Adobe Reader on Linux

This afternoon I tried to print a chapter of my thesis to read through and figure out where I needed to make changes. I opened it in Adobe Reader on Linux, as I had done hundreds of times before, and tried to print the relevant page range. I was then informed that the document could not be printed!

Now, this is a little worrying for a thesis—something which is inherently meant for printing! The weird part was that I'd printed bits of it before, to test layout, colour, etc.

I tried to print other PDFs through Adobe, which all worked fine. I tried to print the thesis from Okular, which also worked fine. I then gave up and Googled the error message (document could not be printed). It appears that there was some kind of bug in Adobe Reader 9.4.2 that caused some documents to become unprintable. I downloaded (and, obviously, installed) Adobe Reader 9.4.6 and the problem was gone.

The moral of the story is, I suppose, always keep up to date on your Adobe Reader version. Obviously this is difficult on Linux since the versions are a way behind, and apparently they're going to stop making them altogether [warning: unsubstantiated rumour]. Unfortunately, none of the other PDF viewers I've tried on Linux actually work very well (both Okular and Evince have various rendering problems, though not the same problems as each other, which is odd because last time I checked they both used the same rendering engine library...)

Still, I'd rather work with PDF than any of the much less portable formats people regularly send around for no good reason (MS Word documents, OpenOffice documents, etc.)

Assassin's Creed

I recently spent quite a while playing Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed II (I haven't finished II yet...)

The games are fantastic! The gameplay in ACII is rather better than the original, but the storyline continues sensibly and it's seriously addictive.

The addictive nature is helped (?) by the lack of obvious breakpoints; you tend to just keep playing, rather than thinking "this is a good place to stop".

I still have quite a bit of ACII to play through, then Brotherhood and Revelations, so I suspect my evenings for the next week or two are looking quite full!

Musings of a Ph.D. student

As September 2011 draws to a close, I am coming up on the final six months of my Ph.D. and felt that now would be a good time to make a post about some of the things I've managed to do, and some of the things I have left to finish.

One of the "goals" of most Ph.D. students is to go somewhere nice for a conference or "school" (essentially a week-long course / conference where the goal is to educate or inform about some aspect of theory, experiment or technology). Over the course of my Ph.D. I've managed to go to Italy twice, Oxford once and Glasgow once...

The first trip happened as the first year of my Ph.D. was almost over; this should be a fairly familiar story for any UK experimental particle physicist, since I am referring to the STFC RAL Summer School in Oxford. This is a two-week long smorgasbord of quantum field theory, and is simultaneously thoroughly enjoyable and complete hell.

Let me explain that one; if you're interested in particle physics and you're doing an experimental Ph.D. the summer school is the closest you get to a decent understanding of the theory behind it all. The problems for the first week are interesting and solvable, while the problems for the second week are interesting and impossible unless you are a theorist! The hell aspect comes from having two weeks of lectures, problems, solutions, more lectures, too much food, and far too much alcohol.

Shortly after the summer school, I had a week-long trip to a place called Bertinoro, in the Forlì-Cesena province of the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy (near Bologna). This was for the 'European School of Computing' (ESC 09) which was a week of lectures on high-performance computing for particle physics. Some of the things discussed here were quite interesting, and my understanding of things like virtual memory improved dramatically over the course of the week. One of the interesting aspects was the food; each night we got to try a different local restaurant!

My third trip was to Siena, Tuscany (Italy). This was for the IPRD10 conference - a week-long conference on particle detectors. Here, the food was spectacular, but more expensive than in Bertinoro. The weather in Siena was wonderful, and it is a beautiful place to walk around. The same cannot be said for Pisa, though. Staying in Pisa was necessary since I flew into the airport there, and had a flight back from there. Once you've seen the tower (and it really does have quite a lean to it!) there's not an awful lot left.

One of the highlights of Siena was finding what I thought was a little restaurant on a side street. On walking inside, I discovered that it went quite a long way back, opening out onto a balcony looking out over the Tuscan countryside. This proved to be an ideal place for a lunch of lobster linguine!

The final trip was to Glasgow, for the IoP NPPD 2011 (Institute of Physics Nuclear & Particle Physics Division) Conference. Since several of us from Warwick were going, we rented a house in Glasgow for the duration of the conference. The house was amazing, and I think it helped to keep me sane, having a "house" to go home to rather than a hotel room and another restaurant dinner. We managed to find a Waitrose on the way between the house and Glasgow University, where the conference was held, so all of our evening meal and breakfast needs were taken care of. The cooking facilities in the house were second to none, and the entire experience was a huge success.

I managed to give talks at both the IPRD10 and NPPD11 conferences, on both occasions to a small but interested audience, so that is one of the Ph.D. checkboxes ticked.

I've spent three years now working on software for track reconstruction in liquid Argon TPCs (time-projection chambers). This software has been in a mixture of C++ and Python. As I write, I'm currently finishing some work on one such algorithm and heading towards a sensible analysis to round off my thesis... which I started writing last week.

So, in terms of things left to do, I need to formulate some coherent idea of what my final analysis will actually involve, get all the pieces of software together and working, and then run them on large data samples. All this while simultaneously writing a thesis...

Regarding the thesis itself, I spent a little while working on stylistic issues such as changing the chapter title pages from the default to something a little more colourful and modern. In doing so, I purchased the Futura Std Medium font from adobe.com to use as the chapter title font in my thesis (and then had to figure out how to make XeTeX pick up this font and use it).

I guess now I just have six months of being very busy, working simultaneously on analysing physics events, writing chapters of my thesis, writing any papers that seem appropriate along the way, and trying to remain sane.

Gears of War 3

So I'm not what you'd call a "big gamer" (I'm neither obese, nor do I play a lot of games). I do, however, own an Xbox 360, and I was therefore eagerly awaiting Gears 3, which was released yesterday.

Now, my introduction to the Gears saga began with Horde on Gears of War 2, while visiting friends with Xboxes. This experience was sufficient to make me buy a 360 and a copy of Gears 2. Once I'd completed that, I bought Gears 1. I haven't actually *finished* Gears 1, but that is mostly due to a lack of time, rather than, say, lack of interest.

Anyway, yesterday was eagerly anticipated; I even went so far as to pre-order Gears 3  from Amazon (though they didn't manage to get it to me by the release day, which I consider to be a pretty major problem considering the concept of pre-ordering, and the concept of Amazon Prime... oh well!) Instead, I bought a copy from Sainsburys (and will sell the other copy to my housemates) and I spent much of the evening playing.

The first point I want to make is that, as I write this, I haven't finished Gears 3. In fact, I've only played through Act 1 on Normal difficulty, and played waves 1 through 33 of Horde on Normal difficulty. Then, extreme tiredness kicked in and I went to bed.

As far as gameplay is concerned, it feels much the same as Gears 2. The graphics have been polished a little, but it's basically the familiar experience; today's Penny Arcade pretty much sums it up.

I won't go into details about the storyline, but the first act has an interesting split to it, and the Horde mode has been enhanced somewhat, which makes it a little more interesting than the "wait, shoot, wait" cycle of Gears 2 Horde.

I haven't tried out the Beast mode yet, but that sounds like it should be fun; maybe I'll write more about that another day!

In all, Gears 3 delivered exactly what I expected... the third chapter in the Gears story, the familiar gameplay in familiar environments... having played the previous versions, I'm not having too much trouble playing through on Normal difficulty. I guess Hardcore and Insane are going to be more tricky; and probably even more fun.

As for achievements, the usual complement return (Waves 1-10 on Horde, Waves 1-50 on Horde, story progression in the campaign, etc.) though I haven't spotted any as ridiculously hard to achieve as Seriously 2.0 on Gears 2... yet!

More Android Development

So far, I've managed to set up Eclipse to use the Android dev. tools and completed the 'Hello World' tutorial. This proved relatively simple, except for the matter of getting the entire emulator visible on a Macbook display. My resolution is 1280x800 and the Android emulator wants to display something 800 pixels high. Luckily, I discovered that you can pass the emulator a command line option to scale the device on screen:

emulator -scale 0.75


The full list of options is available at http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator.html

There's a 'Notepad Tutorial' to try next, so I'll probably do enough of that to get a decent idea of the components available, then start digging around the reference documentation for the components I'll actually need for one of the ideas I have (more on this later!)

Android Development

It's been a while since I posted here, and since I've decided to spend a little time on a new project, I thought I might use the opportunity to write some new posts.

The project is to get acquainted with the Android SDK and write one or two apps for my Android phone (HTC Desire, since you didn't ask).

So far, it's going well. I'm taking the easy route, as outlined at http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html so I have downloaded the SDK starter, and downloaded Eclipse. I'm now installing the 'ADT' (Android Developer Tools?) into Eclipse.

I've never really bothered with Eclipse before, since I prefer to do most of my software development with gvim and a terminal window, but it is apparently the easiest way to get started with Android development. We'll see...

Comment Moderation

In the last few days I've noticed a number of spam comments appearing on here. I've turned on comment moderation in order to prevent these receiving any airtime, but please accept my apologies if you are a genuine commenter and your comment is not published immediately; I'll approve the comments just as soon as I can.