Tuesday, September 14, 2004
How to write a lab assignment
Don't.
This has been taking me a long time. Not the content. I had the lab done three days ago. Polishing. Readability. All of these things take so much time. I'm using LaTeX (pronounced - Lay-tek) to do the layout, which is cool. Formatting and fonts and spacing are a breeze as the compiler takes care of it all. However, learning it. Well, not only am I trying to learn LaTeX, but I decided, hey! Why not learn two things instead of just one? So I'm also learning VIm. Neither of these are too diffcult to learn, but coupled together (I write the LaTeX code in VIm) it feels like somebody installed a different OS on my computer. I don't know how to do anything. Everytime I have a question I have to go to the internet. HOWEVER! Here in lies the beauty of VIm and LaTeX. When you do a search for saving files vim or equations latex in google, you don't get microsofts crummy help, nor a bunch of links to people selling stuff or selling services for stuff. No. You get lots and lots of pages packed with help and information. So learning becomes fun and exciting. The lesson? Somethings are worth doing, and learning these two packages are definitely one of them. (If you don't want to learn VIM, consider Emacs still free.)
The other good news is that I plan on writing my thesis in these two programs. So this is like warm-up exercises for thesis marathons!
This has been taking me a long time. Not the content. I had the lab done three days ago. Polishing. Readability. All of these things take so much time. I'm using LaTeX (pronounced - Lay-tek) to do the layout, which is cool. Formatting and fonts and spacing are a breeze as the compiler takes care of it all. However, learning it. Well, not only am I trying to learn LaTeX, but I decided, hey! Why not learn two things instead of just one? So I'm also learning VIm. Neither of these are too diffcult to learn, but coupled together (I write the LaTeX code in VIm) it feels like somebody installed a different OS on my computer. I don't know how to do anything. Everytime I have a question I have to go to the internet. HOWEVER! Here in lies the beauty of VIm and LaTeX. When you do a search for saving files vim or equations latex in google, you don't get microsofts crummy help, nor a bunch of links to people selling stuff or selling services for stuff. No. You get lots and lots of pages packed with help and information. So learning becomes fun and exciting. The lesson? Somethings are worth doing, and learning these two packages are definitely one of them. (If you don't want to learn VIM, consider Emacs still free.)
The other good news is that I plan on writing my thesis in these two programs. So this is like warm-up exercises for thesis marathons!
