The Telegraphic

To anyone doing an undergraduate degree in physics – download and learn to use these three programs:

• LyX: A frontend for LaTeX,  specially designed for people who don’t like LaTeX. You could consider it “training wheels for LaTeX”, but if you learn it well you’ll probably never need to learn full-on LaTeX.
• JabREF: A reference manager for making Bibtex bibliographies. It plays nice with LyX, and you can use it to organise all those papers you read just for fun.
• Inkscape: A vector graphics program (SVG). Super useful for making diagrams to put into LaTeX. If you’re using LyX, the best option is to save your files as PDF when you want to insert them into LyX.

These are all free, and cross-platform. Note that for LyX, you’ll need to download TeX as well. Just follow the instructions on the lyx download page and you should be fine. The only other thing you’ll need is a graphing program: I’d recommend Mathematica, MATLAB and OriginPro (note: not free).

In my honours at UWA (2008), I was the lone cowboy who decided to LyX instead of LaTeX. It saved me a shitload of time and LaTeX related anguish. As such, I thought I’d offer a UWA Thesis Template up to give a helping hand to anyone else who wants to give LyX  a stab. In retrospect, there’s a few things I did dodgy along the way (I was pretty stressed out though, in my defense). Even so, I reckon it’ll be useful for some.

A few hot tips:

• Press Ctrl + L to manually enter LaTeX, whenever you can’t do it out-of-the-box
• Press Ctrl + M to enter maths mode
• Learn all the maths shortcut key combinations (e.g. press Alt + M, then F to input a fraction)
• Watch some youtube videos, like this one, to help you get up to speed

Good luck…

Download LyX template »

I spent a lot of time in the lab last month, taking measurements with an Anritsu 37xxxC series VNA. It would’ve taken me even longer if I hadn’t made this little python script to control the VNA over GPIB. All it does it open a connection, grab the data off and then write it to a CSV file. The magic lines you need to know:

## Open a connection to the VNA
VNA = visa.instrument("GPIB::06")

## Select a channel
VNA.write("CH1")

## Get frequency data
freq = VNA.ask_for_values("OFV")

## Get channel data
S11 = VNA.ask_for_values("OFD")

If you’re lazy just run the grabData script and voila. If you’re not, try editing the grabData() function to your needs and script away.

To get this to work, you’ll need Python 2.5, pyVisa and the relevant NI drivers (488.2 and for me the ones for the UBS-GPIB thing). There’s some useful documentation on the Anritsu site here. Kudos to Oliver King for his help .

The oldest human remains found in Australia are that of the Mungo Man, believed to have lived about 40,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch. So the Aborigines have been in Australia for at least 100 times longer than the Brits.

As far as colonists go, China knew about Australia before the Dutch, who sailed here on the Duyfken and landed on the Cape York peninsula in 1606 (navigated by Willem Janszoon). In 1616 Dirk Hartog got to Shark Bay and left a pewter plate. No-one in Europe really cared enough to make a settlement, until James Cook decided to claim the Eastern States: he sailed over on the Endeavor and landed at Botany Bay on 29th April 1770. After he left, tried to take the Hawaiian king Kalaniopu’u hostage, but miscalculated and instead, got stabbed to death.

The only reason the Brits actually bothered colonising was to get rid of prisoners (and possibly to look for replacement tea after the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773). Captain Arthur Phillip led the First Fleet (11 ships) over, they left on the 13 May 1787 and reached Botany Bay on 18 January 1788. They waited until 1829 to claim the West Coast and then founded the Swan River Colony, now known as Perth.

That’s it in a nutshell. Thank you Wikipedia.

This year’s 24 ways was a blast, and one of the articles that stood out for me was Andy Clarke’s tutorial on writing a Killer Contract. I think it’ll be saving quite a few developers out there from getting burnt. For my own dark desires, I’ve created a Microsoft Word template, complete with a macro to autocomplete it. I offer it here, free to use and redistribute as Andy did. I offer it as-is, make sure you look at it carefully before allowing the macro to execute, of course.

Using this, it only takes a few seconds to make a custom contract between you and a client. It should also only take a few minutes to customise it to your own styles and formatting.  If you’re even crapper at Word than me, then you might want to read up about user forms, bookmarks and form fields. The word MVP site is a killer resource for all that jazz. A quick MS Word tip: use ALT+F9 to toggle field view, and turn bookmarks viewing on in tools > options > views. Finally: IANAL, so YMMV. Good luck and enjoy!

Download contract template (zipped)