Sorry for lack up recent updates. I’ve left the laptop at work (my preffered system for writings posts involves the latop a nice cool beer and a period of sitting on the roof in the early evening) and it is too bloomin’ hot to sit at the computer.
There are a couple of science posts to come and one or two regarding ‘Fenchurch St to Limehouse – the long way round‘.
In the meantime, have a couple of photos I took the other day.
A female Dragonfly
A male Damselfly
Click for bigger
Several explosions on London Underground , possible train crash at Kings Cross station, bus explosion at Russell Square.
update: 12:30
Now claiming 2 dead, many injured. 7 explosions.
And of course ID cards would have prevented all this [/sarcasm]
update: 17:56
Well the story is all over the news now. at least 32 dead, many injured. Four explosions, 3 on tube trains and one on a bus. No confirmed dead from the bus yet, but judging from the state of it – it is shreaded – I doubt there will be many survivors.
I was amazed by the lack of visible police presence at Stratford station on my way home, I’d have expected that to be a high priority given the Olympic situation and the fact it is a major LT station.
Yay!
London will be hosting the 2012 Olympic games.
I work about a mile west of the soon to be Olympic Village. so I have something of a vested interest in seeing this area regenerated.
I doubt (hope) I’ll still be living and working in this area come 2012, but it will be interesting to see the changes as they happen.
Tomorrow sees me heading off to Cardiff for the ISSC-15 conference. Just under a week of geeking my particular variety of science with a few hundred like minded individuals at the UK’s premier surface science conference.
Looking at the program, the will be talks on everything from ablation (my field) to catalysis to xenon adsorption analysis. I’m scheduled to talk for 15 minutes before lunch on Tuesday. My talk, which will appear here some time next week, is about producing ordered arrays of very sharp thing by shooting a very flat thing with a laser causing it to explode.
One problem with giving talks at scientific conferences is that everyone now uses LCD projectors, so gone are the days of hand drawn or printed acetates and the noisy overheard projector. Instead welcome to the world of powerpoint, annoying animations, incompatible screen resolutions, missing fonts, music and sound effects, version incompatibility, the list can continue…
Fully half the time I’ve spent putting together my talk has been taken up with tweaking slide layouts, removing random animations attached by default to every bloody image I’ve inserted and checking I’m not using anything specific to my powerpoint installation that will cause the talk to die when viewed on another machine.
It is just so much faffing around. I’m about 80% sure I’ll need to tweak the file further in the 10 min testing time before the session starts. The only problem is, so will everyone else :-/
In the past I’ve tried PDFs for presentations, but they just didn’t quite work. Powepoint does have the edge for flipping through slides quickly, it is also – alas – the expected format for presentations. Turn up with something other than a .ppt file and expect to get a few blank stares unless the AV people are on the ball or one of the scientists are running the projector. Even if they recognise the file there is no assurance you’ll actually be able to use it.
Well everything I can think of has been taken care of, a copy of my talk exists in 3 different places – laptop, email, pendrive, I might stick a copy on a website as well. The laptop is loaded up with films and southpark rips, I just need to find the GBA for the trip and locate a decent book.
Back Friday.
I’ve been using LyX (a What You Get Is What You Mean document processing system) to prepare various documents for a couple of years now. Since moving to the Mac I’ve had trouble with any PDFs I create using PS2PDF from LyX, all the text in the PDF became rendered vectors, rather than selectable text. Effectively the whole document becomes pages of high resolution images, rather than text.
As well as making for file sizes in the tens of megabytes from a few hundred k of ASCII, it also means the PDFs are uneditable – this makes collaboration on a document rather hard…
The solution, obvious now I think of it, is to make sure in LyX that the document fonts are set to one of the 14 base fonts supported by the Adobe PDF standard (Times or Times New Roman, Helvetica or Arial, Courier, Symbol and Zapf Dingbats; this adds up to 14 when you consider the bold, italic, etc version of these fonts).
If you are also having this problem in LyX go to Layout:Document:Fonts and select something other than Default. You should now be able to edit your PDFs.
