Career planning

I went to a career orientation event yesterday. There was free lunch (sandwiches&fruit) and some few former research students, now grown-up, describing how their career evolved and describing their job in different areas. Interesting at times, but not useful nor inspiring. The first thing I noticed is, none of them had planned his/her career path, that has been shaped mostly by them being made redundant, being sick with their current job, or being offered a new job out of the blue.

I left at the tea-break. Yet another proof that career orientation days aren't useful but for the free lunch and for you to think a bit about your career, but not for orienting you nor for giving you useful information.

How to detect the presence of links within a PDF file - linux

This is again somehow related to the conference organisation tasks in which I'm sometimes involved. IEEE does not accept for inclusion in IEEEXplore PDF files that contain links. Therefore, it's useful to have a way to check quickly if the bunch of submitted camera-ready is compliant before sending them over to IEEE.

If you have all your PDFs in a certain directory, from there you simply perform a:

egrep -l "/Link" *.pdf

All the non-compliant filenames will pop out.

About querulousness

It's good and healthy to discuss our own troubles with people close to us, our family and those ones that we call friends. Nonetheless, the sensibility is required to find suitable moments and ways to do so, in order not to become peevish. Yet, many people just wouldn't care, throwing up to you all their "sicknesses" at the first available opportunity. Failure in interfacing with people that care about you results in becoming isolated, damaging oneself on the first place.
It looks something so obvious, yet a number of people make this error and either do not realise it or confuse it with being honest and open. Good luck to them.

Convert all the images of a format into another format

So, you have a lot of images to be converted into EPS format in order to be included in you LaTeX file, don't you? OK, then the following is right for you

mogrify -format eps *.png

Once again, thanks, ImageMagick!

Useful notes about writing properly technical documents n LaTeX

For you guys out there that, for passion or just for work, write technical papers in LaTeX, I just found a page that points out common mistakes in (LaTeX) technical writing. Even though I discovered I was already complying with some of the guidances, it has been useful to me, so I share.

(from http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~jowens/commonerrors.html)

mloss

At http://mloss.org/software/ it is possible to find a good collection of Open Source Machine Learning software. In my experience, this kind of resource is very valuable since the availability of good software is fundamental both not to "reinvent the wheel", and to have a quick "bootstrap" into the real problems of machine learning that are not connected with implementation of algorithms that are, by themselves, quite complex both in theory and for numerical considerations.

I gave a look quickly since I'm not needing any new algorithm now, and I saw some good projects that I had the opportunity to use in my past work:

• OpenCV for image processing;
• LibDAI for graph inference;

in addition to other things that I didn't use but I know by fame.

oh shit, the Pope...

I've been lucky to come back to London recently. Sure, Im under the rain while down there there are 30 degrees and people is laying on the beach, but at least I avoided the Pope visit in Cagliari! What a curse. And apparently, pope Benedict "Palpatine" XVI, going up and down by the city with his "papa-mobile" (not quite a bat-mobile, but still...) has been warmly greeted. For the event, also Berlusconi was there (plagues never come alone). Some facts:

• the Pope arrived this morning with a personal Italian Army airplane: guess who's paying the fuel bill?
• according to the newspaper: "three girls, Chiara, Valeria, and Giorgia, gave to the Pope a bunch of flowers, receiving in return a wide smile and a caress." Then I ask to myself... WHO IN THE HELL GIVES A FUCK?!? ARE THESE ONES THE FUCKING NEWS FROM THE COUNTRY?
  

I'm disconcerted, I don't know what's going on here. Depression.