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I just released my first free software project: CL-HEAP. It’s a small library implementing some heap data structures and priority queues. I wrote it for my phd and thought that it would be neat little thing to release into the wild. I’d say, “Download it and try it out,” but it’s really not that exciting unless you’re implementing algorithms in Common Lisp.
Hopefully someone other than me will use it!
One of the great things about climbing at Higgovale is how beautiful the quarry is. Tonight, while I was at the top of a pitch untying the equipment in the approaching twilight, an owl started hooting. It was the end of a climb, I was safely secured at the top, and I had a moment to just relax and enjoy the dusk, the cool breeze. The owl. And the whole quarry below me.
On the walk out you can see the city bowl below you, still sunlit enough to clearly see the buildings and their colours, but now the buildings also have their lights on, those darker yellow lights and the bluish florescents and halogens.
So pretty.
And it seems that the paper I submitted has been published on the journal’s website, here. I think it’s been available for a few weeks now, although I’m not sure when it’ll be published in print.
The amount of work I put in to it is frightens me. The paper’s a writeup of my masters, which I finished off at night while working a full-time job during the day. Then there were the examiners’ (thankfully limited – I finished those in a day) corrections to my thesis, followed by the whole paper process: choosing what went in, cutting that down so that it fit into the length restrictions, cutting down the tables, submitting, working on reviewers’ changes, looking over the proofs. I am very relieved that that part of my life is finally over.
And now for the PhD 
Yesterday I sent in my corrections on the proofs. Thankfully it was all just small typos, and a minor modification to the tables. The one surprising thing is how much it cost to fax off the copyright transfer agreement: the copy shop in the Gardens Centre charged me R15 per page. Thankfully there was only four pages. Still, that seems quite exorbitant, even for an international number.
I just received a pdf copy of the proofs for the paper, which I’m going to start working on. Very little to do now: mostly just need to reread it and look for typos. Which means that hopefully tomorrow I can fax this off to the publishers. Yay 
My paper finally seems to be out of the editing phase. This morning I got an email from the journal saying that editing is now over, and they’re happy with it as it is. Next I should be seeing the page proofs, unless there are any major formatting problems. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there will be none.
Also, it seems that South African National Parks are the people who put up the gate at the Higgovale Quarry, apparently as a way of keeping muggers and the like off the mountain. The key is going to be copied and made available to people, although I haven’t entirely discovered how yet. But I have the contact number of the person from SANParks who manages Higgovale, so will be phoning them soon.
After months of working on it, the paper based on my MSc is almost off my hands: I’ve just submitted the revised manuscript to the Journal. I’m not yet sure what happens after this. I do know that there will be proofs to look at, but hopefully that won’t be too much work.
One Journal Paper: 30 pages, eleven tables, ten figures. Having it done: priceless.
Yay! I’ve finally got the paper into a more-or-less completed form. I’ve sent it off to the other authors for their opinion on it. I’m waiting to see what they say, but it shouldn’t need that much more work any more. So it’s back to working on the phd for me.
I’ve had a chance to use Office 2007 for the paper that I’m writing. The journal I’m submitting to somehow expects it to be “typeset” in Word, which is an interesting exercise in futility.
But I like Office 2007. I’m not 100% sure, but it seems that the equation editor has been revamped, although it’s been years since I’ve had to use it. For the limited use I put it through this time round, it seems to be doing a semi-reasonable job at typesetting the equations, although inputting them is still something I’m glad I don’t have to frequently do.
And Office 2007 has a built in citation manager! That made me quite happy to see, although I’m still having a lot of teething-pain with it. For instance, I often land up with author surnames and first names switched around, even when I’m using their built in “edit name” tool that has separate fields for adding first name, middle name and surname. It also doesn’t completely handle citation styles, like how to cite page numbers and so on: it just lets the user add arbitrary “page number” text to the citation; nor does it let you easily add text to a citation (such as Ackermann, 1998), or combine multiple citations into one entry. Gah! Maybe I’m just missing something. It also, sometimes, in what appears to be an arbitrary decision, adds the document’s title to the actual, in-text citation — I have never seen that done in anything except footnote citation styles (which I am not using), and I have no idea why Office feels that this “feature” is something that an author would automatically want. And while I can thankfully use unicode characters in the citations, I don’t seem able to use different font faces, such as italics, which you do actually need when, for instance, an article name contains the name of a species (specific names being written in italics, such as Homo sapiens).
Anyway, I like it, although typesetting a large document in it is probably still a nightmare. Trying to easily deal with the various styles, indenting and so on, even in a 25 page document, is an irritating hassle, and I’m not sure I want to deal with over a hundred references in its citation manager — I’m also pretty sure that there’s no way to use those citations in a sensible, non-mechanical way that isn’t going to drive someone insane in the long run.
Paper progress: it’s now down to 25 pages, and all the citations have been added. I just need to fix up the tables and then I can send it off to the other authors.
I’m not fond of writing papers. At least, I’m not fond of writing the paper that I’m working on at the moment. I’ve reached the point where I’m trying to cut down its page count — why journals use a page count rather than a word count escapes me, as does the reason that many journals want authors to “type set” their documents in Microsoft Word. I need to cut out two more pages to reach a total of 25 pages, which I should hopefully have done tomorrow sometime.
It’ll be good to have this finished. I’m looking forward to getting back to working on my PhD.
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