slides done (EN)

Got the slides done today. In English. S managed to convince me that I might be better off that way. Simpler. Maybe have a sheet of trigger words in French.

I dunno.

This is going to suck (not because of the English slides)

I hate doing this.

enlg practice talk

ENLG talk went ok. I felt very unready, what with me tripping over myself last night (two rehearsals at home) and this morning. Trip trip trip. But somehow survived the practice talk. Some weak spots, got very long and boring in the beginning, which is BAD, first impressions and everything and a couple of sloppy bits otherwise. Also failed to give a proper motivation. Oh well.

But comments say that it was clear, so I ought to be happy. P thinks I'm not quite using the remote control right, in that now you lose the sort of natural transition between slides when the guy sticks a new slide on the transparency, or pushes a button on his computer. I agree, but I'm addicted to being able to stand right up next to the screen where I can interact physically with my slides. Ideally, the laptop would be within reach, actually slightly out of reach but no more than one step.

I guess I'm making progress. I made a conscious effort to go reeeeeaaaaaalll slow, don't know if that worked. Talking slow just does NOT come naturally to me.

Always room for improvement. Wonder if I'll ever hit a hole in one, just cinch it the first time. It seems like I'm always going to need several practice talks with people commenting, just fold it over and over and over again until it flows out naturally. Can't believe there are people who don't rehearse.

My ideal talk, sort of the goal in my speaking life is to produce the Perfectly Comprehensible Talk. Still a long long ways to go. One of my problems is a kind of heavy handedness. I don't know how to leave things unsaid, how to work with not-saying. So I end up doing lots of blah blah about obvious things. I've seen other people just get it Right, a kind of light touch, no blah blah, no need to be all excited and animated, they just go, zero bullshit, zero stress, posé, full clarity. But that's not me. Oh and honesty and correctness are important too, but I hope I've gotten that bit down.

Otherwise, helped A with GenI a bit and attended a nice tutorialy talk about presupposition by MS .

Anyway, guess my month of June is over now.

runaround eric

I guess today was okay. Too busy to feel gloomy.

this morning

chores and préfecture visit; got in to work around tennish

geni hacking

was trying to figure out what the Parsec code seemed to be infinite looping. Red herringed myself into thinking that maybe it was something to do with left recursion. But the problem only occurs when you give malformed input. I cut the parser's guts out and put it in a standalone program (really easy because functional code is modular code) and realised...

that I'm an idiot

The reason is that I have it set up to be magical, in that if the Parsec stuff fails, I try decoding the file with Data.Binary.decodeFile, in the hopes that it's a GenI pickle. But when you try to decode some random text file with Data.Binary, you get weirdo hanging.

Nothing to do with Parsec, everything to do with erician foolishness.

So I made the code less magical. Now it only attempts decodeFile if the filename ends in ".genib" and when you feed in malformed text input, the user actually gets an error message instead of a weird hang. Also fixed some minor morphology stuff for A

admin admin

Saw I., got a bunch of open loops closed off, yay! Also talked to the SG about my carte d'access

semtag demo

Copied the mini xmg/geni demo into the semtagdemo repository. Ported some of the simple GenI scripts over. Made the Makefile a little bit nicer, fixed some bugs. Met with K and C to talk semtag demos and databases

enlg slides

Finished them off after getting C's help. I think I've found my formula for making handouts: 9 slides per page = 18 slides. One sheet handout. You have to use \mode to cut some slides out of the handout, but that's ok. Handout serves different role than slides.

slides done

A little bit less glum today. Was it the sleep or something? Finished off the ENLG slides, although with a few holes that I need C's help for and with some very poorly worded stuff at the end.

parsec troubles

Helped A with some GenI problems. My input file parser sucks. For some malformed inputs it just sits there and hangs instead of complaining. Maybe a bug in my Parsec code. I wish I knew how to write parsers that didn't do this. I really don't want to go back to Happy days. Parsec just so convenient to write with. Sorry, I'm like that. I prefer clean looking code to actual practical things. Sue me. No, actually don't. No warranties.

filing/gtd

Cleaned off my desk again, filed all the shit on it. Quite pleased with my handy-dandy alphabetical filing system. Filing things is now quick and anxiety-free, completely brainless. Had been letting my inbox pile up as well, which is a no-no (i'm a bad gtder for many reasons). Got my open loops identified and have things boiled down in actions.

tomorrow

Might go to the préfecture tomorrow, and maybe chat with C about the slides and about flat semantics. Hopefully I will have time to start PHASE II of thesis operations

practice talks

Gave two practice talks for the job interview. The first one went pretty well, had lots of feedback on things to fix, cutesy things to nix. Second one was crap. I guess it's the erician one-talk-per-day rule. The first talk I'm a nervous wreck, somehow a very disciplined and enthusiastic wreck that sticks to the lines he rehearsed. The second talk, I'm tired, trying to say things differently, trying to work with new material. Very susceptible to details like that, details like not having the videoprojector to beam the talk with (#2) or having my screen dimmer go on every N seconds (probably due to it being on battery mode).

Many thanks to C, P and everybody else chez us for the helpful comments.

I wonder if in the future I will be able to do off-the-cuff. I'm still at the stage where giving a talk is partly theater (something which certain purists seem to hate - if you can't present it simply enough, you don't know what you're talking about, get off the stage). I need lines, a script. Not something I'm going to write, memorise and repeat, but I need to have things preformulated, keywords, keyphrases and keyhandmovements. It's like putting a bunch of beacons into the ocean. I can be spontaneous only within the confines of the beacons, swimming from one beacon to the other. No beacons and I just drown.

handouts

Here's what I do to produce handouts:
page setup - landscape
(adobe reader print dialogue) page scaling - fit to printer margins
(print dialogue) layout - 6 pages per sheet, the first setting

slide hacking

Rather distressing day, trying to get those slides together, just not coming. Well, I guess it's getting better, hope to be done tonight or early tomorrow morning. This is going to be tight. I usually like to rehearse my rehearsals tout seul chez moi, but I might not have the time for it.

sloppy screwup

C asked me today why we have 116 sentences for parsing and 140 for generation. Eh... oops. I screwed up there; was not using the same sentences for parsing as for generation. Got that fixed after some digging around, so we should have some new 140-based parsing numbers. Also discovered another screwup in my methodology for the other paper, another data mismatch, grabbing numbers from not-quite-the-same-place within the same paper. Nothing deliberate, but still pretty bad. It's all about protocol, I guess... starting to get better about it, putting things in nice tidy places so that I don't screw things up. In the case of the previous paper, I was really in a hurry or something and must not have thought through completely where my data were coming from. Gah. Anyway, should all be fixed in time for submission, or resubmission-if-accepted in the case of the earlier one. This is also the kind of stuff you need to learn in order to become a good programmer, I guess; part of good protocol is good automation (he says grandly); you want to set everything up to be fool-proof, or eric-proof as the case may be, just hit go and everything gets cranked out. And don't think that it's not worth it because you're just doing it once, because you know you'll be needing to get that data back someday. Making shit reproducible is all.

making slides

One thing which are useful for making slides:

while echo; do make; sleep 5; done

(Works best if you have -halt-on-error in your latex command). This avoids me hitting make every time I make a stupid little change. I still have to unlearn the reflex though. Kinda cool to just be writing my slides up, hitting :w once in a while and having the thing refresh in TeXniscope. The problem with running make in your text editor is that it prevents you from working on the slides for the time it's compiling (it's eating up your screen)... this kind of thing can pop you out of concentration.

Another thing is pdftricks. I had to edit my Makefile so that I'm calling pdflatex -shell-escape. Also had to include this in my slides:

\usepackage[shell]{pdftricks}
\begin{psinputs}
\usepackage{pstricks}
\usepackage{tree-dvips}
\end{psinputs}

What's nice about this is that I can just use pdflatex for the rest of it. Everytime I want a pstrick, I just wrap the whole thing in pdfpic. Said thing could be any arbitrary block of TeX, for example, a tabular with a bunch of pspictures inside. I think you have to make the beamer frames fragile, but I'm not entirely sure.