Why is this blog never updated?

I don't know why...

Printing Dissertations

Ok... maybe my last post!

When you print your dissertation, go to the on-campus branch of Kinko's. There's a guy there who's really cool and happy and who's been there since 1999 when the place was called Dissertation Station. He joked that mine was probably the 14,000th dissertation that he's printed!

I printed the B&W pages of my thesis on our laser printer, and then went to Kinko's to have the color pages printed. But what would have been easier would be to have all of the pages printed at Kinko's. If you tell them which pages are to be in color and which B&W, they'll charge you the color rate for only the pages that are in color. Also our printer has trouble printing on thesis paper and sometimes jams.

I ordered the Stanford thesis paper with the Stanford monogram. But when I made some test copies, I discovered that the paper is a bit transparent and when it's printed on both sides, the print on the opposite side shows through a little bit. This made me decide to print single-sided instead. If having two-sided prints is important to you, you might want to consider getting different paper.

Good luck with your dissertations!

How to keep page headers from being all-caps

When writing your thesis, sometimes you don't want your page headers to be in the default all-caps. This is especially important if your chapter or section titles contain chemical formulas that would look really ugly if converted to all-caps. This is a conundrum that K.Yun has been idly pondering for some time now.

I've found a solution that uses the package "fancyhdr" which is available here. The documentation is here. "fancyhdr" lets you format your headers in all sorts of way: italic, bold, not-all-caps -- it even let's your draw a horizontal rule below your header.

Here is what you can input to get rid of the all-caps but otherwise keep everything the same:

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\fancypagestyle{headings}{%
\fancyhead{}
\fancyhead[ER]{\nouppercase{ \slshape \leftmark}}
\fancyhead[OL]{\nouppercase{ \slshape \rightmark}}
\fancyhead[EL,OR]{\thepage}
\fancyfoot{}
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
}

All of the above goes before the \begin{document} in your latex file.

But why keep everything the same if "fancyhdr" let's you format your header in an infinite number of ways?

Envelope Extraction in Origin

I'm doing "envelope extraction" analysis on my dHvA data. It took me some time to figure out which boxes to check or uncheck on the Origin FFT tool, so I thought I would just document that here, partially so that I remember how to do it myself.

While usually I would apply a window (e.g. "Hamming window") while doing FFT, here it's better to not use a window i.e. use the "Rectangular" window.

Forward FFT
Use "Rectangular Window"
Uncheck "Normalize Amplitude"
Check "Shift Results"

Apply filter

Backward FFT
Select real and imaginary columns
Use "Rectangular Window"
Uncheck "Normalize Amplitude"
Uncheck "Shift Results"

Plot 2*r
Results may be offset in x-direction.

Converting PDF images to EPS

I've had to convert PDF images to EPS quite often over the past few days, and I've developed a foolproof if intricate process to do this conversion. It is especially good for if you only want to convert a small section of a document (i.e. a figure), because if you want to convert the entire document, Ghostview/Ghostscript can do it for you in one step.

Here is my process:
1. Open document in Adobe Reader. Use the Snapshot Tool to select desired area.
2. Open Paint. Paste from clipboard. Save as jpg.
3. Use jpeg2ps to convert to EPS.
4. If necessary, use Ghostview/Ghostscript to resize bounding box. (Select "PS to EPS" under File menu)

If your jpg image is too large, part of it might get cut off in the jpeg2ps conversion. If this happens, resize your jpg image so that it's smaller.

If you know of an easier way to do this, I'd be interested to hear about it. Also please share other document/latex tips you might have.

Organizing PDFs

I'm trying out Zotero as a tool for organizing pdfs of journal articles. My journal articles are always hidden away in multiple folders on my computer and it's hard to find them when I need them. Zotero lets me access them from a central location, and I can tag and search them. If you are viewing certain websites, like Socrates or Physical Review, Zotero will import title/author information for you. It will also export Bibtex.

If you are using a Mac (I don't think any of us are), Papers is the new, awesome scientific paper organizer for Macs. I was searching for a PC version, and that's how I came across Zotero.

PPMS cryopump regeneration

We have been having a lot of trouble with the PPMS cryopump. The manual claims we should only need to regenerate the pump once every 500 uses, but we are needing to regenerate every ~30 uses. Ernest at QD says that, every time we regenerate in dewar, we should run the regeneration command 5 or 6 times, and every time we regenerate out of dewar, we should run it 4 times, then do an in dewar regneration after finishing the out of dewar regeneration. I've modified the regeneration sequences accordingly, and we should all remember to do an in dewar regeneration after finishing an out of dewar regeneration.