot.

Now, the funny thing is that even if I don't have a developer account with Apple, or iOS development knowledge (yet), there's a quick way to create a program that does exactly this for my iDevices (in fact, for almost any device with a browser).

HTML5+Javascript (using localStorage and cache mode). Simple, isn't it? Now I have a small app to track my time in my iPod Touch. Just a few lines of Javascript and a few buttons:

A button to timestamp, press it again to end the timestamp
A button to dump all the data from localStorage and show on screen
A button to clear the data from localStorage
A button to mail the data

Nothing else. Nothing more.

Each time the timestamp button is pressed, a nicely formatted string gets saved into localStorage, making sure everything works even when I lose the local cache copy due to refreshes. The dump data button is to know what I have already logged, before mailing. And of course, even if 5MB is quite a lot, I don't want to fill it so I need to clean up when I send.

For now, I need to refactor the code before posting it. I finished it in two batches of 20 minutes, and in the second I gave up on refactoring, and clean a little the functionality. But it's simple and it works, I have already tracked more than a week of data. Now I only need to find the time to write the analysing code. So far I have a Python function to generate the spans from the time stamps, but I'm still not sure how I want to analyse everything. If I want to generate aggregate data from Python (I'm more fluent) or in R (more versatile, and I will do the graphing here).

Another World for iPad and iPhone Review

2011-09-22T10:43:00.000+02:00

I don't usually post on two consecutive days... But this post is special: today is the 20th Anniversary of Another World, one of the best games I remember from my childhood. And to commemorate, they have released an iPad/iPhone port. Which is awesome!

5 Years ago, for the 15th Anniversary, another special edition was created for Windows with high resolution graphics, and this is the base version for the iPad port. It looks awesome, and you can switch from the "old" low resolution graphics to the "new" high resolution while in-game, to get a taste of what games where in 1991.

I have only played a little, mostly because I should be working. You have two choices for the controls: touch and pad. The touch controls look very well thought, but after many (many!) deaths in the original (and 15th Anniversary) editions of Another World, I prefer pad.

Also, to appeal more players, they have created 3 difficulty levels: Normal, Hard and Hardcore. I have not checked, but I bet the original was only Hardcore. Will need to play more to check, which I will undoubtedly do. By the way, all the links to App Store in this post are affiliate links... But you bet this game deserves it.

The Mental Drawer: Never miss an idea again

2011-09-21T13:45:00.000+02:00

This was posted to my mail newsletter a few months ago. Subscribe now if you want to receive this kind of content to your inbox. I won't spam you, promise.

When do you have your best ideas? If you are anything like me, I have my best ideas when I can't act upon them. While I'm falling asleep or while I'm taking a shower. And a lot of them get lost forever, I always think I'll remember it next morning, something that never happens. But I found a nice way to solve this, with a solution very similar to the memory palace technique for remembering lists. Use a mental drawer.

I have to confess that the idea is not completely mine... I read it a long time ago in the preface to Four Past Midnight, by Stephen King. He uses it for drafting his book ideas. King puts ideas in the drawer and lets them grow. We won't be using the drawer like him, but the idea is pretty similar.

You need to imagine your mental drawer (design it as you wish! modern Swedish style or 18th century wood, as you please), as vividly as possible. Feel the smell of wood (or lacquer), the sound as it opens and closes, the feeling of its surface. Keep it in mind for a few days, mentally opening and closing it as soon as you wake up or get out of the shower.

After getting used to it, you are ready to harness its power. Imagine you have an idea before falling asleep, for example that you'd like to interview Steven Pressfield (like I did, read here). You want to keep this idea, as it sounds interesting and worthwhile but don't want to turn on the lights and write it down: you are almost asleep, turning on the lights will mean 30 minutes before falling asleep again. Now you have a solution: mentally open your drawer and put (imagining it as vividly as possible) something related to Steven Pressfield. For it to work more effectively, the image has to be bizarre. You could imagine Steven Pressfield squirming inside the drawer like a contorsionist, or a bunch of Spartan soldiers getting out of it (Pressfield wrote Gates of Fire, about the Battle of Thermopilæ).

As soon as you wake up, you check your mental drawer, notice Steven inside it and write down the idea in your notebook. Easy and effective. Of course, for it to work you need to make checking your drawer a daily habit, but this is another whole story I'll write about any other time. Stay tuned, and share with your friends if you liked this post.

This technique will be a small part of an upcoming ebook on memory techniques I'm currently writing. If you are interested in being a "beta reader" or even being an affiliate/reviewer, just drop me an email. Don't be shy!

Using Gephi with Google Analytics to visualize keywords and landing pages

2011-08-18T18:50:00.001+02:00

As of late, I've been playing a lot with data analysis and visualization tools. Recently I've read two interesting books (Statistical Analysis with R and Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics) and I'm on my way to another two to refresh my statistics knowledge.

But this post is only mildly related to these books, since it started way before: the day I read about Gephi. Gephi is an open source graph visualization tool, to work with huge (or at least very big) datasets and graphs. I've seen it used to graph the friendship network from Facebook, or to graph tweet-retweets from Twitter (these two can be found in the Learn section from the Gephi website). In this post I'll guide you step by step to do a keyword-landing page directed graph, using data from your Google Analytics account.

A directed graph is a graph with arrows. You have a set of sources (in this case keywords) and targets (in this case landing pages), and aggregate sources by name. Plot this, and you have a keyword-landing page graph like this one (data for the last month in mostlymaths.net restricted to the first 500 keywords).

Keywords (arrow) Landing pages

What interesting things you can read from such a graph

Clustering: In this particular instance, I can find the "clusters" of my blog. You can see 3 big aggregations of keywords and landing pages (left-middle,up-center and right-middle). Each one of these marks pages and groups of pages with several landing keywords. The groupings mark like the "big themes" in my blog, at least from search engine traffic (these are memory techniques, 9 best programming books I've read and seed germination respectively). Oddly enough, I've had one visit landing in seed germination from the keyword "gnus mail", thus the big seed germination cluster includes emacs.
Big keywords: In gephi you can scale nodes depending on other table variables. For example, I can scale the landing page dots depending on the number of keywords, or the number of visits. In particular, I can show which keywords lead to more of my pages, by using the outDegree (number of arrows escaping) of a node.
Big pages: Alternatively, I can scale nodes with the inDegree (number of arrows entering) to learn which pages have the most different keywords. I can also label the arrows with the number of visits (and scale them with this metric).
Huge pages: with a little more work, I could scale with total visits to see which are my biggest pages together with the landing keywords.

Step by step guide

I'll assume that you can manage to download and install gephi on your own, and have some knowledge of Google Analytics. Of course, the first you need is to select the keyword and landing page fields in your Google Analytics page:

Then select Show Rows and select 500:

And get a nice CSV file with the export tab on top:

Now I don't know if this is because I select CSV and not CSV for Excel, but you have to clean the file: there are a lot of table identifiers to remove before the real data table. You also need to remove a line at the end of the file. You can do all this editing with any plain text editor. I used emacs.

Remove all this, below Table you should have the useful data,

Remove the last line with dashes. Now the file is almost ready to be imported... You need to rename the Visits column to something else, for some odd reason Google Analytics copies the same column twice and Gephi needs unique column names. Ready to import! In Gephi, go to the Data Table window from the Window menu, and click Import Spreadsheet:

And now you should select edges table and comma-separated:

Oops! More tweaking of the CSV file is needed: Change the first two columns to Source and Target (and don't forget to mark comma as I did, too) and re-import the file:

After clicking next, Gephi will ask you for the types of the columns. Since I'm only interested in visits, pages/visit and average time on site, these are the only columns I want to be floats. You need them to be float to scale the nodes according to these parameters:

Next, we'll see a blob of points with no labels. Choose the Force Atlas algorithm in the Layout window, run for a while and then click stop:

The result from the Force Atlas algorithm to distribute points will look nicer, spreading aggregates of arrows all over the place. Now we need to get the labels. To do so, you have to click on a somewhat hidden button in the bottom-right part of the Graph window, and select the correct names for the tags. In this picture I've also marked the label and edge scaling according to parameters:

Once you have labels, you need to play with the layout to make them more visible. Run the algorithm Adjust Labels for a while, then Force Atlas and repeat until you are happy with the results:

You can also set labels for the edges, if you are interested in seeing visits, for example. But I found it messy and unchecked the option. Finally, to scale the nodes, use the Ranking window:

The arrows mark the different ways to adjust: you can change colour, size, text size or text colour. Feel free to play with all these settings!

You can get a nice PNG file of you graph by pressing the camera-like icon in the Graph window (clicking the down-arrow will list the properties), or you can export a PDF or SVG with some more work from the Preview window. Both result in very nice images, but a SVG or PDF can be tweaked extensively using Illustrator or Inkscape. But it also needs more work from the Gephi side, so I won't enter into the details in this tutorial. Well, just a little! Be sure to check "show" before exporting, or you'll see a blank page:

And with just these steps you can create quite nice (and useful) graphs like this one:

And here you can find a closer zoom:

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, if you did it would be awesome if you share it. I'll try to do a few more Gephi tutorials as I find more interesting (for me) uses of Gephi. I have also a few post /tutorial ideas about visualizing Facebook Insights data for pages and using Google Fusion Tables. Stay tuned!

Breaking Blogging Conventions

2011-08-10T11:40:00.000+02:00

From kevygee@Flicker

I'd like to apologise for my lack of writing as of late. See? I just broke one of those absurd blogging conventions. Sincerely, I don't give a d––n about doing that. Please, keep reading.

This is one simple example. Blogging gurus say that you should not apologise for not writing, since that would seem pointless to your readers and you'd appear like a less capable guru. I say so what?. I'm not into writing here to make tons of cash (they are very welcome if they come anyway), and I have a lot more things to do beside blogging. I'm here to write for my readers. As of now and according to Feedburner, 620 something. I'd like to thank every one of you for coming back. I try to thank you by writing interesting stuff.

It's been quite a while since my last post (which was a book review, not even a "real" post). And why is that? There is a mix of reasons and motivations going here.

Although I had my decent share of ideas, none were compelling enough to get me into writing mode. If I'm not pulled by the idea, the post turns out dry or boring. I don't want to write boring posts. My ultimate goal is to be able to write a post about some theme and find that readers uninterested in it can read it whole and enjoy the experience. I follow some bloggers like these, I love their ability to keep me entertained.

This is closely related to another stupid convention in blogging. That you should only write about one theme, only one niche. If you've been here long enough you'll know that I write about anything I find interesting. Programming, time management, whatever I find interesting. I could not write about just one thing in my blog. I'm like that, I enjoy a hundred different things. Just like everybody else.

I also have an unwritten (at least until this post) deal with my readers. I don't want to write "empty" posts. I don't want to write 700 words of fluff, akin to political speeches. I want to get information out there, share what I've learnt, ask what I don't know. Let the politicians (and quite a great deal of bloggers, too) talk or write for hours/pages without saying anything.

I'm not here for the money (as I have already said), but for my readers. You can see ads around the page. Currently they are:

A spot below the menu, cycling through Bookdepository (50% of the time) and two different AdSense colour schemes (25% and 25%),

An Amazon my Favourites widget in the sidebar.

And that's it: you see, I won't make any decent money. A few months ago I dumped AdSense because I wanted a more ad-free experience for my readers, leaving only the bookstore ads (I love books and love to share books). AdSense is here again because I have started an A/B test with AdSense, just for fun. I want to see which colour layout is more effective, to do so I'm running this ad splitting scheme for the different colours and in a few weeks I'll know which one is better. I'm curious, it's not that AdSense makes me a lot of money (2 or 3 euro each month, at most and with luck).

Another reason I've been less eager to write lately is that I'm busier, and it gets harder to fit writing quality and informational articles (disclaimer: this is what I try, I don't promise all my articles are up to my tastes) into my schedule. Also, ideas are like __________. You can come up with almost anything and find some analgoy to comply. In this case, I feel like ideas are like mushrooms. Why is that? If weather is very hot and dry, there are no mushrooms. But come a big storm and they will pop all over a place. This happened yesterday, for unknown reasons.

All ideas I had lately were now seen in a new light, and I started filling a notebook in Penultimate for iPad (an affiliate link, this app is quite neat for this quick sketching of ideas or taking meeting notes) with post ideas and execution (screenshots, tables, screencasts) for some of them, I'd get them written soon. Also, I decided to write this post, because the ideas in it were around my mind for quite some time and needed some pouring.

I'll never promise I will write more frequently. My only promise is that I try to do my best to write interesting stuff. I owe this to my 620 something readers and also to everyone else that stops by this blog. Thank you all, and keep coming.

Book Review: Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall

2011-07-19T00:15:00.001+02:00

Some of the links in this page are affiliate links. But I only recommend the best I've read.

A very interesting book. I've been thinking about a great and brilliant start of post... But I always go to plain and simple. Easy, it's a great read, and I had a hard time leaving it down: finished it in less than 3 days (amid my usual busy schedule...). The main premise in the book is that humans have evolved to run, not for speed but for endurance. But it is not a dry science book, the book tells a tale. And it is a good one.

You can buy this book from Amazon or The Book Depository (with free international shipping)

The tale is about the author and his contact with a lost tribe of ultra-athletic runners in Mexico, the Tarahumara. A tribe of long distance runners. McDougall found them during his work as a journalist (he has written for several magazines and journals) while researching in Mexico. A long time runner, he always struggled with plantar problems... And saw the picture of a almost bare footed man, running in robe and sandals. After a little research, this was a tribe of distance runners... Without foot or leg injuries. How come he could not run 3 miles without pain and they could run so much without even a pair of running shoes?

Decided to settle this question, he began a quest around Mexico's deserted areas, escaping a few encounters with drug dealers. He was looking for another "searcher", known as Caballo Blanco (White Horse) to the Tarahumara in the middle of the Copper Canyon. His real name, Micah True, ex-fighter who loved long distance running. Met the Tarahumara while he was a bartender in Leadville (host of one of the US ultramarathons), when he was asked to be a pacer for them. In case you don't know, a pacer is someone who enters the race for the last 20 (or so) miles to help the runner keep its rhythm and sanity. After this contact he became mesmerised, and hunted them down Mexico, where he lived on the food people could spare and what he could hunt... While he was running up and down tirelessly.

Just when McDougall arrived, he was planning a race for the next year, the (supposedly) greatest race ever: the Tarahumara against some of the best ultramarathon runners... And he was invited, if he could run! Some intense training and expert advice (explained in the book), mixed with some physiological and anthropological sauce about our evolution to run dress up the remaining of the book until the onset of the race... Which I won't spoil. Go buy and read the book, I bet you won't regret it.

By the way, last week I ran 20.5 km (in my recently repaired Vibram FiveFingers). A great inspiration to pick your running shoes!

You can buy it from Amazon or The Book Depository (with free international shipping).

Follow mostlymathsdeal in Twitter to know when this hardcover book decreases in price!

Repairing a Tear in My Vibram Fivefinger KSO

2011-07-02T15:50:00.000+02:00

Scratched FiveFingers

Last year I was happily running around my usual route when I stumbled in a wooden area... and scratched the "skin" of my FiveFingers KSO, as you can see in the left. I asked the local Spanish retailer, and he could only suggest I took them to a shoe shop to get some inner repair. No luck: the lining is too flexible to allow for a patch. I asked to the main company... and I'm still waiting for an answer.

I needed to do something, it's been already 10 months of non-running. Thus, some voodoo repairing was needed. Did you know super-glue was invented to seal wounds in the battlefield? Well, this looks like a wound, doesn't it??

First I filled the finger with a big ball of WC paper, like you can see below:

Then I attached some needles to keep the wound sealed, look below:

Finally I spread some super-glue to seal it:

And after 30 minutes I removed the needles and paper. Let it dry for a whole night, and never ever touch super-glue to check if it is dry. Never.

Yesterday I tried them again and ran for a while. They feel as good as new.

Eye of the Theorem

2011-06-25T23:46:00.003+02:00

To sing along with Survivor's Eye of the Tiger (youtube: Survivor - Eye of the Tiger)

Risin' up, back on the desk
Did my research, took my papers
Went the distance, now I'm back on my computer
Just a man and his will to publish

So many pages, it's going too slow
You change your passion for glory
Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must struggle just to keep them alive

It's the eye of the theorem, it's the cream of the proof
Risin' up to the challenge of our thesis
And the last known advisor stalks his prey in the room
And he's watchin' us all in the eye of the theorem

Proof to proof, out in the congress
Hangin' tough, stayin' bored
They stack the odds 'til we take to review
For we go with the skill to publish

It's the eye of the theorem, it's the cream of the proof
Risin' up to the challenge of our thesis
And the last known advisor stalks his prey in the room
And he's watchin' us all in the eye of the theorem

Risin' up, straight to the top
Have the impact, got the factor
Went the distance, now I'm not gonna stop
Just a man and his will to publish

It's the eye of the theorem, it's the cream of the proof
Risin' up to the challenge of our thesis
And the last known advisor stalks his prey in the room
And he's watchin' us all in the eye of the theorem

Written for a friend who recently read his thesis. Congratulations VM-V!

And if you like fractals, check my post for 17th June: Gift: quadratic Julia set for Iceland's national day!

Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 11 – A fjord day and visit to Ísafjörður

2011-06-21T09:45:00.002+02:00

In Back to the Future, Doc sets the clock in the DeLorean to a day 25 years in the future. Today (2010, 6th July) is that day.

Today was a really amazing day. It was very sunny, and we visited Ísafjörður, a city that stole our hearts.

Holmavík's Witchcraft Museum, Reykjanes

We started our day with breakfast and taking a quick picture of Drangsnes' Rock troll. It does not look like a troll for us, but anyway.

Does it look like a troll to you?

Fueled at Holmavík, and then visited Holmavík's Witchcraft Museum. It was very interesting! It only costs 700 ISK with and included an mp3 player-audioguide. They also had an open wifi hotspot, thus we took a coffee while relaxing, at Kaffi Glaður while checking our mail and twitter.

From Holmavík we drove to Reykjanes... Where we did not find Reykjanes' old pool... We just walked around for a while, then we went back to the car. Fueled again (it had been a longer drive than expected!)... This N1 station only offered gas, no food or anything else. No skýr, no market, not handcrafts. A boring stop, if not for the views!

Hey! Look! The sky is more blue in Iceland!
(View in front of Vigur)

Way to Ísafjörður

We started to drive around the fjord area, taking pictures all around. The day was sunny and warm... Incredible. It was the best moment for a change of weather, the views of the fjords were incredible.

The fjord area around Ísafjörður was astounding

Ísafjörður is an awesome city. Probably this impression was heavily biased by the fantastic weather, but anyway. If I ever get to work whenever I want in the world, this is the place we want to stay.

Parked in front of the information centre, where parking is free (which happens almost everywhere, in spite of what our travel guide explained). Walked around for a while, before having a look at the local Eymundsson bookstore, which had absorbed the old local bookshop. Nothing interesting, the same books we saw at Akureyri. But beside it we found a wonderful "store", mix of cafe and wool and handcrafts. We had a coffee with a rhubarb pie, very similar to my æblekage.

Walking around Ísafjörður

We walked a lot around the city, under the sun. Wonderful, just wonderful. If you have the chance, visit this city.

End of the day at Þinfeyri

Tunnel!: a 9km tunnel, 4 of which were just one lane, between Ísafjörður and Flateyri. It even had a forking in the middle to drive towards Suðureyri. After the tunnel we stopped to collect seashells and take pictures of the surrounding firðir (plural of fjörd in Icelandic).

Collecting seashells after a long tunnel

Kept on driving, and before we realised it we were already in Þingeyri! Our "hotel" was not really a hotel, but a guesthouse without cooking facilities. Oh well... Shared bath and restaurant. Could be worse. We had a soup of the day with salad and bread for 1250 ISK, which is not that much, and as usual was really good. The bread was homemade, without salt but with sunflower seeds. Wonderful with butter!

Went to sleep, expecting another sunny day tomorrow!

Catch previous posts in Road Trip Around Iceland: The Index.

« Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 10 – Hvítserkur
» [...]

Gift: A Quadratic Julia Set for Iceland's National Day

2011-06-17T00:05:00.000+02:00

Click to open in a new window/tab and then right click to Save as

Today is Iceland's National Day (commemorating their independence day and the date of birth of Jón Sigurðsson), and to commemorate it I share this image with everyone.

I computed this image a long, long time ago (using the Distance Estimator Method, paralellised with PVM using 16 computers, it took just 2 minutes). The full file is a 30MB pdf, which I printed large-size, and sits in my office. This is for your desktop background pleasure, I hope you enjoy it. I can do higher resolution shots or zooms from the original if you like.

If you liked this, please share it with your friends or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Ego Depletion: Go Eat That Chocolate Cookie to Be More Productive

2011-06-15T13:00:00.002+02:00

Snickerdoodles!

Do you have problems to keep motivated?

Is your usual to-do list filled with great hopes of accomplishing 20 things? Do you dump it when you are wasted at 11 AM after finishing just the first 5 things? Of course, you are not alone. This is a very common thing, from freelancers to researchers, or to almost anyone managing their own time. But this can be due to eating radishes instead of chocolate chip cookies.

Ego Depletion?

Ego depletion was introduced a few years ago, as a placeholder of the results of several experiments... Which seem to show that your willpower can be depleted.

In one of this experiments, several test subjects skipped a meal to be hungry and then were split in 3 sets. One would eat nothing (poor lads). Another set were left alone in a room with a bowl of radishes and a bowl of chocolate cookies, freshly baked, and were instructed to eat two or three radishes while avoiding the cookies. And the lucky set were told to eat chocolate cookies, while avoiding the radishes.

After this, they were instructed to try to solve a geometrical problem, with the possibility of giving up if they wanted to. The trick here was that the problem was unsolvable. And the non-eating set and the chocolate cookie eater set tried longer to solve the problem, and reported being less tired than the radish eaters. Since they didn't spend their mental energy in forcing to eat the radishes instead of the cookies, they had more willpower to keep on trying.

More research in this subject (and there is plenty!) has shown that there are some ways to replenish this ego depletion. Forming implementation intentions (like plans, projects, todo lists) helps, but is not the only solution. Getting rewards, doing fun things, eating something pleasant (or even mildly pleasant) can also help, but as before, it is not the only solution.

From some other experiments, it looks like ego depletion is just a self-regulatory method. Your brain just leaves some energy in reserve after a hard try. Which means that when you have almost no willpower left, there is still a lot you can do.

How can you use this to your productive advantage?

You have to gauge how you approach a todo list. If you start with a task you don't want to approach (even if it is easy!) is more likely to erase your willpower than a hard task that you don't dread doing. You should then sort your todo list depending on how much you want to avoid a task, and then sort by priority. If a simple task will eat a lot of your energy, leave it for last. If a hard, energy consuming task has a very high priority do it as soon as possible and follow the next suggestion.

When when you have no willpower left, there is still a lot you can do. Take a short break and give yourself a treat you like. You can eat a chocolate cookie, for example. Or draw a little, read a (not online) newspaper. Do something you enjoy but does not lead to procrastinating. Checking online feeds leads to checking Facebook which usually can end in doing nothing for an hour. Refrain from this and just eat that cookie.

Don't forget to share this post in Twitter if you enjoy chocolate cookies!

References

Psychwiki article on Ego Depletion
Baumeister, Vohs: Self Regulation, Ego Depletion and Motivation
Baumeister, Vohs: Intelectual Performance and Ego Depletion: The role of the self in logical reasoning and other information processing

Book Review: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (very recommended)
Personal Development for Smart People: A Not So Short Review
Focused Interview with Leo Babauta (from Zen Habits)

Time boxing: you will work like never before

Winning Against Your Reading List

Book review: How to be #1, by Vince Lombardi

31 Best Links About Blogging, Productivity and Programming (November and December 2010 edition)

2011-06-12T17:35:00.000+02:00

Last year I used to collect all links that caught my attention each month in list posts... Until I got bored, because they ate too much time to write, and were really really boring to write. I used to write a small re-cap of what they were about, and thus a 30 link post was very long and needed a lot of editing. I just stopped cold their writing.

But... I already had links for November and December stored in my Delicious account, and I've just decided to share all these good links with you. This time I'll only sort them alphabetically and put the link, a little like Sam from Xamuel.com does in his Linkfests.

I still collect a huge amount of links in my RSS reader, Instapaper and Read It Later accounts. If you'd like I keep on sharing these, please retweet this post so I can know it. Thanks!

Ben Casnocha – What 17 Million Americans Got From a College Degree

Citizen428.blog() – Clojure: Deriving the Y Combinator in 7 Stolen Steps

Daniel Lemire – Why you may not like your job, even though everyone envies you

Fearless Endeavours – Is patience a virtue we don't value anymore?

Friendly Anarchist – How to Make Change Real

Friendly Anarchist – Mirrors and Necklaces

Friendly Anarchist – Walk with Flowers

GarlicSim – Technology Principle: The Toy Will Win

Illuminated Mind – Getting to Know Yourself by Looking at Outward

Liopic – 10 Years to Master

Litemind – How to Make Great Decisions in Life

Math Gladiator – Escaping Mr. 20% and losing the ego

Matt Might – Hacking your Address Book With C, Racket and LaTeX to print mailing labels correctly

ProBlogger – Why Your Blog Won't Make You Rich (or Even Pay the Bills)

ProBlogger – How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel for Success

ProBlogger – How to Increase Product Profitability After Launch

Reinvigorated Programmer – How Many Gadgets You Need

Ryan Waggoner – 5 steps we took to overcome procrastination in launching 21times

Ryan Waggoner – How I use Omnifocus to get things done

Ryan Waggoner – Per aspera, ad astra

Ryan Waggoner – Steve Jobs home office: minimalism isn't everything

Ryan Waggoner – How to build discipline and brainwash yourself with the Greatest Secret in The World

Steve Mould – How To Cheat With Frank Benford

Steve Pavlina – 30 Day Supertrials

Study Hacks – The pre-med and Ira Glass : complicated career advice from compelling people

TPEB – How to Finish What You Start: 10 Important Tips

The 99 Percent – 20 Gifts for the Productivity Nerd In Your Life

The 99 Percent – Best of 2010

The Chronicle – The Shadow Scholar

Yield Thought – Users who don't buy, customers who don't use

the { bucklogs :here } – Maze Generation: Eller's Algorithm

If you found this collection of links useful, consider using 2 minutes to subscribe to mostlymaths.net newsletter (where I can send these to you more often) or share this post with the buttons below if you don't have enough time right now.

Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 10 – Hvítserkur

2011-06-08T14:00:00.002+02:00

As you may remember, yesterday we were not happy with our guest house. And in addition to what we saw yesterday, today our breakfast was d––n late. When you are driving around a country trying to be on time everywhere, you wake up early and drive a lot. If your breakfast is late, you are bound to either go faster (not a good idea in Iceland) or get to places later. Anyway, let's stop the rant.

After leaving our guesthouse, we went to get some fuel and buy some souvenirs. We got some nice key-chains made with treated fish "skin" (cod, salmon and others) and our usual dose of skýr for the trip.

Blönduós' textile museum, Borgarvirki's fortress

Our first stop was Blönduós, where we visited the textile museum. The entry fee was 600 ISK, and it was somewhat interesting. If you happen to pass around there it is worth a look just for the old clothes you can see.

I was impressed with this plaque in Borgarvirki.
It is an usual view around Iceland, signaling places

Next came Borgarvirki, which is supposedly a natural fortress, used by local settlers to defend the area. If it was really used or just an odd-shaped hill is still unsettled, but the views from the place are just huge. As a defense point it looks really good. The road up the hill is quite rough, beware.

Driving in Iceland can be tricky

Hvítserkur

The Hvítserkur is an odd-shaped rock formation, 15 meters from the shore. It looks really interesting, and it is one of the most visited things in this area. There are two ways down the beach: to the right of the parking zone, slowly and going pretty far in an almost flat walking path or an uneven quite steep path just below the viewing area.

We liked this formation

We recommend the steep path, after our experience with the flat one. This is the first place we had Hitchcock like moments with the local birds, Arctic Terns, known as kría in Icelandic. The national bird (depicted in postage stamps), loved by the locals for its protective behavior is an animal we hate. Kría lay their eggs in flat areas, with a preference for the sides of pathways. They are highly territorial, and will attack anything that goes close to their nests... Or any other bird's nest in the area. And indeed, they attack. First they scream around your head, 6 or 7 meters above, two or three times trying to get you away from their nests. If you don't, they'll dive to your head. They have hard beaks.

We had to run for our heads' sake a few moments before reaching the beach in front of the Hvítserkur, where we collected rocks and seashells. Facing the prospect of more attacks, we climbed the wall in front of it. An interesting feature is the small waterfall in front of the rock, beside the downward path. It was probably due to the recent rain.

On The Way to Holmavík: Seal Watching

On our way to our guesthouse we stopped in an old, abandoned farm set as a seal watching area. Really wonderful! Also full of kría... We saw how a careless Frenchman was hit in the head by some birds.

It was also damn cold, and we were lucky to have a hot chocolate there. It was not expensive (it wasn't incredibly good either) but made us feel warmer.

Our guesthouse was in Drangsnes, and we had some problems locating it: it is named Malarhorn, but the signs read Malarcafe. The road was odd: we had lots of fog for a long while, and then suddenly everything was clear as soon as we reached the seashore.

Funny rock decoration in Holmavík

Let's rest, tomorrow will be a long day...

« Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 9 - Goðafoss and Hólar
» Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 11 – A fjord day and visit to Ísafjörður

Using an Apple Remote with Mac OS Preview

2011-06-05T18:00:00.001+02:00

Last Tuesday I presented a talk in a congress, here in Barcelona. This post is not about this talk, but about the Mac remote and Apple's "problems". If you are interested, you can download the talk here, anyway.

As the congress was local, instead of using my netbook for the talk I brought my MacBook. Instead of using arrow keys, I could use these fancy Apple remotes. Good plan... at the moment. I asked a colleague for his Apple remote (my girlfriend had hers in her office, and I could not get it soon enough)... And after lunch, before my talk I checked if it worked.

Well, as you already know, I use LaTeX and Beamer to create my presentations... And generate as output a PDF file. Which I then open with Preview, a native Mac OS app. And when I tried to use Apple Remote, it didn't pass the pages. Why? Well, Apple only supports a handful of applications, the most relevant being Keynote and Front Row. And not Preview. I was shocked.

As I expected, there was a free solution to this problem, but at first it looked troublesome. I found a program named iRedLite. The "Lite" part scared me: would I be only able to pass 30 pages and then need to enter my registration?

Turns out it is "Lite" because there is a Pro version which can interact with a USB infra-red emitter to control your TV and other gadgets. It works wonderful, no problems. If you ever need to give a PDF presentation with a Mac, give it a try.

I had another solution which hopefully I didn't have to use: a free application for iPhone, RemotePad and RemotePad server in my Mac (there is also a Linux version). But passing pages is a little cumbersome, needing to flip+scroll in a very small screen. Far better to use the remote with iRedLite!

Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 9 - Goðafoss and Hólar

2011-06-01T15:00:00.001+02:00

Hólar's church, if I'm not wrong

I've been procrastinating a lot with this post. Although it may not look like this from the pictures (or even the text), this was one of the worse days in our trip. Uneventful, visiting not-so-interesting places and with a lousy guest house at the end of the day. Let's see if you find if interesting! If not, the next post will be, don't worry.

The day started in Husavík, with a wonderful breakfast: toasts and marinated herring. I just love marinated herring since I was in Germany... But the best comes from Denmark, mind you. After a shower and shave we went for some local shopping. We bought jam for our friends in Barcelona. After this chores, we wanted to visit the Phallological Museum in Husavík. We couldn't... as usual in Iceland, most museums and shops start working at 10 or 11... The museum started at 12. D'oh!

Yes, it's for real!

It should have been an interesting sight: it holds 272 specimens of embalmed or dried penises.. trying to get a specimen from every mammal in Iceland. When we were there, human was lacking but 12th April 2011, an Icelander donor died and completed this.

To Akureyri and Goðafoss

From Husavík we headed to Akureyri, the capital of the North of Iceland. We missed the turn to the city... and just went straight to Goðafoss, the God's waterfall. A very nice waterfall indeed.

They were named Goðafoss around AD1100, when the Alþing (the Icelandic gathering of leaders and chieftains) decided to convert Iceland into a Christian nation. The lawmaker at the time decided to convert, but allowing current pagan worshippers to keep doing so in the privacy of their houses. Upon returning to his home after the gathering, he picked his pagan idols and threw them down the falls, hence God's waterfalls.

Goðafoss, an amazing name

After seeing this wonderful view, we went to the city. Bought some things in a bookshop and had lunch. We also stole some free wifi from Café Akureyri to check our mails and twitter accounts. An interesting sight: Akureyri's traffic lights were shaped like hearts, while we were there.

The rest of the day

Uneventful... We drove along our marked route. The most interesting part... we drove over a long-beeked bird beside an hydroelectric station. This kind of birds nest by the sides of the road, and have a tendency of starting to fly just when you pass them. You'll likely run over one or two.

Tunnel from Dalvík to Ólafsfjörður, 3400m!

Headed to Hófsos, where an array of Scandinavian style houses sit... but it was too foggy, after stopping for a few minutes we kept on driving to our next landmark, Hólar. Hólar is a religious centre, with a "big" church. I must confess we didn't find it so impressive, and would not have bothered if we knew beforehand.

Hólar's church

Next stop was Nybær, a turf farm along the road. Kept on driving until we reached Sauðarkrókur, where we ate at Ólafshús. Good supper! We recommend the place. Our final stop for the day was Glaumbær, another restored turf farm. It wasn't that great, and it was pretty late already.

Nýbær, if I'm not mistaken... Didn't tag my pictures this time. May be
Glaumbær

Our final stop, guest house at Flugumýri. The hosts were hosting (no pun intended) their daughter's birthday. We were to sleep in what looked like the servants room (there were none, mind you), beside the garage and close to the stable. All our bed lining was old, we did not have window blinds... Not a very welcoming place, the worse guest house of our trip.

Let's see what tomorrow has to offer...

« Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 8 - From Mývatn to Husavik visiting Ásbyrgi and Dettifoss
» Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 10 – Hvítserkur

Anki and Language Learning: The Spaced Repetition System

2011-05-28T18:50:00.002+02:00

From my cheap dictionary

I first heard of spaced repetition software around 5 or 6 years ago, while browsing around the net. Read about it, found it unappealing and moved on. You know, there are times when you learn about something and dismiss it as not necessary... and after a while you are lead into it again to find it is wonderful. This is one of such instances.

I have only written two highly visited posts about languages: The Language Switch and How to Train Your Brain to Flip to a New Language (in Bitesize Irish Gaelic, it also appeared in Hacker Monthly, April 2011) and a lot of the commenters suggested me using Anki, Mnemosyne or Supermemo. Three instances of the same theory, spaced repetition paired with flashcard based language learning. So far, so good. Let's check it someday.

The underlying principle behind spaced repetition is easy. Once you learn something, you don't need to refresh this knowledge for a fixed time span. If the knowledge was easy (like the fact that bók is book in Icelandic) you only need to review it every once in a while, at most. On the other hand, if you have very hard to fix knowledge (like knowing that hústökumaður is squatter), you need to be reminded of it more often. This is where spaced repetition software comes into the playfield.

You pick a deck of virtual flashcards you want to learn and gauge the quality of your answers (from "Don't know" to "Too easy"). The algorithm now plays with this quality. Based on it, you won't be shown again these cards until enough time has passed. This has a twofold effect. On one hand, you don't need to review everything every day, you only need to review what you are more likely to have forgotten. On the other hand, even well-known knowledge gets tested at some point. A lot of people say it works wonders to learn languages, and I decided to give it a try.

I decided to use Anki, basically because it is free and has cross-platform solutions in addition to an online syncing feature. So far I'm more than happy with my learning of a corpus of 1500 Icelandic words, and even more when I discovered I could get it to work (somehow) in my iPod Touch.

There is a native Anki iPhone/iPad application (affiliate link), costing 20€, which I found a little on the high side, but in addition to being able to use (for free) the online version if you have an available connection you have another free option. If your iDevice is jailbroken, you can install AnkiMini, which runs a local webserver running Anki on your device. Just point your Mobile Safari to localhost:8080 and you can keep on learning, being able to sync to your desktop too. Just wonderful.

I will probably end up paying the paid version (reviews I've read say it is even better than the desktop version, which is very good), but so far I'm happy with this solution. Only 1300 words left to "see".

I'm also implementing my own version of the SuperMemo algorithm for fun, to use in my Ben Nanonote. In a few weeks I'll try to post an update on how it is going.

If you want to keep reading:

Book Review: Even a Geek Can Speak: Low-Tech Presentation Skills for High-Tech People

2011-05-22T18:35:00.000+02:00

From nicmcphee@twitter

Some of the links in this page are affiliate links. But I only recommend the best I've really read.

If you are anything into research or even technology, you are required to give presentations. You start your degree, and are blissfully unaware of it... Until the first spoken presentation strikes. It is probably not too hard, in a slightly empty class during your degree. Then you get to your PhD, your first serious talk in front of 50 or 60 experts... And you are probably not prepared.

I can assure you after reading Even a Geek Can Speak: Low-Tech Presentation Skills for High-Tech People that this is a book you should read before ending your degree, or at least, before your first oral presentation. This is the book that will teach you everything you wanted to know about talks and presentations.

Why?

It covers the main topics of a presentation: preparation, technique and tips.
Gives you clear advice about subjects you did not think about: your voice, your gestures, your posture.
Tells you how to turn a presentation into something almost everyone can understand.

There is a catch, though. It is more focused in geeks talking to management than geeks talking to geeks. In other words, it is not perfectly suited for a mathematician talking to other mathematicians. But except for this very minor point (and I'll tell you why this is minor in a few lines) this is the talk book.

It covers the main topics of a presentation

The book starts with a review of what you have to do to make a presentation, very quickly, before getting into more in-depth matters. Creating a good hook, preparing a wrap up and filling the dreaded in-between are the first subjects. Create a message objective: what the reader will get from your talk. Add supporting points to this message, and then add evidence to support them. And you are done!

After the quick recap you get into the nitty-gritty details. Crafting a message, removing jargon, using stories and jokes and so on. Everything you wanted to know about the craft of your presentation (i.e. before the day) is thoroughly covered.

Gives you clear advice about the finer details

God is in the details
(Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)

Chances are, you never, ever gave a damn about how your voice sounds. Or how your whisper voice is, compared to your loud voice. Or how to modulate your voice speed. And this are only things you can control about your voice!

These fine-grained details are one of the most interesting parts of the book. Mostly because they are the stuff I tend to not think about, ever. I may craft a decent presentation... and flunk it exactly because I am not aware of my voice, speed and nerves.

Some tips? Record your voice and read parts of your presentation in loud voice and whispering voice. Chances are, they are very similar. Record you talking with a huge, phony smile. Chances are it will look almost natural and cheerful. Rehearse a lot. Practice the first lines more than anything else.

Tells you how to turn a presentation into something almost everyone can understand

The book is very thorough in getting your geekspeak into normal English (or whatever language your talk will be). From removing jargon to being funny, from having stage presence to being clear and thorough. Of course, there is also a chapter about making your presentation interesting. Of course, do you want it, don't you?

Remove any jargon people might not understand: plain language is understood by everyone, but jargon can be specific. And don't try to be so obscure no-one asks anything afraid of your answer! By the way, now we talk about questions: prepare a brainstorming session beforehand, looking for all the questions you may be asked. Rehearse them, and you will have nothing to fear from the end of talk questions session.

Re-cap

The book covers everything you need to know to give a rock-solid presentation or talk. Crafting the presentation, rehearsing, prepare your mind and your body for it. So far I have found nothing I missed from the book, except addressing talks from geeks to geeks. For example, when I'm giving a presentation about complex dynamics, I don't need to leave jargon out of the way. All the audience knows my jargon as well as I know theirs, I only need to forget about this point. Also, the book focuses on "selling something" to the audience. In a purely research talk you may think you are not selling anything but just teaching your method or result... Think again. In reality, you are selling yourself as a valid researcher, are selling your mind for future collaborations and are selling your result and techniques to be used in forthcoming papers. There is a lot of things you can sell, even if you are in research.

Even a Geek Can Speak has even chapter covering creating elevator pitches, pitching to venture capitalists and sailing over the room in networking events. May look like very minor points, but from a shy geek point of view, they are awesome in pinpointing flaws.

I absolutely recommend this book to anyone who needs to convince someone else about some subject. You don't even need to be a geek! By the way, I read the Kindle edition of the book. Although I would have loved a paperback, I found it too expensive... and I had gift certificates from Amazon, making it an awesome buy.

Building Your Memory Palace Collection

2011-05-08T13:30:00.001+02:00

Picture courtesy of Shanidar

Do you want to have very good memory? I do, in fact I've been interested in it since my school days. There are some techniques that exploit your brain's natural power, and the one I'm covering here is the memory palace technique.

I have already written about the memory palace memorisation technique (go and read the previous post if you don't know what I'm talking about), but I did not cover a very important point there: Where can you find memory palaces to use in your memorisation?

Why we may need a very big array of palaces

Not everyone has the same memorisation needs, as not everyone needs the same computing power. Some people are fine with netbooks, and some people need big multi-chip clusters. In memorisation, the same applies. Some memory masters try to memorise pi to very big lengths, a feat that requires a huge number of multi-room memory palaces perfectly stacked.

Obviously you may not need to memorise pi, but maybe you enjoy memorising poems or history facts and need more than the occasional shopping list enabled memory palaces. Let's see how we can enhance our mental landscape.

What to do with the 'palaces' you will find

In this post I'll give you a way to find suitable locations to use as memory palaces. What you need to do is write the list down together with a brief description and a list of rooms. If you are artistically inclined, try to draw a plan (or if you are very artistically inclined, draw the interior of the rooms!) of the buildings or routes, as this will burn them more clearly in your brain. At the very least you should write down the palace and the set of rooms.

Warming up: your home and known towns

As you may remember from the memory palace memorisation technique post (if you don't, maybe you should put it in a memory palace?) a memory palace does not need to be a house or palace: it can be anything that has some spatially ordered qualities. For example, a journey through a known town (like from your house to your office) or the stops in your underground route.

The first set of memory palaces you can create is the most basic and the one you should be using since the beginning. Your current home, the house were you were raised and the routes from these to your work and your school/highschool. These are the basic blocks that you should be using for your shopping lists, to-do list and similar very frequent tasks.

These are the basics mostly because you don't need any effort to picture them clearly in your mind, you don't even need to write them down (but you should, just to see how many palaces you have).

Getting deeper: Offices and frequent routes

The next source of good memory palaces are also in your day-to-day habits. Your office (or offices, or workplace), covering also your boss' office and co-workers den. Add to this list your walking routes around all of these, which should be between 3 and 15 memory palaces.

Now think about your frequent routes: from your house to your parents' place, from your house to the bakery and so on. The kind of walks you do weekly (or more frequent) but not the standard work commute.

These are pretty basic, too: they are always in your radar, as you are seeing them frequently.

Get exotic: holidays, foreign cities, travel routes

The next set is a little more 'foreign'. If you have been to some foreign city on holiday, you can use it as a memory palace. It will be a little harder to visualise it at first, but just take a look at your pictures or browse Google images for it. I can picture pretty easily Reykjavik (or at least some of its places), but I can use a lot of place-makers in Iceland following the route of our road trip around Iceland. You can do as well with your past holidays: in addition to being a good memory palace, the fond memories you may have will improve your mood.

This set is a little harder, but with a little help from your picture books and Google images you can use the wonderful landscapes you've been as memorisation aides.

Want it all: friends and relatives houses

You can now get a huge boost to the number of palaces by adding your current friends and relatives homes. Here I should add a recommendation: if you can't visualise properly some room of a friend or relative... It is no big deal. Just leave it empty or add some plain furniture. If you ever get back to that place, update your memory palace. The only point you need is a clear mental image, not a clear correct mental image. By adding these memory palaces you may be able to add between 10 and 30 (or even 40!) memory palaces to your list. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

You have to be a little more careful with these, as visiting a friend and discovering the plan is completely different can disrupt your memory for that particular palace. In practice, if you have been to a house and visited all rooms, you should be able to visualise them without any problems. If you have not been to a particular room, you can choose between creating your own picture or just keeping it closed. If you are sure you won't enter it ever, create your own: there will be no problems!

Going overkill: childhood homes and "odd places"

If you want to get all the lot of memory palaces, this is ultimate place. Time-travel to your childhood, and pick all your childhood friends homes. As I advised earlier, if you can't remember something properly, fill it as you wish: this last category is for homes you won't be visiting anytime soon (and if you do, update as needed). Add to this list your forgotten homes like ex's homes and ex-relatives-in-law homes, related routes, previous work routes and the kind of palaces and routes that would have applied to the previous categories for your past-self.

And finally, the odd buildings list. Like your local church or museum, a beloved place in your hometown, special places and similar. Whatever you can visualise you can use as a memory palace, you only need to 'think about it'.

For this list you can use the suggestions from the previous with respect to long-forgotten rooms.

Finishing

Now you should have a pretty long list of memory palaces, with a description of the rooms. And I bet this is a pretty long list! What can you do with it?

Well, a very important task is to get used to all these places again. Pick the list and carry it with you anywhere, and for a week or two just take it out occasionally and read it quickly. After that time, trim the descriptions and test your recall of the places. If some of them are too hard for you to visualise, just remove them from the list. There is no point in wasting effort when your list should be long enough already.

When you are profficient in traveling your new memory palaces, you just need to use them. To memorise what? Well, this is up to you now!

If you have enjoyed this one you may also like:

Focus in Language Learning: Doing Two Languages at Once Is a Bad Idea

2011-05-01T17:30:00.000+02:00

From my cheap dictionary

Last February I set myself a goal for these next three months (February, March and April): to learn Gaelic. The time is up and I must confess I have not made a lot of advances. The reasons are plenty, and most are shared with whoever wants to learn a new language. They are even harder for people learning a few languages at once, the kind of language nerds that have way too many Teach Yourself books on languages. I also have some solutions to approach the problems... Now I just need to apply them wisely.

Lack of time

As you may remember, I'm doing my PhD in Mathematics. I'm close to its end (or at least it looks so), and this means it eats even more time than before. In addition to this, I write regularly (or semi-regularly) here in mostlymaths.net and 100perZen.net, I'm learning to play guitar and have picked drawing (to have some more non-thinking time) again. I'm also attending a course on how to make your own shoes (yes, really). And together with Laia we are opening an Etsy shop. All quite time consuming!

Learning a new language can be split in really small steps: one word or declension a day, even. But I'm not hard-wired into doing so little with languages, and as such I try to do at least half a lesson a day, when time permits. But time never does!

Solution: I'm currently trying to use memorisation techniques (like memory palaces and mental associative chains) in my language learning experience. It is not easy, as memory palaces are not very well suited for language learning, and abstract data (like foreign languages) are hard to code in its images. But I'm still trying. This would mean that if I could find one or two hours in a week, I could advance steadily. A forthcoming post will explore this with more detail as soon as I have more experience with it.

Mild lack of motivation

My trip into Gaelic came from a guest post in Bitesize Irish Gaelic and several emails I exchanged with Eoin, who runs the site with his wife Saša. I got hooked into the language and the site, and for a while was very excited by the prospect of learning a new (and quite unknown) language.

Then I started to realise how much time a language needs. It's not that I didn't know before, its just that I was trying to learn two languages at once. This is usually a recipe for failure, unless the languages are very close. A few days ago I picked again my Icelandic book and I realised I had been telling myself to learn Irish without wanting to do it in that precise moment: I'm currently craving Nordic languages. When I opened my Swedish book it was like Hey, how fun is this!, the same went with Norwegian.

Solution: Concentrate on Icelandic for now. After all, one of my New Year resolutions is to learn enough Icelandic to read Egil's Saga (and The Little Prince before it). Let's do it, and then I can go for another language branch with Gaelic.

There's always something else to do

On my commute, reading RSS feeds or drawing. At home, blogging, drawing, laundry, chores. In my office, thesis.

If there is always something else to do that has a biggest lead (like getting more visits to my blog, or having clean clothes), it is very hard to do something "just for fun" in our free time, if it is something that needs a big time expenditure.

Solution: Fixed schedule. Set a specific moment in the day or schedule a few hours in the week for your language learning, just like if you were in a classroom. Two hours in a week, if bearable can do wonders. You can split it in two lessons per hour, or one lesson and one hour of reading with a dictionary, or one hour of online chatting. Do it enjoyable!

What are your language learning problems? And your solutions for my problems?

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends.

Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 8 - From Mývatn to Husavik visiting Ásbyrgi and Dettifoss

2011-04-24T20:15:00.002+02:00

No more gas ahead

Leaving Mývatn was a little dull. We saw a pair of handcraft stores that looked really interesting... And they were closed until 11! No way we could spend so much time waiting. We fueled, bought vanillated skyr for the route and took the road to Dettifoss. This is one of those places where you definitely have to fuel, there is no other gas station in 130km.

Dettifoss along the way to Ásbyrgi

On our way to Dettifoss we passed close to the Apolo 11 geological training zone, a lunar-like desert where Armstrong and Aldrin buzzed along before doing the real deal.

Dettifoss and the Dettifoss canyon area

What can I say about Dettifoss? Well, it wasn't that impressive after Gullfoss and that beautiful after Svartifoss. It was a good sight nevertheless, and it was just along the way to the Ásbyrgi. The road before the watching area was a little rough, red volcanic rock. And when we arrived we found a red Volkswagen Beetle from the 70s... Coming from Germany!

The Red Beetle, the Dettifoss canyon with some odd blue water and Hafragilsfoss from a good point of view

We also stopped along the way in Hafragilsfoss, where we collected red stones and bluish lava rocks.

Ásbyrgi

The Ásbyrgi is according to folk tales where Odin's eight-legged horse, Sleipnir set foot. Seen from the side it reminds me of the Flatiron building in New York.

It is a very odd geological formation, as we learned in Ásbyrgi's information centre. It was caused by a massively strong flood caused by the eruption of a volcano, melting a glacier, which swept away everything that was not strong enough to withstand its force.

Different view from the Ásbyrgi: Side, front, afar and its whereabouts

We made some instant coffee and had a walk around the zone, which is full of trees (birch, fir and pine). I don't remember if I had said this before, but Iceland has almost no big trees, and in fact this is one of the first places we saw some except at cities. It turns out that before the Viking discovery the island was full of trees... Which were used as fuel and supplies to build ships and homes. The big deforestation removed every tree, and the climate didn't help them grow again: trees here grow at a very slow rate.

Husavik: Whalewatching takes a "whale"

We left Ásbyrgi and tried to collect some seashells in places that our road map said there were plenty, but didn't have luck: the road was like 20 or 30 meters from the beach, and there was no way to pass except crossing some farm. Even the way to a museum with interesting views was closed by a fence! We had to drive backwards for quite a while and then maneuver to get back to the road.

In Husavik we had almost only one thing to do: go whale watching! We had a 7% discount we found in the information centre in Ásbyrgi and went straight to buy it, it was something like 14000 ISK. They told us the sea was a little brave and (as is usual for whale watching) gave us seasickness pills to take before the trip. They also told us to get some heavy jackets: I went to buy a 66º North black jacket for 16000 ISK, it is an awesome jacket: thin but very warm and weights almost nothing. It has been what I wore all this winter here in Spain.

The dock from Husavik, people before puking and a humpback whale's tail

It was really freezing at sea, and as they said, the sea was brave. We catched a humpback whale which we saw several times, also a lot of puffins flying around and some dolphins guided us back to port. An interesting fact: puffins have very short wings and thus don't have enough power to get out of sea. They stay in the water riding the waves until one lifts them up high enough to jump and fly.

On our way back to port I almost felt asleep, even with the rough sea. Something like 20 minutes before docking, they gave us hot chocolate (which was awesome after the freezing wind) and a cinnamon roll. I ate two, mine and Laia's, she looked a little pale and green. If you ever go whale watching and they say the sea is a little rough, don't go. You'll see at least 10 times more people puking from board to starboard than whales or even dolphins.

Back to our guest house and to sleep, we were wasted: it was already tomorrow and we were soaked from head to toes. We needed a shower... Even less time to sleep!

Today we drove for around 170km... Or not.

« Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 7 - From Egilsstaðir to Mývatn passing through Hverir
» Road Trip Through Iceland: Day 9 - Goðafoss and Hólar

Book Review: Do The Work, by Steven Pressfield

2011-04-20T10:28:00.003+02:00

St. George and the Dragon,
Cassell's Mag. of Art Ill. 1878,
link: fromoldbooks.org

You are the knight. Resistance is the Dragon

Some of the links in this page are affiliate links. But I only recommend the best I've really read.

Follow mostlymathsdeal in Twitter to know when this hardcover book decreases in price!

I have just finished reading Do the Work, by Steven Pressfield. Just in under one hour I went from start to finish, with a sense of non-rushing: it is a short book. A long manifesto, somehow. But it will kick your ass. I had been waiting for it since Steven told me about it in one of our email exchanges for Focused Interview with Steven Pressfield... An interview I wanted to do since writing my review of The War of Art. Got up, had breakfast, synced my Kindle and reading time ahead. Go download it for your device, it is free!

When I read The War of Art I had the same feeling, but being a longer book somehow it diluted across the days. Now I feel like a working high, I have to do something, and do it now. Well, later, first this review.

The book starts with some excerpts from The War of Art, aimed at identifying who is this mighty opponent: Resistance. Yes, with capital R. If you have read it already, these will be quick: you already have named your enemy and are ready to fight. Then the real deal begins: What is the best time to start?

The first mind-shattering question in this book has an interesting answer: Start before you're ready. Quoting from the book:

Good things happen when we start before we're ready. For one thing, we show huevos. Our blood heats up. Courage begets more courage.

The War of Art was written for writers and novelists, although it can be read by anyone in a creative endeavour, the style was aimed at them. Do the Work is slightly different: it approaches writers but encompasses almost everything (businessperson, entrepreneur, writer, researcher?). And tells you how to split your big ode to the world into something as simple as writing in a small piece of paper the three acts of your work. You can read this in Steven's blog here, he posted it as an article last Wednesday. Then you have to finish this 3 act structure... Begin with the end, fill the gaps and ship it. Sounds easy? No way!

First you'll have to learn to silence the inner critic, letting your creativity flow. If you've read The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain you know what I'm talking about here, if not... Why don't you pick up drawing in your free time? Now, your creativity may flow for a while, you're humming and singing and doing and then... You'll hit a wall. It's like a law of the universe. Solve it and finish. And finishing will get as hard as it gets: our greatest fear is fear of success.

All in all, a very good booklet and with a price tag of 0 it is far, far better. I highly recommend it, but if you have not read The War of Art, it is very well worth the money, at least from my point of view. If you are interested but not convinced, you can read my review of The War of Art.

I hope you enjoyed this quick review, and more so the book. If you did, please spread the word!