Hey. I has been some time already! But as my advisors told me in a quite serious tone last year, in some moments during our life we need to define priorities and hold to them. So I needed to take a long breath and work quite a lot in my thesis projects (yes, plural). Finally, I will now start to write the thesis itself! Happy new year!

Not that I have everything ready, of course, don’t get me wrong: I still have a lot of work to do. But anyway, I still have one entire year ahead of me, so my decision was to write the thesis at the same time I am working on the project. I am also doing this because I will need to write two versions of the same thesis: one in Portuguese and one in French… don’t even ask me why…

At least I already have a lot of material. They were written to reports I periodically need to produce for the funding agencies (the one from the last year had almost one hundred pages, without the attached documents!). But now I will start to write a document with a coherent structure, and although I am not going to copy and paste the material from those reports, I will certainly use many ideas, figures and probably even text, from them.

However, before starting to write any document, one needs to decide in what software to write. For typesetting documents I generally use Apple Pages… but it is not very nice to write the thesis on it, since keeping track of the references would be hard, as well as for the management of tables, figures, formulas, etc. The standard for writing scientific thesis is a very nice software called LaTeX, which I like quite a lot. But LaTeX is not what we call a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software: writing documents with LaTeX is more like writing a computer code. In fact, you even need to perform the analogue of compiling as to obtain a nice looking and normal human readable document. Nonetheless, the advantages of using it are fare more superior that the disadvantages in the case of writing long documents, full of references and mathematical formulas, such as a thesis or a scientific paper. So, the point is done: I will use LaTeX.

But now that I started to write this mythical document, it would be a good practice to keep track of the changes I perform on the files that will compose it. The “files” are in plural, because a thesis written in LaTeX is usually made of several different files, for different chapters, bibliography, etc. So I would like to use something we called a versioning system, that is a software capable of keep track of those modifications in you files. However, since I am also going write on different computers which I am not sure to be online all the time (at least my notebook and my desktop), I would like to use a versioning system with a non-centralised repository, nonetheless, I am a very graphical person (perhaps the reason I use macintoshes?) and those softwares are still lacking a polished user interface that allows me to have a view of different versions of the same document directly from the repository, something like in the figure below:

So the I’ve gave up of the non-centralised repository request as to have a nice and more productive interface. So I will use Subversion with the Cornerstone GUI, since the student licensing for 2 computers is cheaper than for Versions GUI: as you may know the PhD scholarship is not that high!

That is it, by the end of 2010 I will have my PhD diploma (there is no room to “perhaps”). Then, I hope, I will be able to dedicate more time to some good old (and healthy) habits I once had, such as swimming, playing the piano, doing astronomical outreach, etc. .

Oh, last minute news: the year started nicely! While I was writing this blog entry I received an email telling me that an article I submitted less than one month ago (if I remember well) to a nice astronomical journal will be accepted after some (hopefully quick) modifications. But this is a subject for another blog entry…

Clear skies,

Alberto.

Tags: Astronomy - Blogs, latex, pages, PhD, Software, subversion, thesis

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 11:06 am and is filed under Astronomy (Professional), Celebrations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.