Posts Tagged ‘wikip’
LaTeX, TeXnicCenter and LyX
Some time ago I sat down to learn how to write equations on Wikipedia using TeX, a language used by scientists and mathematicians for technical documents. MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, uses a subset of this language so that we can have pretty equations on our articles, like this one I just did (right). For some time I was wondering what was used to produce the beautiful equations in textbooks and so I delved further and discovered LaTeX, the language used. It is called a typesetting language – you type out your document with tags (it’s a markup language, not a programming one), run it through the TeX engine and get a beautiful image or PDF out of the other side. It does headings with a table of contents, margin and foot notes, cross references that work regardless of which page the actual content is, tables (with difficulty) and of course beautiful equations like the one above.
Writing LaTeX in a normal text editor works, but it is better to find an app that will check your syntax, highlight brackets and the like, and then compile into a finished document at the press of a button – effectively an IDE. So I started using TeXnicCenter on Windows which is rather nice. I would recommend it for beginners. I would suggest that readers make use of Google primarily for learning the language – there are tutorials dotted around. I intend to write my coursework up this way after Christmas – it makes it look very professional when done right. Then I will get gnuplot (not actually GNU, by the way) up to draw graphs, but I am not sure this is allowed.
Yesterday I found myself on Ubuntu and wanted to write up some revision notes for physics so I fired up the package manager and installed a selection of LaTeX GUIs, and through this discovered LyX, a rather nice one. It is actually a complete environment where you are not required to use any code at all, although a knowledge of how the language works helps. Through this I produced a rather pretty overview of the course so far that I intend to use just before the exam for last-minute revision and something I can add to and complement over the revision period. Also for me doing revision this way is more fun because I do love the beautiful typesetting. So, if you like maths or mathful science, learn LaTeX or get a copy of LyX.
Debating, elections and birthday
It seems I have been reduced to one blog post a month, so I better make this one good. Today was my round in the internal debating competition for selecting a school team for national debating competitions that are for the sixth form only, as most of them are. We started off well with a strong opening from me but then I totally misjudged the timing and ran on for a seven minute speech when I was making one of three minutes and so this spoiled the end a little. Nevertheless we were still in with a chance. Katy made her speech, but I think she piled on the facts and figures a little too much and this meant that she seemed a little rushed. The opposition by this point had established a strong case, directly addressing us, and despite the fact that we got a lot more audience questions than them we were still pretty even as it went into closing speeches. But I messed that bit up in general by again thinking I had longer than I actually had. Apparently debating won and we were very close, but overall my team did lose which shocked some others when told about it. I am disappointed that I will not be able to take part in the competition, but really I think in this case the other team was better so it was fair enough that we lost.
I am currently deciding whether or not to join the race for the Arbitration Committee this year. I am told by wikifriends that I stand a fair chance of being voted in (one, a former arbitrator, said that the worst outcome of it all would be being elected…) so it is worth doing as there is nothing to lose if I don’t succeed in gathering enough support to be appointed. I would like to do the job because I think I would be pretty good at it, simply put, and thus it is worth running for the position. It is something I could get into and get good at by being efficient with my time. The sucking of time that the job involves is of course the main reason against running, but I think that I could squash it in by reducing other activities. I think an important factor here is that I need to manage my time better to ensure that I can do all these things as I am sure that I can – the decision on whether to run or not rests on how well I can manage my time, and if I do post my candidate statement I will have decided that I can do it.
It was my seventeenth birthday on Saturday, and it has hit me how close I am to being eighteen, which concerns me somewhat. It was a pretty good day once I got back from work at twelve noon; along with my grandparents we went out for lunch and then opened some presents. Key presents are an exciting flash drive watch and Wikimedia and Wikipedia T-shirts. I also got a rather special box of crackers and various other things to eat, and surprisingly some clothes too, which is not usual for my birthdays. I also got a great deal of money which I added to my savings for building a computer, something which I am now aiming to do either at Christmas or over the half-term after that. Hopefully I won’t have an unreasonable amount of revision for the January exams because they are subjects I am not having problems with. So things are going pretty well in general, even if I rushed this post.
Time is a lot more valuable than it used to be
I have long accepted and understand that the sixth form can and should be a lot more work than before as the level of study is significantly higher. That has finally become apparent at school in terms of difficulty where things are taking a step up (although due to personal skew and paranoia this is not apparent in history) at last. I am happy to be challenged and to question and to explore, however PC that may sound. However, sheer quantity of work has been proving a problem lately as I am not finding time for a lot else, as described in my previous post. This can’t be good – I should be doing things other than homework in an evening and could do with a longer weekend. It has been suggested that the initial burst will level off once teachers are satisfied that pupils (or ‘students’…) have got the message about what the sixth form is, and it does seem to me that things are getting a little less, but it is hard to tell if this is just me getting used to it. It is meaning that I am having to make changes to the things I do.
On an aside here, I am not always one hundred percent sure that I am doing the right work. I do things very throughly, wanting to do well and to get as much into my head now so that revision is a lot easier. But often for history I have reams of notes I am told to make and I don’t know if I am ramming too much detail down and wasting my efforts. I plan to speak a teacher about what I should be doing ideally.
For starters, I am unable to do little things on top of what I already do when they would normally be easy to accomodate. For example, there is a club starting at school for a board game called ‘Diplomacy’ or some such – I would love to go, but I really can’t devote another evening to an activity such as this. Another example of this problem is the National Cipher Challenge. I am on a team for that (we are actually doing rather well; will post on it when the competition gets serious and those in it for a laugh are eliminated from the ‘everything right so far’ group) but it is interfering with things already. This isn’t a major issue, really, because all it does is inconvenience me when I have the afternoon of the day the challenge is released off. But the point stands that I am having difficulty fitting small projects or events around what I do any more. Having to say no to constructive activities is not something that I am used to. Another example of this issue is the distinct lack of progress on the new SilentFlame website.
The above makes sense during term time but my involvement in my online projects, Wikimedia and freenode, has also been suffering. Wikimedia works a great deal over the medium of mailing lists, which we find very practical for discussion as they work with all sorts of configurations, assuming people use plaintext e-mails, which they do. I am subscribed to a lot of these lists but have them filtered in three directions: labels called wmfe for external and public lists, wmfi for internal, closed-subscriptions things I am involved in (not strictly true – I have at least one list on there that is not mainstream but that I do need to keep up to date on everything that passes through) and wmwp, which is for project-based lists such as for Wikipedia itself, rather than the parent organisation Wikipedia. Out of these, only wmfi actually arrives in my inbox where the rest get auto-archived. This is because I couldn’t and wouldn’t particularly want to keep up with all of those lists, so I have the important ones coming into my front view. The problem is now that even with this reduced quantity of lists, I simply do not have enough time to read everything that goes through. Or if I do, I am not reading efficiently enough. Even though I find most of the things on the lists fascinating and worth reading, I find that sometimes I have just had enough of the threads and am reading for the sake of reading. This is a waste of time – but what do I do? I do need to know what is going on within Wikimedia.
My specific jobs with Wikimedia are a different matter. I am ensuring that individual responsibilities will always be completed as I have been entrusted with them, and I have no problem getting them done. However, as with real life situations as described above, I cannot take part in smaller events and discussions if I wish to as I must focus on certain tasks. It makes things a lot less fun than they used to be where I could really get into my work. With freenode I am simply not doing as much work – this is fine as I do have a reasonably excuse, but it doesn’t help keep our image of availability of staff very strong because I am not around as much. However, I am still involved in the community there. Despite this I have had to give up one job, that is the verifying of group registration contact information, which is a shame. On this note, swhitton@freenode.net is no longer a valid e-mail address for me, so please do not try to use it if you are one of the few people who does. It was for group registration, so I do not need it anymore.
Throughout this I am always so thankful that I have my hosted Gmail account set up. Gmail is wonderful for keeping things organised and being patient when I don’t read my mail there 
I don’t think I would manage without it and so I am so grateful for the service from Google and the fact that they recently increased my 2GB limit (it does not go up continuously as it does on @gmail.com traditional Gmail. The conversation grouping, labels and filters do it for me.
It has been suggested that I don’t actually use my time as well as I could, and this is something that I have considered. It could be argued that by engaging in small-scale activities I am wastingtime, but I try to be consistently productive in choosing what to do. However I often dither between activities and become rather distracted and messy while not focussed on an activity, which is a really bad thing as I allow time to slip away. This I need to sort out – if I am not doing something, I should be reading e-mails or some such. I need to force myself into more productive habits, but it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. I will keep trying.
Education, education, education
I have been holding off writing a post to report on how the new year has gone because I have been waiting until I was sure a particular issue which I will describe later was sorted. Now it has been, I am very happy with my situation: it is clear that my expectations during the latter part of last year that the Sixth Form would be a lot better than the previous five years were correct and I am finally enjoying learning again. I have said for five years that I “enjoy school but not secondary school” and this is no longer the case. I am enjoying my time now. There are so many things that are better.
For those who don’t know me, I am taking maths, further maths, history, physics and philosophy (shortened on my timetable to the unpronounceable “phphy”. I was also aiming to take politics but this wouldn’t timetable. I am glad that I was persuaded not to persue it as really, the work would have been too much and I wouldn’t be doing a lot else (such as writing this entry). However, it seems my attempts to do six AS levels caused the single politics group to have an awkward timetable and then I didn’t actually join it, as the teacher has been telling her pupils (or students – I generally object to this term but since officially we are and can join the NUS in the Sixth Form, I am being somewhat less verbal about it). My subjects are working out very well; maths is great but I hope it doesn’t get too hard once we end the rehashing of GCSE material. My marks are looking fine at the moment. Physics is also interesting but a lot of it is just the same as mechanics lessons, which is good for reinforcement but can also be a bit boring and repetative at times. However, after Christmas, we go on to “Waves, Particles and Quantum Phenomenon” which is very exciting. After Christmas, I will have half an A-level in maths, which is an interesting thought.
History isn’t quite so positive. For two major assessment points, that is the end of Y9 and of course my GCSEs, I have underperformed in this subject and I’m never quite sure why. I do find in intermediate tests and thought I enjoyed it; I certainly find the study facinating. However, I seem to like it less and less as I am always unsure that I am doing the right amount and critically the right direction of work. A-level is different to GCSE – there is more knowledge and more essay writing, but at least it is only one question per exam. While I suspect I will drop this after Y12 (I don’t know yet of course, but out of the four it seems the most likely right now) I do intend to work hard to get that A, even if I am not very good at it. I am always unsure of my ability and this doesn’t make it too much fun.
Despite the fact I have only had two taught hours of it and thus it is hard to make a fair judgement, philosophy is looking very good at the moment. The group is interesting and wants to engage and is a pretty good size, so it should be a way to add some arguments to my convictions… There is at least one arrogant one in there who can be engaged in debate. Debating within the school is hopefully changing this year too with the return of “Debating X-Treme”, a group for more formal debating. We are pulling in more people from the English department to popularise it and now that Mr Moore-Bridger is finally in every day of the week things are a lot better because as a pupil it was pretty hard for me to organise anything proper. We are having internal competitions to decide on a team to go forward to national things which we miserably failed at organasing before and this is positive. Mr M-B has suggested that we also ask the Debating Society, “the thing which started it all”, to act as an audience and to try and formalise debating more there. My opinion is that this would be great as our own self-developed style doesn’t allow a great deal of depth, but we will propose it to the group and hope they are willing. I have no desire to force it upon them as this would be totally unfair as I am concerned they may not be willing to put in the extra work. But we shall see.
My posts often seem to contain the notion that I am busy in some way, probably because I am writing them whilst thinking “arg, I haven’t updated my blog for a while because I have been so busy”. This is definately the case now and I am completely snowed under with homework most of the time. It is infact rather ridiculus at times in the sense that I don’t do a lot else. At the weekend I only got about six hours, not including my job on a Saturday morning, at home working on Wikimedia, freenode and SilentFlame which seems rather short. However, Tim from my newsagent tells me that they pile it on in the first few weeks to ‘prove’ that the Sixth Form is harder work and hopefully it will ease off. I certainly hope so, otherwise I won’t have a lot of time for my other activities and this will be mad. I have given up Oxfam every week to do it in the school holidays only already and I don’t want to have to give up more. This may of course be because I am putting in a lot of effort, but that represents History where I am working very hard for obvious reasons.
As promised, I will go over the reason that it took me so long to update my blog with school, aside from a lack of time (tonight I have slightly less homework and tomorrow morning free to do it in). Back in May/June, I had been told that it would be requested that I be put in a particular form next year, one with a teacher I knew well and that was based in the library, where I live. However, come the Sixth Form induction I did not get this form and was rather surprised, so decided to immeadiately chase it up, knowing it ought to be achieved before the proper school holiday. I was told that a member of staff had expressed concerns that I was not branching out enough by being attached to the library. Surprised that the member of staff who made the request was seemingly not being listened to, my mother wrote into the school to request reconsideration. For the past three weeks I have been fighting hard for the form change, something which required a great deal of time and effort on my part. But I believe I was victorious through my perseverance and am now where I want to be. I am happy that things will be that bit easier in that form. Everything is sorted for a great year.