To-do: Learn How to give a good presentation

I’m sure you’ve had to sit through a lot of presentations and even more lectures that were horribly boring. I think it is very irresponsible of a person giving a presentation to just read off the slides. And given the nature of things, it may be the case that someday, you’ll be that speaker. So please, although I’ve said this before a lot of times (if you’ve been reading my blog for the last few years, you’ll realize that this is true), I think it’s worth it to repeat this again, in a recipe format.

Step 1: Best software for presentations

You have to realize that creating a PowerPoint slide is just a waste of time if all you’re going to put on the slides is a bunch of text. Please, just print out a few pages of that text and hand it out before your talk. Using PowerPoint as speakers notes is a crime.

If you’ve convinced yourself that you’ll be showing some meaningful images and need some kind of a presentation software, here are some good picks:

• Keynote (mac only): Simple, easy to use and has some really fancy animations. Don’t get carried away by these fancy animations though!
• PowerPoint: The thing that everyone uses…
• S5: Present from a HTML page (and the tell people to view it on your website after the talk!)
• Google Docs: Create your presentation online (great for collaborative presentations!)
• SlideRocket: Another powerful online alternative that has Keynote style effects
• Beamer: If you need to give research talks that involve a lot of equations (and know what LaTeX is), then Beamer is something that you should look at

Step 2: Create your slides

Some rules:

• 10/20/30 rules: If you’re pitching something, I highly recommend Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule. 10 slides, 20 minutes, and a minimum 30 pt font!
• More images than text… this’ll force you to know your presentation, not to read off the slides
• High resolution images
• A sensible theme (a dark blue background with white text doesn’t cut it anymore….). Please choose something that’s easy on the eyes.

Step 3: Rehearse, rinse and repeat

You can’t ever give a good talk without practicing. The more you practice, the more you’ll realize that the software is there mainly just to show a bunch of pictures. Having some text on the slide, and you reading it out is just useless and distracting!

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Fix broken dictionary app in Mac OS X Leopard

So, it seems like the Wikipedia update broke Apple's dictionary application, because some developer at Apple figured that they'd never update Wikipedia. If you change Wikipedia's MonoBook theme to something else, it stops working.

Nevertheless, there seems to be an easy fix for this (sort of). Here's what you can do for now (I think I read about this at smartassism a while ago, but I've tried to describe it a much simpler way here). The instructions pretty much tell you to revert to the older version of Wikipedia:

1. Go to wikipedia in Safari because Dictionary.app uses Safari to load Wikipedia
2. Log-in. If you've never done this before, you can create a new account by clicking Log-in/register at the top right of the page. While logging-in check the Remember me for 30 days box. This box will set a cookie in your computer, because you probably don't wan't to sign into wikipedia every time you want to use it from Dictionary.app.
3. Once you log-in click on My preferences at the top right again, and click the Appearance Tab
4. Set your skin to MonoBook and save your preferences
5. Restart Dictionary.app and Wikipedia, the most complete and reliable source known to mankind, will work perfectly again

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Psychotherapy with Emacs

What does a computer geek do when s/he has problems? Ask Doctor emacs.

Please, try it out for yourself (if you haven't ever opened emacs, try typing in emacs in a terminal window). Then press the Alt key and the x key (or M-x if you know what that means) and type in doctor.

Hello Dr. Emacs!

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If you can't Google it, it probably doesn't exist

I for one have started viewing Google (and Wikipedia for that matter) as a source of really quick and accurate information. If I need to find out the number of meters in a light year, or convert a measurement from cm to inches, a really quick search almost always reveals the answer right away. Sometimes I even use Google for weather, movie times and other random things. Instant gratification is indeed amazing.


But today I noticed that "beyond teck" (which incidentally happens to be the name of this blog in case you didn't notice) doesn't exist on Google. Searching for the term instead shows you results for "beyond tech". Google assumes that you want to search for beyond tech, even though that's not what you typed in and shows you results for that anyway based on previous searches where people meant to search for tech, but accidentally typed teck. Although it does provide a note saying that it's showing results for beyond tech instead, it seems like you don't get to choose what you're searching for when you type it the query. While this feature is often handy, it seems like sometimes Google can lead you to the wrong results.

Beyond teck doesn't exist? Must be a secret society or something!

I can easily imagine a situation where I tell my friend to search for my blog (because it's awesome!). But if I forget to tell my friend that you're suppose to spell tech as "teck" it would be very difficult to find the blog.

Another thing that I'm worried about is my ability to spell? In fact, if it weren't for the spell checking feature provided by my operating system, this post would certainly have several spelling errors, and it probably still does. Slowly, but surely, it seems like I'm depending on Google and my computer now to do the spell checking for me. I'm no longer trying to remember that 2.52 cm is an inch, and then doing some quick mental math to convert from inches to centimetres. I just blindly type it into Google, and assume that any answer it gives must be right. Of course, when I don't have access to a computer, which is rare since I almost always have a some sort of a computer with me, I still do it the "old school" way, but it already seems like a thing of the past.

Recently, I have also been reading Jean-Jaques Rousseau's Emile (as an ebook of course) and I've started wondering what our digital lives are doing to us. Of course, I'm not pessimistic like most (old) people are about the "ruin of the younger generation" (I'm certain that previous generations have warned younger generations about similar phenomena), but wasting time on useless internet endeavours certainly seems like something all of us should try to avoid.

What should I do instead? I don't know. But it sure seems like I ought to get used to staying "offline".

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Copying an Error Message Window in Windows

So, lets face it. Sometimes Windows throws errors. And if you're like me, the first thing you probably do is Google those errors.

What do you search for while Googling those errors? The error code of course. But instead of typing it out, there is a better way to copy text from the error code window.

Although a really old way, what you can do is click in the error window, and press the Control and Insert keys together and Windows will copy the error code for you! Doing control+insert on a "Do you wish to save" message box in led to the following being copied into the clipboard:

---------------------------
Notepad
---------------------------
The text in the Untitled file has changed.
Do you want to save the changes?
---------------------------
Yes No Cancel
---------------------------


Then you can paste this into notepad, and copy the text that you'd like to search for.

Pretty handy huh? Although, I must say that the Mac way of simply selecting text on the message/warning box and copying it from there is admittedly easier.

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Converting Adobe PDF Files to Text or HTML

Chances are that you come across a lot of PDF files everyday, at work, school or home. PDF (which stands for Portable Document Format by the way) files are great as they often preserve the formatting of the text even if you don't happen to have a font installed. They also preserve the layout and images in the document. Also, it's free to create PDF files from several applications like OpenOffice, Microsoft Office and you can usually even print web pages to a PDF file.

However, one big problem with a PDF file is that you need a PDF reader to view it. Although Macs, and GNU/Linux based PCs come with individual readers, and Adobe's reader is a free download for windows users, other platforms sometimes don't have readily available or free readers.


For instance, BlackBerrys, iPhones and many other portable devices don't have a full fledged PDF reader built in. So, ironically, the PDF file isn't so portable after all, since you're out of luck when it comes to a mobile device.

However, sometimes there are files where the content is more important than the layout, and the content is mostly text (like ebooks or project instructions or a letter). In such cases it is often more desirable to just have a text file or a html file instead.

Luckily, Adobe provides some really easy ways to convert the PDF documents.

Option 1: Email To convert a PDF to text, simply email the document to pdf2txt@adobe.com! After converting the document, the service will email you back with the text file attached. Similarly, you can also email a PDF to pdf2html@adobe.com and you'll receive a html file attached in the returned email instead.

Option 2: Online Link to the document Alternatively, if the document happens to be online, you can visit Adobe's online conversion tools page, and convert the documents from there.
This way, if it's something simple like a file full of text, you wont need a PDF viewer to view the information in it. Plus, if you happen to need raw data (for a program that you may be writing, say) from a PDF file, this in a great way to convert the file!

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New Blogger Feature: Stats

If there is one thing I like about the new blogger interface (check it out yourself if you happen to have a blogger account with a blog at drafts.blogger.com) it is most likely the site stats feature.


By leveraging the power of Google Analytics, and automatically tracking your blog (without you having to do any work by adding a code to your blog or something) I think blogger has created a tool that many people will find useful.

As you can see from the screenshots below, the tool by default shows several statistics that most people would care about in a much more relevant way. For instance, instead of showing the page that gets the most hits, it shows a post that gets the most hits, and even displays the number of comments for that post. It provides an overview, a breakdown of visitors by posts, a snapshot of traffic sources, and reader statistics like browsers, countries and operating systems.

The graphs provided by the tool seem to be rather relevant to most bloggers. At least, for those bloggers that care to find out who their readers are by seeing details such as geographic locations, times with the most activity and so on.

Although Blogger Stats may provide far less statistics about your blog than a full fledged tracking service, it seems like a nice way to give casual bloggers a chance to know who's reading their blog.

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