Academic Workflow – part 3 – everyday tools (following)
November 7, 2009
You may want to follow the whole set of articles about my academic workflow:
Today, we delve a bit more into my everyday tools. Last time I mentioned the most important softwares for me. But since then, my workflow has changed a bit.
Online tools
More and more, I turn myself to online tools. Several reasons for this. One of the main reasons is to get access to all my stuff from everywhere. It is more than valuable.
Let’s say I work on something at work and then get the brightest idea ever while comfortably sitting at home. If I did not use online tools, I would jot down the idea somewhere and have to integrate it later into my workflow. What a waste of time! Instead, I can directly shove the idea in my online notebook and everything keeps running smoothly! That’s why I put my TiddlyWiki online using TiddlySpot. I could have stuck to the DropBox workflow but it is actually a bit restrictive considering that you have to install DropBox on the computer. Well, you have DropBox’s web access which you can use but it does not offer the same simplicity as TiddlySpot in my opinion.
Another great online tool I will talk about is Sage, an online mathematics software.
TiddlySpot
It was fairly simple to create a TiddlyWiki before TiddlySpot but it has become even more painless. When you connect to TiddlySpot, you are given four options; all of them to create a TiddlyWiki. The four options correspond to four different sort of TiddlyWiki templates:
- Standard: to create a wiki as you can download it from TiddlyWiki’s homepage.
- MPTW (before MonkeyPirateTiddlyWiki): a standard TiddlyWiki with a bunch of useful pre-installed plugins. I do not use it (I haven’t seen yet the limitations of the standard TiddlyWiki) so I cannot say much about it but you can check the homepage which contains all the information you need and a tutorial to TagglyTagging, the feature that seems to make MPTW a really different product than TiddlyWiki.
- MonkeyGTD: if you are a fan of this get-it-done you may find the tool of your dream there
- d3: or there
Once you have created your wiki on TiddlySpot, you simply go to the url you have been assigned and manage your wiki from there. You can also download a local working copy if you want to wander a bit off the wire. When you’re done and want to be back to the online world, just hit Upload in the menu on the right-hand side and you will be uploaded back to TiddlySpot’s servers. Kind of the nice functions that make things much easier!
By the way, there is an Upload tab in the backstage as well but I could not make the uploading work by this way. It actually took me a while before realising that a silent link was patiently lying and waiting for me in the right-hand side menu!
One other trick: I started to work with TiddlyWiki but without TiddlySpot. This means that I already had a wiki of my own on the disk of my computer. Adding the tiddlers from my existing wiki to my freshly running wiki on TiddlySpot was far from simple in my sense. I tried first to import my wiki html file into TiddlySpot. This did not work for an obscure reason I had no time to solve. So what I did (and trust me it takes me more than a few minutes to figure out this yet simple method) is that I downloaded locally my TiddlySpot wiki (newly created and empty, that is). Then from this local version I imported my existing wiki file. Although it hadn’t work online it worked here. Don’t ask me why! Once imported I uploaded my local TiddlyWiki file (the one I downloaded from TiddlyWiki) back to TiddlySpot’s servers. And now everything works fine!
Sagemath
Sage is a python-based online mathematical software. This means it offers you the possibilities that Python intrinsically has. You can either download a version to work locally or use the online tool with the advantage of keeping your calculus sheets available from everywhere. The online version has one big drawback and this is computation speed. Well, maybe the computation speed is good but transmitting commands and fetching the results over internet is far from being instantaneous. Putting this aside or, rather, considering my modest computation needs, the online tool is perfect to carry out small calculations.
I have not explored the possibilities of Sage but I stumbled upon interesting points such as exporting to latex while I read the documentation (which I encourage those interested in it to do to get a better picture of this software). There is also a tutorial to guide you through the most important features.
Now this was more of a geek spurt and I find honestly that Matlab, which I have installed at work and, more important, which I am used to handle, is enough for me. I say enough but I do not know if Sage offers something better! The point here is that I do not feel like learning a new software, even if it could actually make me learn Python at the same time. So I stick to Matlab but I wanted to share the Sage opportunity!
