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You may have noticed that a fancy new operating system was released earlier this week. To much media fanfare, Microsoft’s latest Windows incarnation, Windows 7, was released. Microsoft even suggested that we throw parties to celebrate. Judging by their video of what they think a party should look like, I dread to think how awful [...]

Ok, so a while ago I mentioned that I was going to try using a new way of working on my thesis using Subversion (a version control system predominantly used by computer programmers) and LyX (a document processor that uses LaTeX in an almost-WYSIWYG style to allow the author to focus on content alone rather [...]

Writing a thesis is a particularly difficult job. Writing a PhD thesis in Microsoft Word, particularly, is a difficult job. Writing a thesis in Microsoft Word, across several computers, running forms of Windows, Mac OS and Linux is an excruciatingly difficult job.
For one thing, standards vary across all platforms. Linux, for example, doesn’t have a [...]

…there’s been a recent update in another lawsuit, the Thomson Reuters vs Zotero case. Zotero, an open-source reference manager that works directly inside Firefox (whose praises I sung before) are currently being sued by Thomson Reuters (maintainers of Endnote, a proprietary reference manager software package), claiming that Zotero (or rather, George Mason University, where the [...]

A particular passion of mine, that I have rather neglected since my first post, is the advocacy of open source software where possible, particularly for non-specialist work-related tasks, such as web browsing and word processing. For my PhD, I write all my documents using OpenOffice (and occasionally LaTeX), and save them using open formats. Of [...]