Matlab Figure Notes

Just saving a figure to pdf or eps does not necessary produce the desired results. Here are some tricks.

% Sets background color to white
set(gcf,'color','white')

% To make sure the figure scales well try to play with these numbers:
set(gcf,'PaperUnits','centimeters');
set(gcf,'PaperPosition',[0 0 20 20]);
% Using saveas command saves the figure to the page size e.g. %saveas(gcf,'norm.eps', 'psc2')
% Saving to pdf usually leaves borders around the figure so it is better to save it to eps and then convert to pdf.
%
% Using print command works the best (gets the best fit)
print -deps norm.eps
print -depsc norm.eps (to print in color)
I usually convert eps to pdf; since pdf seems to have a tighter border when added to latex document

Conference Poster Preparation

Create a new Drawing in Microsoft Visio.

Now you can just start preparing you poster roughly keeping in mind its horizontal and vertical proportions. After you have finished creating your masterpice, all you need to do is to go to File / Page Setup / Print Setup; select desired paper in "Printer paper" section and then in "Print Zoom" select the desired number of pages to fit your poster on. Thats it!

Disclaimer: Generally I prefer to use Linux and open source software; but for this purpose Microsoft Visio seems to work the best.

LyX - Beamer

LyX is by far my favorite tool for working with LaTeX

Beamer in combination with LyX is my favorite way of preparing presentations.

Here are some tips for working with Beamer by using LyX:

can't use unskip in vertical mode
this error could be fixed by adding a BeginFrame to the slide that seems to have the problem

Blocks merge with each other
to fix it add a Separator between blocks

Problem with images
If you included an image of the file type other than the ones specified bellow e.g. .png
You might get the following error:
LaTeX Error: File ... not found
I could not locate the file with any of these extensions:
.eps,.ps,.eps.gz,.ps.gz,.eps.Z

To Fix it just create an .eps file
A shortcut to doing that is just inserting the graphics in your lyx (Insert/Graphics) document and then File/Export/LaTeX(plain)

Things like (blocks, columns, etc.) don't nest as expected
Use 'increase depth' button '->'
With blocks sometimes when you do indentation it will create a new subblock, if that not what you want change the type to 'Standard' and go from there

Make slides break (new pages) automatically
keywords: lyx automatic pagebreaks page breaks allow frame breaks
e.g.: \begin{frame}[allowframebreaks]{References}
LyX: Insert TeX [allowframebreaks] right after the frame definition
e.g. Frame [allowframebreaks] SomeTitle
make sure that [allowframebreaks] is inserted as TeX code

Undefined control sequence.
\lyxframeend
{}\lyxframe{Lalla}
The control sequence at the end of the top line
of your error message was never \def'ed. If you have
misspelled it (e.g., `\hobx'), type `I' and the correct
spelling (e.g., `I\hbox'). Otherwise just continue,
and I'll forget about whatever was undefined.

This error highlights the "Frame" one of the possible causes is that you have forgotten to add "EndFrame" to the end of your presentation.


LyX

lncs llncs layout (Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science) is not available:
This message is somewhat misleading; the layout is most likely is available but what is not available is the style file llncs.cls
Check Tools/TeX Information
your style file llncs.cls should be listed, if not you should copy it there e.g. D:\apps\texmf\tex\latex\base
Then don't forget to reconfigure your TeX e.g. MiKTeX (Settings, Refresh FNDB) and LyX

Problem: an error occurred whilst running python lyx
Solution: I originally installed LyX by using LyX-153-3-21-AltInstaller; reinstalling LyX by using the standard installer LyX-1.5.3-1-Installer fixed the error for me.

Problem: lyx windows cannot find PdfViewWin ....
Solution: Tools / Preferences/”File Formats”/”PDF***” Viewer=”path to your pdf viewer” e.g. "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Acrobat\acrobat.exe"

LaTeX

Inner product brackets – TeX code: \left\langle \right\rangle ; or even more convenient use LyX equation editor

SubVersion

SubVersion – great source control system

TortoiseSVN – very nice gui for SVN (Windows)

Problem: cannot write to the prototype revision file of transaction because a previous representation is currently being written by another process

Cause: At least in my case this error seemed to be caused by samba settings or something of that nature. At my lab we got a new hard disk, after that my SVN stopped working. I though the files got corrupt during the copy, but it works well from my local hard drive.

Solution: Copy you repository files to your local hard drive and then relocate repository to the new location.

 

Web Log Analysis [TO FINISH]

There are several products that I use for log analysis: Polliwog, AWStats, Google Analytics
I will briefly describe comparison between them from my viewpoint. The biggest distinction between them is following. If you don't have an access to your web server log files, then using Google Analytics may be a good option. If you do have an access to the web log files, then using polliwog or AWStats may be better. I prefer polliwog when I need a deeper analysis though.

Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics/
Pros:
Easy installation and configuration.
Quite nice and user friendly.
Perhaps one of the best designed user interfaces.
Cons:
To track your webpages, you need to add a small script to them. Easy to do if you are using templates. If you have many files to track that don't use templates, could become rather troublesome. However, unless you have an

polliwog http://polliwog.sourceforge.net/
Pros:
Very nice user interface
Allows deep analysis of your data
Cons:

AWStats http://awstats.sourceforge.net/