Mark's Speechblog

Do you have a Praat script that can...

2011-09-17T13:12:00.000+10:00

As I have mentioned before, Praat scripts can take care of many repetitive actions for you, saving you many mouse clicks. But be warned, a script cannot do anything that requires human judgment, such as labeling segments. I cannot stress this enough: you have to know exactly what the script is doing.

When I first started using Praat, I used many small scripts, each of which performed one small job. For instance, after a recording session, I would use one script to cut the large file of the entire recording session into smaller files, a separate script to extract measurements, another script to normalise the intensity of the sounds, and yet another script to ramp in and out, and so on. What I found was that the problem with such an approach is that it is very easy to lose track of what manipulations you have already done to a set of sound files — especially if you are working on multiple projects at the same time, with different normalisation scripts, etc. As a result, a few years ago, I changed the way that I used Praat scripts.

Now, for each project, I create one large Praat script that contains all manipulations: taking original measurements, manipulating intensity, pitch, ramping, etc., renaming files, and taking new measurements after all manipulations have been completed. This way, when the time comes to write up the Method section, all of the information is easily accessible and traceable.

Due to this new project-based scripting technique, I create a new script for each project that I am working on. However, I rarely code a script from scratch. Bits and pieces can be reused from other scripts, and in this way new scripts can be generated very quickly. Below, I have listed all of the Praat scripts that I have in my possession. I receive frequent requests along the lines of, "Do you have a script that does x?"

Every Praat script that I have is listed below, along with a brief description. I have omitted some scripts that are very similar to those posted here, or some of the larger scripts that have been tailored to a particular set of stimuli. Each script may be downloaded by clicking on the name. Please feel free to download, modify, and redistribute the scripts without restriction. What's mine is yours:

text grid maker.praat My first ever Praat script. Very useful for creating textgrids once a recording has been completed. Saves you many mouseclicks and RSI.

text grid reviewer.praat Once you (or a research assistant) have created textgrids, it can be useful to open each sound file and its corresponding textgrid to review the boudnaries and annotations that have been created. This script makes the reviewing process easy. It allows you to make edits and saves the changes before moving to the next textgrid.

duration logger.praat Useful for measuring the length of intervals marked in a textgrid. Bits of this script show up in all of my larger scripts that have the word "measure" in their filename.

wav aif converter.praat A simple, but very useful script for those who wish to share soundfiles between Macs and PCs. Wav files can be easily converted to aiff and vice versa without altering the file's quality.

get measurements.praat Similar to duration logger.praat except that this script outputs a range of measurements: formants, f0, amplitude at 25, 50 and 75% of each vowel.

load all sound files.praat A very simple, but very useful script. It loads all soundfiles in a directory into Praat. Praat annoyingly does not function like most Windows/OSX apps. You cannot drag and drop a file into Praat. Opening many files is a bit of a chore. Newer versions of Praat at least let you open multiple files at once. This script makes things even easier. I always include a version of this script when asking others to listen to a bunch of sound files for me. It just makes life easier. highly recommended.

token selection.praat Very similar to load all sound files.praat above. Option may be enabled for soundfiles to being playing when script is run.

sound chainer.praat Combines all files in a directory into a single file, adding 1 second of silence between each sound.

on off ramp.praat Quick and easy way to ramp many files that have already been cut.

chop from point.praat Reads in all sounds and textgrids in a directory, identifies which parts of the original sound have been labelled, extracts the labelled sound, ramps the beginning and end of the sound, outputs newly cut sounds, and preserves textgrids.

ramp, chop - preserve textgrids.praat One of my first 'larger' scripts. As the name implies, it excises individual tokens from a larger file, ramps the onset and offset to zero dB, and preserves the textgrid information for the excised segment.

norm, ramp, chop - preserve textgrids.praat Similar to the script above, except that it normalises each token as well as ramp in and out.

chop, measure, preserve textgrids.praat No ramping or scaling in this version of the script.

chop, measure, scale intensity, fix duration.praat Similar to other scripts listed here except that all tokens are fixed to a set duration by calculating and adding x amount of silence to the end of each sound. Useful for experiments that require regular presentation of simuli, such as one sound each second, as might occur in fMRI.

scale intensity (energy) with output.praat Reads in soundfiles, takes intensity measurements, scales each file to a specified dB value, takes new intensity measurements. An error message is displayed if any sounds clip due to scaling.

scale peak steps.praat Outputs a variety of acoustic measurements. Calculates the difference between the intensity of the vowel and a prespecified intensity (dB_target). Scales the entire soundfile so that the vowel's intensity will now equal dB_target. Outputs a new set of acoustic measurements, this time for the scaled stimuli.

pitch fixer.praat Sets the pitch of each token to a predetermined (flat) value.

sound mixer, step maker.praat Generates a continuum of x steps between two soundfiles that serve as endpoints. The continuum is created by mixing the two sounds together.

create Klatt sound.praat Synthesises the syllable /da/ using Klatt synthesis.

Michael_Klatt_cont_plusplot_2d.praat This impressive script was developed by one of my previous supervisors, Michael Tyler. The script takes as its input two vowels defined in F1/F2 space. One is an anchor and the other a starting point. The script will generate a continuum of vowels at a given distance apart (in erbs) at a fixed radius from the anchor vowel. The user can choose this to be the distance between the anchor vowel and the starting point or the user provides a radius in erbs. The user specifies whether the direction is anticlockwise or clockwise. Most people won't find much use for this, but it is very advanced stuff.

I will continue adding to the list as I develop new scripts, or come across scripts that I consider to be useful.

Brand new look to celebrate Mark's Speechblog's 4th birthday

2011-09-09T12:02:00.000+10:00

My Speechblog turned 4 on September 9, and to celebrate, I have created an all new blog template. I am using a heavily modified version of the 'Ethereal' Blogger template. The text area of each post has been widened to take advantage of the widescreen aspect ratio of most monitors, tablets and smart phones. The header logo has also been updated. I'm a lot better at manipulating images now than I was when I created the original speech signal header in 2007. For those interested in speechy things, the new waveform is of a Spanish female speaker producing a trill in /aCa/ context - only the first vowel and part of the trill are visible in the header. A bit of trivia for you: the old waveform was of a Ma'di voiced implosive stop.

Create high resolution 300dpi images for journal publication... without PowerPoint

2011-07-01T07:01:00.006+10:00

I have previously outlined how to create journal quality 300dpi .tif images in PowerPoint. This worked very well, and has helped a lot of people. However, this only works in PowerPoint 2003 and 2007.

The Problem
Users of PowerPoint 2010, as well as users of PowerPoint on OSX, are unable to join in on the 300 dpi goodness. For instance, in PowerPoint 2010, there is an option to scale images to 220 dpi, but that's not the same as 300 dpi, is it? In OSX, this functionality was included in PowerPoint 2008, but was removed altogether in 2011!

Here is a quote from someone working at Microsoft Support,

"Unfortunately, the "Dots per inch" option is no longer available in Office for Mac. If this is a feature you'd like to see in future versions of Office for Mac, be sure to send your feedback by clicking..." blah.

See here: http://www.officeformac.com/ms/.59bcff97/0

So, it looks like from now on in order to create high resolution images out of your Excel figures it will be necessary to use something other than PowerPoint.

The Solution
I propose a solution similar to what I have recommended for creating high quality conference posters. It requires that you have a PDF printer installed (below I use the example of Acrobat, but the concept applies equally well to other PDF printers).

Step 1: Create your graph in Excel. I recommend leaving the axes unlabeled for the time being to avoid distorting the text when resizing the figure.

Step 2: Print the image. With the image selected, select File | Print and then set the Printer to Adobe PDF (or whatever PDf printer you have) and select Printer Properties.

Step 3: Edit Image Settings. Edit the Images setting so that the PDF creation process will preserve the image in high quality without downsampling or compressing it. Click OK and optionally save your settings for next time. Print your figure to PDF.

Step 4: Extract TIFF image from PDF. Open your newly created PDF in your viewer of choice, and save

the page as a TIFF, setting the resolution to 300 dpi.

Step 5. Add finishing touches to TIFF in image editor. Open the TIFF file in your image editor of choice (I use Paint.NET). Add labels to the axes and legend (tip: for the x -axis, it is easy to keep the labels aligned in vertical space by using the text tool only once and separating the labels using the space key to position the labels along the x-axis). Crop the image and save. The 300 dpi resolution will be preserved in your newly cropped TIF.

An ideal speech recording setup

2011-05-07T03:19:00.130+10:00

Having moved to a new lab, I was faced with a few decisions re: setting up a new speech recording space. This article catalogues each piece of equipment and why it was chosen.

Equipment: Shure SM10A headset cardioid microphone, Roland UA-25EX USB audio interface, laptop computer, recording software (Windows: Cool Edit, OSX: SoundStudio).

I should point out that these decisions reflect my personal choice. My recommendations are based on the following assumptions. The average participant is a speech recording experiment:

has a poor understanding of what they are doing with their voice
does not know how sensitive a microphone is
tends to speak either too softly or too loud
starts doing strange things when you give them too many instructions
has to be tricked to produce speech in the way that the experimenter desires
will get tired as the sessions goes on

Having spelled out these assumptions, my aim in setting up a speech recording space is to get the participant in and out with as little fuss as possible, get recordings that are clean and unaltered, and minimise the chances of a recording going bad due to equipment or setup.

Why a headset mic?
A headset mic allows the talker the freedom to move their head without changing the distance between the microphone and their mouth. Depending on the model, the mic can be positioned as close as possible to the talker's mouth so that very subtle phenomena, such as prevoicing, maybe captured. The downside is that other noises will also be captured as well, such as spit bubbles, tongue smacks, the participant scratching their nose and so forth. This can be somewhat alleviated by selecting a headset mic with a cardioid pattern of sensitivity and a restricted receptive field. The Shure SM10A fits the bill nicely, making it an ideal mic for recording both in the soundbooth, as well as in the field. It is also relatively inexpensive at around $150.

Why an external audio interface?
In this case, the decision was easy: we needed a way to interface the microphone, which has an XLA connector with the computer, which does not. But, apart from this practical issue, there is another important reason to use an external audio interface or soundcard, and that is to improve quality and reduce interference.

The internal soundcard that is connected to the computer's motherboard is surrounded by many noisy and busy circuits that are working all the time. By using an external sound card, the analogue-to-digital conversion is performed outside of the computer, and what is fed into the computer is a series of 0s and 1s, meaning that the signal cannot degrade. In addition, external audio interfaces are designed for this sole purpose, their drivers are constantly being improved (so upgrade frequently), and this all results in getting the best-sounding recordings into your computer.

So, which audio interface to use then? Well, for speech recording, it does not really matter whether the interface has USB 1.1, USB 2.0, or Firewire connections. You will be fine with any of the above. What does matter is the quality of the driver (the software that tells the sound card what to do and when to do it). In my particular case, I chose the Roland UA-25 EX which is one of the most popular (if not the most popular) USB audio interfaces of all time. The reason I chose it is because I have used it in the past extensively, and have been very pleased with the results. In addition, it is inexpensive (around $US200) and works faultlessly on both Windows and OSX. Note that this particular model has now been discontinued and replaced by the Roland Quad Capture.

What software to use?
When it comes to recording software, I just want it to stay out of my way and create sound files that are as untouched as possible—as if the speech is going straight from the microphone onto the hard disk. No effects, no plugins, no nothing. If I choose to manipulate the recordings in any way, I will do so later, by making conscious choices about what is manipulated, and all manipulations will be documented in detail.

These are my criteria for speech recording software:

crystal clear audio recording
real-time monitoring of the input level
a clipping indicator (usually a red light of some sort)
can output to wav and aiff formats
can record for two hours without becoming sluggish or slow
allows me to copy and paste large chunks of audio into new files without a long delay

For simple voice recording that stays true to the original source, without using any effects or plugins, you cannot beat Cool Edit Pro. Now discontinued, Cool Edit Pro was the king of audio editors in the early 2000s. It's makers were bought out by Adobe, and Cool Edit evolved into Audition, which is both too expensive and requires far too many resources for our purposes, namely simple voice recordings.

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Begin rant
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Adobe Audition now occupies the space between audio editor and studio level sound production, making it a poor man's Pro Tools or a fat version of Cool Edit. I am not a fan. To address this issue of bloat, Adobe released a simpler program called SoundBooth, which I initially thought to be an updated version of Cool Edit, but after having tried the demo, all I can say is that it is a poor piece of software that fails to differentiate itself from Audition in any meaningful way, and I cannot imagine who would want to use it.
---------------------------------

End rant
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Having moved to a MacBook Pro, I sought to find an OSX app that had the function and feel of Cool Edit. SoundStudio 4 fits the bill nicely. Priced at a reasonable $50, SoundStudio has a simple interface that is both intuitive and efficient. For OSX recording, I recommend it.

Best text editor: Aquamacs

2010-12-02T11:57:00.000+11:00

Programmers are very passionate about which text editor they use. There are many lists of the top 10 text editors available for Windows, OSX and Linux.

During my PhD, I had to become very familiar with coding and scripting. I need my text editor to be able to perform complex, multi-line regular expression searches. And as a student, preferably, the text editor would be available for free.

I discovered Notepad ++, which I fell in love with. It was very easy to use, and made me feel very comfortable. But, I soon discovered that Notepad ++ was not very good at multi-line regular expressions. This was a deal breaker. I started looking for a solution. Unable to find one, a colleague nudged me towards XEmacs. It took some getting used to (and configuring), but once it was set up, I could use it to get my work done (although I wouldn't say that I enjoyed using it).

When I started working as a Research Officer, I was handed a MacBook Pro and needed to find a suitable OSX editor. After some detective work, I came across Smultron, which I immediately liked nearly as much as Notepad ++. I created a Praat syntax highlighting scheme for Smultron, but when I read that it was no longer being developed or supported, it made me think twice about relying on a no longer supported application. I decided to keep looking.

And then, it happened. I came across Aquamacs. Aquamacs takes everything you hate about Emacs and fixes it, making everything you love about Emacs multiply tenfold. You just download and install it and it just works, without losing any of the awesome power of Emacs. It is hands down the best text editor I have ever used, and reason enough to sell your Windows machine and purchase a MacBook. It is that good.

iPad keeps disconnecting from wireless network

2010-12-02T11:51:00.000+11:00

I bought an iPad a couple of months ago before traveling all over the US. I must say that I love it. It is so light and convenient and the battery lasts for ever. I had read that some iPad owners were experiencing wireless network dropouts continuously. Having stayed in a number of hotels on my trip, as well as friends' homes, and even having visited several Starbucks, I hadn't experienced any major issues, so I didn't worry about it.

Upon my return to Australia, I configured the iPad to work with my home wireless network and I started noticing the wireless dropout issues that I had read about. This became very annoying very quickly. So, I started scouring the internet for a solution. As I trawled through forum after forum, I came across many different stories and problems, and quite a bit hate. Posts such as, "I can't believe that Apple put out such a piece of crap...", but having used the iPad for over a month on the road with virtually no issues at all, I refused to believe that the fault lied with the hardware - it had to be something to do with the network.

After many hours searching, I finally arrived at a solution. I have tried and tested it and it works. The reason why some people have been experiencing connection problems with their iPads while others have not is because of different wireless network setups. Specifically, the problem lies in the type of wireless security. My network was set up to use WEP security. It was under this setting that I experienced the dropouts. By simply changing the security setting to WPA2, my iPad dropout issues have been resolved. It really is that simple.

Create high resolution 300dpi images for journal publication... in PowerPoint

2009-11-16T23:54:00.004+11:00

Update July 1, 2011: Dear users of PowerPoint 2010 and all users of PowerPoint on Mac OSX, due to popular demand, I have created a new post taking into account the limitations of newer versions of PowerPoint. Please refer to my new post on how to create high resolution images without PowerPoint. Users of PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 may use the techniques outlined below.
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Not many people know that you can create journal quality, 300dpi, .tif images in PowerPoint. Well, you can.

By default, PowerPoint compresses images and saves them at 96dpi. For most users, this isn't a big deal, but if you are interested in printing the contents of your slides, for example, as a conference poster or as a figure in an academic journal, 96dpi isn't going to cut it.

What is dpi?
Dpi is an acronym for dots per inch, and is a measure of printing resolution. Generally speaking, the higher the dpi, the better the printing will come out.

Changing the dpi setting in PowerPoint
The trick to changing PowerPoint's dpi setting, is that you do not actually change it in PowerPoint.
1. Select Run from the Start menu.
2. Type regedit into the Run box, and then click OK.
3. Once the Registry Editor has opened, navigate your way to the registry key for PowerPoint. This will depend on which version of PowerPoint you are using.

PowerPoint 2003: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\PowerPoint\Options

PowerPoint 2007: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\PowerPoint\Options

4. Select Options by clicking on it once, and then click the Edit menu, then New and then DWORD Value.
5. Type ExportBitmapResolution, and then press ENTER.
6. Select ExportBitmapResolution, and click on Modify on the Edit menu.
7. In the Value data box, type your desired resolution value: 300, then click Decimal (the value will change to 768), and then click OK.
8. Exit the Registry Editor.

Saving a high resolution image in PowerPoint
To save an image, you simply export a PowerPoint slide as a picture.
1. Have the slide that you want to export open.
2. Select Save As from the File menu.
3. In the Save as dialog, select the type of file that you want to export your slide as (.gif, .jpg, .png, .tif, .bmp, .wmf or .emf), and then click Save.

Why use PowerPoint to create images at all?
As I've mentioned before, a lot of people have Office installed on their computers, and universities often provide Office for their research students and staff. Because of its large user base, researchers often crunch their numbers and create their figures in Excel. Importing an Excel chart into PowerPoint is as easy as copy-pasting, and you may then save the figure as a high resolution tiff image, as outlined above.

PowerPoint provides another advantage, which is the reason that many conference posters are created in ppt format. The file may be saved as in native PowerPoint format, preserving the different objects. Need to insert a bigger arrow? No problem. Need to change the font size? Piece of cake. The advantage afforded by PowerPoint is its simplicity. It's easy to send the file to a collaborator, changes can be made, and comments inserted in text boxes.

Further readingUsing PowerPoint to Create High-Resolution Images for Journal Publications

Zotero: Book titles are capitalised in my APA reference list when they shouldn't be! Fix it

2009-09-07T00:33:00.010+10:00

As I've mentioned before, I am a big fan of Zotero. It is one of those pieces of software that you love more and more the more you use it. I've already shown you how to remove the issue number from appearing in your APA reference list. In this post, we're going to tackle incorrect capitalisation in book titles. The APA Publication Manual specifies that book titles should be sentence case and in italics.

Most of the time, Zotero handles this without a hitch. But sometimes, the title of a book Appears In Capitals, which is not consistent with APA formatting. Why does this occur? Well, there are a few potential reasons, and rather than going through them all, I will instead share with you my foolproof method for making sure that book titles display the way that they should. Always.

Let's start at the beginning
First things first. When importing a reference into Zotero, format it so that the capitalisation is correct. Zotero is a clever program, but it does not know if any words within a book title should be capitalised, for example, the name of a country, a language, or a word following a colon. Here's an example that has all of these:

Haugen, E. (1953). The Norwegian language in America: A study in bilingual behavior. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

As you can see, four words need to be capitalised: The, Norwegian, America, A. But when I imported this into Zotero from an online database, all of the words were capitalised. We need to fix this so that only the necessary words are capitalised. You can (a) go through and do it by hand, or (b) right-click on the book title in Zotero and select Transform Text | lowercase.

Now, all of the text will be in lowercase. Simply go through and capitalise the appropriate words manually. Easy.

When you cite Haugen's book in text, the full reference will appear in your reference list with the appropriate capitalisation. But, some people have complained in the Zotero forums that every word in the book title is capitalised in the reference list, even when they have manually corrected the capitalisation within Zotero.

Now, there might be more than one reason for this, but I have only come across one so far. When entering citations into a document, the reference will normally occur within parentheses at the end of a sentence.

For example, there are Norwegian bilinguals in America (Haugen, 1953).

This usage will not cause Zotero (and you) too many headaches. But sometimes, you will add some information within the parentheses because you have not gone into all of the details in your own writing.

For example, The number of Norwegian bilinguals in America is increasing (see Haugen, 1953).

The potential problem here is how you insert the word see, or any prefix for that matter. The wrong way to do this is to click Show Editor and to manually add the text.

The wrong way

Using the editor to insert the word see in this way may result in capitalised text in your book title in the reference list. Instead, what you should do is click on the Prefix field and type in the word see there.

The right way

If you want to type (see Haugen, 1953 for an excellent review), then you would enter see as the Prefix and for an excellent review as the Suffix. This will make sure that the book title in the reference list will be capitalised as you intended.

Easy, no?

Zotero: How to hide the journal issue number in an APA format reference list

2009-09-07T00:28:00.004+10:00

I've been a big fan of Zotero for a long time. I'm currently using version 2.0b6.5, which is wonderful, and the Zotero forums are generally helpful, but there is one problem that I have come across now that I am finishing off the thesis: Zotero by default includes the issue number of a journal in the reference list. Now, I know what you're thinking. Who cares, right? Well, if you're thinking that then you are probably in the wrong place. Thesis examiners, journal reviewers and editors, conference reviewers all care. As an academic, having a properly formatted reference list is of paramount importance. A well-formatted reference list makes a good impression on your reviewer. An incorrectly formatted list... well you get the point.

Zotero is capable of formatting references in a variety of styles. One of the most popular is that of the American Psychological Association (APA), used in psychology and the humanities. According to the 5th edition of the APA Style Manual, "If, and only if, each issue of a journal begins on page 1, give the issue number in parentheses immediately after the volume number" (pp. 227). This means that 95% of the time, the issue number should not appear. So how do you get rid of it?

Well, Zotero has a .csl file for each of its styles, containing code that specifies what information should appear in the reference list and how it should be formatted. To make the issue numbers disappear, you simply remove the code that inserts the issue number into the reference list.

Finding the style file
The style files are located in the Zotero directory, C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\YourBrowser\Browser\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\zotero\styles\. I have written YourUserName because yours will be different to mine, and YourBrowser because Zotero is compatible with any Firefox-based browser, so for most people this will be Firefox, but for others it will be Flock, and so on.

Removing the issue number
Open the apa.csl file and ~~Find the issue number code and delete it~~ (hint: it's right after the volume number code that you should leave untouched).

Update 20/11/2009: As tends to happen when new versions come out, the advice above will not work for Zotero 2.0b7.x. You still open apa.csl with a text editor, but now find and delete the following text:

Here's one we prepared earlier
To make this easy for those of you who aren't tech savvy, I have made my apa.csl file available for download (compatible with Zotero 2.0b7.x). Just copy it to your Styles folder and overwrite the existing file.

Import high quality, high resolution images and figures (charts) into Word

2009-06-18T22:26:00.000+10:00

A few weeks ago, Chris Davis gave an excellent MMM on producing high quality tables and figures. Most journals ask you to provide the figures and tables as separate files. They have professional page-layout people that take care of this stuff. However, students creating a PhD thesis (or a Masters thesis for that matter) have to tackle this problem on their own.

So what's the problem? Well, by default, Word downsamples (compresses) images that you paste into your documents. It does this to keep the filesize of your .doc file as small as possible. This is because once upon a time people used 1.44 MB floppy disks to transport their files. Amazingly, there are still people alive that want to compress their images in Word (more than the default).

Thankfully, there is way to insert beautiful, crisp images into Word. Click on the Tools menu, and select Options. Once the Options box appears, click the General tab and then the Web options button. In the Web options box, click the Pictures tab. Change the Pixels per inch value from the default (72) to 300 (or whatever your requirements are).

A word of warning: After having set this value, do not assume that it will stay there. This value resets to 72 dpi unpredictably and without warning. My advice is to check this setting before inserting an imporant image or figure. Don't worry about it changing without you knowing. If it reverts to 72 dpi, when you insert an image it will look awful, which should make alarm bells ring.

The Healthy Laptop MMM presentation

2009-04-21T11:07:00.000+10:00

Yesterday, I gave a talk about setting up a laptop for work. The talk covered turning off useless Windows services, security, and also contained a few recommendations for what programs I think should come with every MARCS laptop. Frequent visitors of this blog will probably already know most of the things outlined in the slides, as some information comes from posts that are two years old. However, the info is as true today as it was the day I originally wrote the posts. In any case, I have made the slides from yesterday's talk available for download here. I designed the presentation according to Seth Godin's excellent presentation style and advice re: slide design in Powerpoint. There are two slides that I am not entirely happy with, but overall, it's a good presentation.

Rearrange text using multiline regular expressions in Emacs

2009-02-20T00:25:00.010+11:00

My previous posts on Notepad++ and regular expressions have become very popular. In particular, readers have posed many questions along the lines of "how do I write a regular expression that will..." After having read this post you should be an intermediate regular expression creator. Let's get started.

While I am a fan of Notepad++, it is not powerful enough to perform the regular expressions that I will be going through in this post. I strongly recommend that you download and use the excellent (and free) XEmacs. Installing XEmacs is not as simple as it could be. To simplify the process, I have made my Config files available for download here. Instructions are included.

Regular expression you say, what exactly is a regular expression?
Think of a regular expression as a fancy Find+Replace command that can span across multiple lines and can rearrange bits of text. Using regular expressions involves two steps:
1. Create a search term that finds and selects only the text that you want to modify/move/delete.
2. Create a replace term that outputs the desired text in the correct way.
This is a bit vague, isn't it. Let's look at our first example.

Example 1. Manipulating a simple list of names using Find+Replace
I got married on 11 October (a few months ago) and the photographer gave us a DVD containing all of the photos, approximately 1350 JPEG files. My wife and I were told to choose 120 of these photos to be printed for our wedding album. The DVD contained two folders named 'A' and 'B'. Folder A contained files named DSC_0001 through to DSC_1000, and folder B contained files named DSC_0001 through to DSC_0350. The reason for the existence of two folders was that they came from two memory cards. A thousand photos were taken on card A, which got full, and then a further 350 photos were taken on card B. Now, the problem is that we have 350 overlapping filenames. So we need to change the filenames in some way to make them unique and identifiable. This is relatively easy. Here is what we did.

First, we chose 120 photos. 105 came from folder A. I copied the filenames of the chosen photos from folder A and pasted them into a new text file. It looked like this:

DSC_0004.jpeg
DSC_0007.jpeg
DSC_0015.jpeg
(and so on....)
DSC_0997.jpeg

Before moving on to adding filenames from folder B, I performed a simple find and replace.

Find: DSC_
Replace with: DSCa_

This made the text look like this:

DSCa_0004.jpeg
DSCa_0007.jpeg
DSCa_0015.jpeg
(and so on....)
DSCa_0997.jpeg

We then pasted the filenames from folder B (in pink) into the text file:

DSCa_0004.jpeg
DSCa_0007.jpeg
DSCa_0015.jpeg
(and so on....)
DSCa_0997.jpeg

DSC_0002.jpeg

DSC_0004.jpeg

DSC_0011.jpeg

DSC_0015.jpeg

(etc.)

I then changed the newly pasted names using a simple Find and Replace term:

Find: DSC_
Replace with: DSCb_

That made our text look like this:

DSCa_0004.jpeg
DSCa_0007.jpeg
DSCa_0015.jpeg
(and so on....)
DSCa_0997.jpeg
DSCb_0002.jpeg
DSCb_0004.jpeg
DSCb_0011.jpeg
DSCb_0015.jpeg
(etc.)

This made each file unique and identifiable. I also removed the .jpeg extension to minimise the possibility of confusion.

DSCa_0004
DSCa_0007
DSCa_0015
(and so on....)
DSCa_0997
DSCb_0002
DSCb_0004
DSCb_0011
DSCb_0015
(etc.)

Of course, I could have renamed the filenames in many different ways. For example, I could have changed DSC_0004.jpeg to A\DSC_004, or A_004, or FolderA_004, and so on. The name is not important. What is important is that the names are uniquely identifiable, meaning that no two names are alike. Now, our photographer will not get confused between which DSC_0004.jpeg we want (the one from folder A or B). This is the end of our simple Find+Replace exercise. Let's have a go at a regular expression.

Example 2. A simple Regular Expression: Removing newlines and replacing them with commas
Let's cover some Regular Expression basics. A Regular Expression is used to search for text with a similar pattern, that is, text that matches the search criteria. What makes Regular Expressions so powerful is that there isn't a one-to-one mapping between the regular expression and the text (as there would be in a simple Find+Replace). For example, a period or full stop character . matches any character. So searching for DSC. (note: that is DSC followed by a full stop) would select both DSCa and DSCb, as the full stop could be any character.

Find+Replace is a useful tool. However, there are certain tasks that go beyond the capabilities of simple Find+Replace. Let's assume that we have the list of photos from above.

DSCa_0004
DSCa_0007
DSCa_0015
DSCa_0997
DSCb_0002
DSCb_0004
DSCb_0011
DSCb_0015

I don't want to leave this list as it is (one filename on each line). I want to place the files all on the same line, separated by a comma. This would be the regexp:

Find: newline
Replace with: ,

Note: You do not actually type in the word newline. When we type, every time the Return or Enter key is pressed, a newline character or carriage return is placed on the page (even if you cannot see it on the screen). Given that our filenames above occur on separate lines, there is a newline character after the final digit on each line. To further complicate matters, there are different types of newline characters. Most text editors have a hard time dealing with newline characters (it is precisely for this reason that I have switched from Notepad++ to XEmacs). XEmacs is quite excellent at handling them with minimum fuss. To enter a newline character into your Regular Expression, type Control+Q Control+J, represented in XEmacs as C - q, C - j.

Executing this regexp results in:

DSCa_0004,DSCa_0007,DSCa_0015,DSCa_0997,DSCb_0002,DSCb_0004,DSCb_0011,DSCb_0015

Example 3. A more complex example: Rearranging groups of text onto the same line
Let's assume that my wife went through the list of photos and wrote instructions to the photographer under each name, making the list look like this:

DSCa_0004
Print this one 6*4
DSCa_0007
Print this one 5*7
DSCa_0015
Print this on canvas
DSCa_0997
Print this 6*4
DSCb_0002
Print this one 8*10
DSCb_0004
Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011
Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015
Print this one 6*4

I think that the best way to make this clear for the photographer would be to rearrange the text so that it looks like this:

DSCa_0004 = Print this one 6*4
DSCa_0007 = Print this one 5*7
(and so on....)

In order to make the correct regular expression, we must first identify the correct pattern in the text. We cannot simply replace all the newlines as we did in Example 2, because then every photo and comment would be on one very long line. We must place some unique characteristic into our regular expression that will discriminate between which two lines belong together and which do not. In this case, one possibility is by taking advantage of the fact that all photo filenames begin with D, the comments for that photo are on the line immediately below, and no comments begin with D. The regexp would look like this:

Find: $D.*$ C-q C-j
Replace with: \1 =

Let's examine this regexp. D searches for the letter D. The full stop "." searches for any character. The asterisk after the full stop allows for recursion, meaning that we are searching for any characters after D. The slash and parenthesis around the D.* allow us to save the contents of the regexp and manipulate it in the replace term. The line break, represented by the Ctrl+Q Ctrl+J keyboard command is outside the slashes and parentheses and is discarded.

The replace term takes the D.* (effectively the filename, which is enclosed in slash+parentheses in the search term), adds a space, then an equals sign, then a space. This produces the following output:

DSCa_0004 = Print this one 6*4
DSCa_0007 = Print this one 5*7
DSCa_0015 = Print this on canvas
DSCa_0997 = Print this 6*4
DSCb_0002 = Print this one 8*10
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015 = Print this one 6*4

Example 4. An even trickier example: Rearranging groups of text onto the same line 2
Let's assume that my wife wrote instructions to the photographer under each name, however, some comments began with a D. The list looks like this:

DSCa_0004
Do you think you could print this one 6*4
DSCa_0007
Print this one 5*7
DSCa_0015
Do this on canvas
DSCa_0997
Dave, print this 6*4
DSCb_0002
Print this one 8*10
DSCb_0004
Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011
Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015
Print this one 6*4

This time, we cannot use the previous regexp as it does not identify only the photo filenames. It will also select the comments beginning with D. Using the regexp from Example 3 in this case will result in this:

DSCa_0004 = Do you think you could print this one 6*4 = DSCa_0007 = Print this one 5*7
DSCa_0015 = Do this on canvas = DSCa_0997 = Dave, print this 6*4 = DSCb_0002 = Print this one 8*10
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015 = Print this one 6*4

It is a mess. We need to find a pattern in the text that uniquely identifies the filenames only and not the comments. Look at the filenames. All begin with DSC. So, we could change the regexp to find DSC or even DS. No comments begin with DS. Let's give it a shot.

Find: $DS.*$ C-q C-j
Replace with: \1 =

And here's the output:

DSCa_0004 = Do you think you could print this one 6*4
DSCa_0007 = Print this one 5*7
DSCa_0015 = Do this on canvas
DSCa_0997 = Dave, print this 6*4
DSCb_0002 = Print this one 8*10
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015 = Print this one 6*4

Easy. We could have used $DSC.*$ as the search term and the result would have been the same.

Example 5. Getting rid of unwanted information.
Let's assume that the photographer receives our list of photos. He wants to see which photos we want to print in what sizes, but he also wants to leave the descriptions for files where no size has been specified. Using regexp, we can remove all info other than the sizes. Here's the file:

DSCa_0004 = Do you think you could print this one 6*4
DSCa_0007 = Print this one 5*7
DSCa_0015 = Do this on canvas
DSCa_0997 = Dave, print this 6*4
DSCb_0002 = Print this one 8*10
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015 = Print this one 6*4

The unique thing that identifies the comments that contains sizes is the asterisk character in the dimensions. We want to keep the asterisk as well as the characters immediately before and after the asterisk (the numbers). And here is the regexp:

Find: $= $.*$.\*.$
Replace with: \1\2

This is the output:

DSCa_0004 = 6*4
DSCa_0007 = 5*7
DSCa_0015 = Do this on canvas
DSCa_0997 = 6*4
DSCb_0002 = 8*10
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015 = 6*4

As you can see, only lines conatining sizes have had their comments removed. Let's go through the search term. The $= $ searches for the equals sign followed by a space (which denotes where comments begin) and stores it in \1. All text thereafter .* is not kept, until we come across $.\*.*$ this pattern which is stored in \2. Let's unpack the $.\*.*$ final part of the search. The first full stop searches for any character, the \* searches for the asterisk (note: the slash before the asterisk is essential as it specifies that we are searching for an asterisk * character, and not a recursive .*), and the last full stop and asterisk allows any character after the asterisk.

Example 6: Rearranging information.
Our photographer has decided that he would like to display the sizes of our photos on the left and the filenames on the right of the equals sign. Photos containing comments only should remain as they are. Here is the text:

DSCa_0004 = 6*4
DSCa_0007 = 5*7
DSCa_0015 = Do this on canvas
DSCa_0997 = 6*4
DSCb_0002 = 8*10
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015 = 6*4

Again the asterisk is our unique identifier of the sizes. Here is the regexp:

Find: $.*$$= $$.\*.*$
Replace with: \3 \2\1

And here is the output:

6*4 = DSCa_0004
5*7 = DSCa_0007
DSCa_0015 = Do this on canvas
6*4 = DSCa_0997
8*10 = DSCb_0002
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
6*4 = DSCb_0015

Our photographer could have done this at the beginning of Example 5 (if he wanted to). Here is the text from Example 5:

DSCa_0004 = Do you think you could print this one 6*4
DSCa_0007 = Print this one 5*7
DSCa_0015 = Do this on canvas
DSCa_0997 = Dave, print this 6*4
DSCb_0002 = Print this one 8*10
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
DSCb_0015 = Print this one 6*4

And here is the regular expression that will (a) get rid of all info apart from sizes, and (b) rearrange the order of the text to size = filename:

Find: $.*$$= $.*$.\*.*$
Replace with: \3 \2\1

And here is the output:

6*4 = DSCa_0004
5*7 = DSCa_0007
DSCa_0015 = Do this on canvas
6*4 = DSCa_0997
8*10 = DSCb_0002
DSCb_0004 = Can you print this one in matte
DSCb_0011 = Make 3 copies of this one
6*4 = DSCb_0015

As you can see, the two outputs are identical.

These are only a few examples of how regular expressions can be used. I hope that these examples will be useful for you and will provide some guidance and stimulation about what is possible with regexp. If you have any questions, please post them in the comments below.

Figures and captions in Word

2009-01-30T15:00:00.001+11:00

Writing a thesis in Word is, let's say, challenging. As the document grows, Word tends to become less stable. This is particularly the case if you do a lot of chopping and changing. Sometimes, figures, graphs, and images move, or don't move when they should, or become separated from their captions, or disappear completely. This appears to be random behaviour and can be very frustrating. For this reason, I have put together this guide which will keep your figures and captions together and will help maintain what's left of your sanity.

Step 1: Insert the image
Before inserting your image, reveal all formatting characters (shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+8). Press Enter at the part of the page where you want to insert your figure, this creates a carriage return character, and then select Insert | Picture | From file. Select the picture and then click Format | Picture, and click on the Size tab to resize the picture as needed.

Step 2: Create the caption
Click on the picture once then select Insert | Reference | Caption. Name the figure and click OK.

Step 3: Group them
Select both the caption and picture, then right click and select Grouping | Group. Now right click on the newly grouped object and select Format | Object. Click the Layout tab, then the Advanced button, then the Text Wrapping tab and select Top and Bottom, click OK.

Step 4: Select and lock the anchor
Now click on and move the anchor to the carriage return you created earlier.Get back into Format Object | Layout | Advanced, and click Lock anchor and set Horizontal Allignment to Centered relative to margin, Vertical Absolute position set to 0 below paragraph, tick Move object with text and Layout in table cell. Click OK.

Step 5: Format the caption
Click on the caption and format the text according to your figure caption styles. For APA, you will need two: one for the Figure x. part (in italics) and another for the title of the figure (not in italics).

Now you can make edits, add or remove paragraphs and your figures and captions will not disappear when you break over a page. Easy, no?

Adobe Acrobat alternatives: Find the best PDF software for you

2008-10-29T19:30:00.003+11:00

Working with PDF files is inevitable. Most journal articles are downloaded in PDF format. You need to get used to working with PDF files and software that lets you do what you want to do with a minimum of fuss.

Adobe Acrobat 9 looks wonderful, and in a perfect world where all software was free, I would recommend using it. However, Acrobat Pro Extended costs around $700. Luckily, there are a number of third party applications that do a lot of the things that Acrobat does. I have created this guide to help you find the best software (or combination of software) to suit your needs (hopefully for free).

The benchmark: Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat now comes in three flavours: Standard, Pro, and Pro Extended. Each version introduces more features and is more expensive. Acrobat Pro Extended is the most powerful, feature rich PDF creation program in the world. However, ever since Acrobat 7, I feel that Adobe has introduced many features that have turned Acrobat into a bloated piece of software. I just want a program that makes beautiful PDFs, allows me to comment, markup, and organise my collection. Acrobat is hopeless when it comes to organising your PDF collection. You are better off using iTunes for PDF organisation! Bloated, overpriced, let's find an alternative.

Acrobat alternatives
Nitro PDF Professional - An Acrobat clone that tries to do everything that Acrobat does. At $US99, this is a good value alternative to Acrobat Pro for those who are serious about PDF creation and editing. Nitro PDF allows you to create, edit, comment, and annotate PDF files. You can also convert PDF files to other formats such as .doc, .rtf, .txt and so on. Nitro PDF is aimed at Microsoft Office users, desktop publishers or document management professionals. If you are considering buying it, here is a detailed review.

Foxit PDF Editor 2 - Lacks some of the features of the Acrobat alternatives mentioned in this article. It treats everything as images, so resizing a text box will distort the text. At $US99, you would be better off purchasing the superior Nitro PDF.

PDF Xchange Pro - An Acrobat clone that tries to do everything. You can edit, crop, markup, create PDFs. At $US70, it's cheaper than Nitro PDF.

PDF Converter 5 - Another Acrobat clone. Create PDFs, combine multiple files into a PDF, convert PDFs into other formats, annotate PDFs. Costs $US99.

PDF Fill PDF Editor 6 - Budget Acrobat alternative. $US20. Not sure how good it is. PDF creation looks questionable. Interface looks poor.

PDF Toolkits
PDF Tools - Manipulate the structure of PDF files. Merge, remove, rotate, crop pages. Free download.

PDF Transformer - A utility that creates OCR PDFs and converts PDF files back into Microsoft Office formats such as Word .doc and Excel .xls.

Free PDF printers
PDF Creator - Open source. Create PDF from multiple files. Extensive options for customising quality of PDF. Highly recommended.

Primo PDF - Create PDFs from multiple files.Embed fonts. Easy to use interface. This is my favourite free PDF printer.

Cute PDF - Free printer driver. Requires GhostScript to run.

doPDF - Free printer driver. Does not require GhostScript.

Free PDF viewers
Adobe Reader - A free download from Adobe's website. Very popular software that has become bloated in recent versions. The installer for Reader 9.0 is 33.5MB! There are faster and better alternatives.

Foxit PDF Reader - A popular Adobe Reader alternative. Loads very quickly. The installer is under 3MB! Better than Adobe viewer for viewing PDF files. Commenting features are limited in the free version.

PDF Xchange Viewer - I have mentioned PDF Xchange Viewer before. It is a fast PDF viewer that allows the user to markup, comment, highlight and annotate PDF files, which in my opinion makes it better than Foxit Reader. Every student should have a copy on their computer.

The ultimate (free) solution
I am not sure that there is a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to working with PDFs. Obviously, Acrobat Pro Extended does it all, but costs a fortune. Unless if you are a high-level digital print professional, it is not worth the money.

When working with PDF files, you usually want to do three things:

Create PDF files (and modify them by removing, rotating, cropping pages)
View PDF files (and maybe print them on paper)
Comment, highlight, markup a PDF

We can do all of these things using free software. 1. Primo PDF is the PDF printer driver that I recommend. It is free, easy to install, and creates high quality PDFs. 2. PDF Xchange viewer is the best PDF reader on the market. End of story. It is fast, and allows you to comment and markup PDFs. 3. PDF Tools is a free program that allows you to modify the structure of PDFs.

These three tools allow you to perform the most common functions that you would carry out in Acrobat... and they're free.

High quality logos

2008-08-21T14:40:00.000+10:00

Nothing looks worse than a poor quality logo on an expensive poster or a Powerpoint presentation for a conference. So,I have put together a bunch of high quality UWS and MARCS logos in a number of different combinations of colours. Download my logo pack.

Fix uneven line spacing when using Doulos SIL for transcription

2008-08-14T15:09:00.000+10:00

If you have ever transcribed speech using font such as Doulos SIL, you know how frustrating it can be when the line spacing changes in your document. You have a line of text that stands out and looks strange.

Doulos SIL includes characters with diacritics that require a looser line spacing than fonts such as Times New Roman. If the line spacing was like that in Times New Roman, many characters would be clipped.

However, there is a solution! The SIL fonts FAQ provides the answer.

By adjusting the line spacing in the word processor, such as Microsoft Word 2003, it is possible to assign the same line spacing value to all lines of text within a given style. In Word, select Format|Paragraph and set the line spacing to use the Exactly setting and specify a value more suited to your needs.

Creating a thesis in Word: Formatting text

2008-08-12T14:24:00.000+10:00

Most people use Word as if it is a typewriter. It's not. It's a word processor. Chances are that you use it as if it is a type writer too. It's ok. It's not your fault. No one teaches us how to use a word processor properly. Well, lets get started.

Using Styles and Formatting
A style is collection of numerous formatting options that are grouped together, given a name, and that may be applied to selections of text throughout your document. When we create a document, the formatting we use indicates different levels within our document. For example, headings may be size 14, bold, underlined and centred; subheadings may be size 12, bold and left aligned; and, body text may be size 12 and justified.

The Styles and Formatting pane is accessed by pressing this button on your toolbar or from the Format menu (keyboard shortcut: Alt+O+S). In addition to the default styles, you can create your own styles. Here is a screenshot of what my Subheading style might look like:Notice that I have selected size 12, bold and left alignment. More detailed formatting options can be specified by clicking the Format button in the bottom left corner (it's a shortcut to the Format menu including Font, Paragraph, Bullets and Numbering etc.). Clicking the Add to template checkbox will ensure that this style will appear in all new Word documents in the future (an easy to way to ensure consistency in the formatting of your documents).

Applying styles to text
The Styles and Formatting pane contains the existing styles available for your document. To apply a style, simply select the text in the document and click on the style in the task pane. The selected text on your document will change to reflect the formatting options of that style. You may repeatedly change the style applied to a selection of text by clicking on different style names. You can also make changes to a style after it has been applied to sections of text, and all of the sections of your document that have that style will update automatically. This allows you to change the formatting of large sections of your document quickly. For example, if I change the Subheading style above by clicking on the italicised text button, then all of text that I have applied the Subheading style to (presumably all of my subheadings) will automatically become italicised.

Never press Enter Enter to put a blank line between two paragraphs
We are all guilty of this. It might be ok to press the Enter key twice if you are just creating a page that you want to quickly print out, however, this is not the way that you should separate paragraphs in your serious documents - especially your thesis. At the end of each paragraph, you should press the Enter key only once. To create a space between one paragraph and the next click on Paragraph in the Format menu. Increase the value of Spacing After so that it is greater than 0 point. In this case, there will be a 12 point space after my paragraph - when I press the Enter key. Of course, you can specify this as part of any style. Had I specified this for my Subheading style above, this would mean that all pieces of text that I apply the Subheading style to would also be followed by a 12 point space.

Stop getting frustrated at the one line of text that won't fit on the page
Word 2003 allows you to prevent individual lines from creeping over the page. In the Paragraph dialog (shown above), click on the Line and Page Breaks tab. Enabling Window/Orphan control prevents Word from printing the last line of a paragraph by itself at the top of a page (called window), or the first line of a paragraph by itself at the bottom of a page (called orphan).

Word also allows you to keep two paragraphs together on the same page. Use Keep With Next to keep one paragraph on the same page as the next paragraph.

I want a browser like Mark

2008-07-31T16:11:00.004+10:00

Long-time readers will know that Flock is my default web browser. It is based on Firefox, but has a few extra features that I find useful. Today, I deleted my profile and reinstalled everything. This is a log of what I did (for my future reference and also for those who keep asking me about what browser I use).

1. Set Options to the way I like them (Tools|Options)
Privacy: Keep cookies until I close Flock, Security: Do not remember passwords, Advanced: Search for text when I start typing, Network connection.

2. Make Google search the default straight from the location bar
Type about:config into the location bar.
Find keyword.URL.
Change the value to
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

3. Install addons (Tools|Addons)
Adblock Plus, AI Roboform Toolbar, Customize Google, Grab and Drag, IE Tab, Nuke Anything Enhanced, Zotero.

4. Import Zotero library (Windows Explorer)
Copy Zotero files and folders from backup to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Appication data\Flock\Browser\Profiles\randomstring.default\Zotero.

5. Log in to web services and click Remember Account
del.icio.us, Blogger, Facebook, Youtube, Gmail, Twitter, digg.

6. Customise UI
Add New Tab, Downloads buttons. Remove Roboform Toolbar from
Viewinstead, place Roboform button in between Photo Uploader button and Bookmarks Toolbar. Remove Adblock Plus button from view. Change Zotero button to Z.

7. Customise search engines (Search Preferences)
Wikipedia, Google Scholar, Google Images, Google Maps au, eBay au, Youtube, Amazon.

8. Add favorites to Favorites Toolbar
Gmail, Compose Mail, Scrybe, Flickr, Blogger.

9. Configure RSS Feeds (as specified by RSSFeeds tag in Favorites)

Configure Zotero to work with Google Scholar

2008-07-17T23:11:00.001+10:00

I love Zotero. It is my reference manager of choice. I have Endnote X, but no longer use it.

I just updated to Zotero 1.0.7 and received an error message when trying to import a citation from Google Scholar. I had not received such an error since the early beta releases of Zotero (I think 0.5). Luckily, I came up with a solution.

On the Google Scholar homepage, click on Preferences. Scroll to the bottom and tick Export to Endnote format, then click save. The error was then gone, and Zotero worked beautifully.

Zotero is a free download and is an addon for Mozilla Firefox and Flock.

Notepad++: A guide to using regular expressions and extended search mode

2008-06-29T11:28:00.019+10:00

The information in this post details how to clean up DMDX .zil files, allowing for easy importing into Excel. However, the explanations following each Find/Replace term will benefit anyone looking to understand how to use Notepad++ extended search mode and regular expressions.

If you are specifically looking for multiline regular expressions, look at this post.

You may already know that I am a big fan of Notepad++. Apparently, a lot of other people are interested in Notepad++ too. My introductory post on Notepad++ is the most popular post on my speechblog. I have a feeling that that is about to change.

Since the release of version 4.9, the Notepad++ Find and Replace commands have been updated. There is now a new Extended search mode that allows you to search for tabs(\t), newline(\r\n), and a character by its value (\o, \x, \b, \d, \t, \n, \r and \\). Unfortunately, the Notepad++ documentation is lacking in its description of these new capabilities. I found Anjesh Tuladhar's excellent slides on regular expressions in Notepad++ useful. After six hours of trial and error, I managed to bend Notepad++ to my will. And so I decided to post what I think is the most detailed step-by-step guide to Search and Replace in Notepad++, and certainly the most detailed guide to cleaning up DMDX .zil output files on the internet.

What's so good about Extended search mode?

One of the major disadvantages of using regular expressions in Notepad++ was that it did not handle the newline character well—especially in Replace. Now, we can use Extended search mode to make up for this shortcoming. Together, Extended and Regular Expression search modes give you the power to search, replace and reorder your text in ways that were not previously possible in Notepad++.

Search modes in the Find/Replace interface

In the Find (Ctrl+F) and Replace (Ctrl+H) dialogs, the three available search modes are specified in the bottom right corner. To use a search mode, click on the radio button before clicking the Find Next or Replace buttons.

Cleaning up a DMDX .zil file

DMDX allows you to run experiments where the user responds by using the mouse or some other input device. Depending on the number of choices/responses (and of course the kind of task), DMDX will output a .zil file containing the results (instead of the traditional .azk file). This is specified in the header along with the various response options available to the participant. For some reason, DMDX outputs the reaction time twice—and on separate lines—in .zil files. Here's a guide for cleaning up these messy .zil files with Notepad++. Explanations of the Notepad++ search terms are provided in bullet points at the end of each step.

Step 1: Backup your original result file (e.g. yourexperiment.zil) and create a copy of that file (yourexperiment_copy.zil) that we will edit and clean up.

Step 2: Open yourexperiment_copy.zil in Notepad++ (version 4.9 or later).

Step 3: Remove all error messages.All lines containing DMDX error messages begin with an exclamation mark. Let's get rid of them.

Bring up the Replace dialog box (Ctrl+H) and select the Regular Expression search mode.

Find what: [!].*

Replace with: (leave this blank)

Press Replace All. All the error messages are gone.

[!] finds the exclamation character.

.* selects the rest of the line.

Step 4: Get rid of all these blank lines.

Switch to Extended search mode in the Replace dialog.

Find what: \r\n\r\n

Replace with: (leave this blank)

Press Replace All. All the blank lines are gone.

\r\n is a newline character (in Windows).

\r\n\r\n finds two newline characters (what you get from pressing Enter twice).

Step 5: Put each Item (DMDXspeak for trial) on a new line.

Switch to Regular Expression search mode.

Find what: (\+.*)(Item)

Replace with: \1\r\n\2

Press Replace All. "Item"s have been placed on new lines.

\+ finds the + character.

.* selects the text after the + up until the word "Item".

Item finds the string "Item".

() allow us to access whatever is inside the parentheses. The first set of parentheses may be accessed with \1 and the second set with \2.

\1\r\n\2 will take + and whatever text comes after it, will then add a new line, and place the string "Item" on the new line.

So far so good. Our aim now is to delete duplicate or redundant information (reaction time data).

Step 6: Remove all newline characters using Extended search mode, replacing them with a unique string of text that we will use as a signpost for redundant data later in RegEx. Choose a string of text that does not appear in you .zil file—I have chosen mork.

Switch to Extended search mode in the Replace dialog.

Find what: \r\n

Replace with: mork

Press Replace All. All the newline characters are gone. Your entire DMDX .zil file is now one very long line of (in my case word-wrapped) text.

Step 7: We're nearly there. Using our mork signpost keyword, let's separate the different RT values.

Stay in Extended search mode.

Find what: ,

Replace with: ,mork

Press Replace All. Now, mork appears after every comma.

Step 8: Let's put the remaining Items on new lines.

Switch to and stay in Regular Expression search mode for the remaining steps.

Find what: mork(Item)

Replace with: \r\n\1

Press Replace All. All "Item"s should now be on new lines.

Step 9: Let's get rid of those duplicate RTs.

Find what: mork ([^A-Za-z]*)mork [^A-Za-z]*\,mork

Replace with: \1,

Press Replace All. Duplicate reaction times are gone. It's starting to look like a result file :)

A-Z finds all letters of the alphabet in upper case.

a-z finds all lower case letters.

A-Za-z will find all alphabetic characters.

[^...] is the inverse. So, if we put these three together: [^A-Za-z] finds any character except an alphabetic character.

Notice that only one of the [^A-Za-z] is in parentheses (). This is recalled by \1 in the Replace with field. The characters outside of the parentheses are discarded.

Step 10: Let's get rid of all those morks.

Find what: mork

Replace with: (leave blank)

Press Replace All. The morks are gone.

Step 11: Separate each participant's data from the next.

Find what: (\**\*)

Replace with: \r\n\r\n\1\r\n\r\n

Press Replace All. The final product is a beautiful, comma-delimited .zil result file that is ready to be imported into Excel for further analysis.

Notepad++, is there anything it can't do?

Please post your questions in the comments below, rather than emailing me. This way, others can refer to my answers here, saving me many hours of responding to similar emails over and over.

Update 20/2/2009: Having trouble understanding regexp? I have created a new Guide for regular expressions. Check it out.

Create conference posters: From Powerpoint to high quality PDF

2008-06-19T15:33:00.013+10:00

Researchers often present their research findings at conferences using posters. When creating a poster, it is best to use software designed for laying out text and graphics onto a page, such as Adobe InDesign or even Illustrator. However, many PhD students and researchers do not have this software. Most use Powerpoint to create their posters. This post is a step-by-step guide to creating high quality A0 size print posters from Powerpoint.

How do I select A0 size?

A0 size paper is about sixteen times larger than A4. Chances are that your printer doesn't print on A0 paper. Thankfully, there are a few ways around this. One way is to install a virtual A0 printer driver. However, the simplest method is to create a custom paper size. A0 paper is 841mm × 1189mm or 33.1 inches × 46.8 inches. Click on the File menu and select Page Setup. Select a Custom paper size and enter the dimensions.Note: Make sure to select Scale to fit paper on the Print dialog when printing any drafts of your poster to avoid wasting a lot of paper.

Converting to PDF. Do I have to? Yes.

Printers (the people not the machines) do not like Powerpoint files and you should avoid using them for printing. This is because Powerpoint is a presentation program, not a poster-making program. As such, Powerpoint does a poor job of embedding fonts, controlling the layout and preserving the colours. Text boxes tend to move around, graphs lose their labels, axes change size and so on.

So why do so many people create posters with Powerpoint?

Well, a lot of people have Office installed on their computers. Universities often provide Office for their research students and staff. Also, many people do not like using Powerpoint (or Office in general) but do so in order to share files and communicate with their supervisors and colleagues. What can I say, it's an imperfect world.

Printing to PDF

Once your poster is done and has been checked for any errors it is ready for printing. In order to print your poster on paper exactly the way it looks on your screen, you need to convert the Powerpoint file to a format that will embed the fonts and keep the text, images, graphs, tables and colours looking how you intended. For these reasons, we use PDF files.

I'm going to assume that you have access to Adobe Acrobat for the rest of this post (at MARCS, the Hotdesk computer has Acrobat). For those of you who do not have access to Acrobat, there are a number of free PDF printers that allow you to create PDF files from any Windows application: CutePDF, doPDF, PDFCreator and many more. Typically, these free PDF printers do not have all of the features that Acrobat has. Anyway, try printing your file to PDF and see how it turns out. If it looks perfect, then good for you. If it doesn't, then keep reading.

Why do my images look good in Powerpoint but crap in PDF?

This is because Acrobat (by default) downsamples the images to save file size. Let's fix that so that your PDF will look exactly like your Powerpoint file:

In Powerpoint, click on the Adobe PDF menu and click Change conversion settings.

Select the High Quality Print conversion setting and then click Advanced Settings...

Click on Images (on the left) and turn off all Downsampling and Compression.

Click OK to save your changes to the settings. Maybe save this new setting under the name Poster.

Now print your poster to PDF. Compare the PDF with your original Powerpoint version. Make sure that everything is where it should be. Once you have confirmed that everything looks good, send it off to the printer.

Digsby: IM, email and social networking

2008-05-05T22:09:00.005+10:00

If you have MSN/Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk or ICQ installed on your computer, you should uninstall them right now and replace them with Digsby.

Multiprotocol IM clients aren't new. Trillian, Miranda, Pidgin (formerly Gaim), Adium and Meebo have been around for a while. Digsby isn't just another multiprotocal IM client though.

Imagine a chat program that allows you to connect to all of the major IM networks: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk and Jabber. A program that allows you to combine a friend's multiple IDs from different networks into a single merged contact to eliminate duplicates in your buddy list. A program that notifies you of new email from all of your email accounts. A program that allows you to stay up-to-date with your social networking accounts on Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. That program is Digsby.

Digsby is a free chat program that does IM better than it has been ever done before. Beautifully simple, customisable and powerful, Digsby puts all of your accounts and contacts at your finger tips. Digsby is on the IM cutting edge. For example, Facebook rolled out Facebook Chat a few weeks ago. Within 5 days, Digsby rolled out an update allowing Facebook chat to integrate into Digsby just like any other IM network. No other IM client supports Facebook chat (yet).

Instant messaging
Digsby lets you do what you want: change your status for all your accounts, sign in to two accounts from the same service simultaneously (e.g. two different Google Talk accounts), have multiple chats in a tabbed conversation window, or drag important conversations into their own windows. Digsby is great because it lets you decide how you want it to behave.

Minimise the chat window and you will receive popup messages in the corner of your screen, notifying you of new IMs. You can reply directly into the popup - no need to re-open then re-minimise the chat window. Send your message and the popup will fade away, and you can continue working on what you were doing. If you want to, you can allow notifications to pop up even when using a full screen program, e.g. if you are viewing a Powerpoint presentation in fullscreen.

Email
You can manage your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, even IMAP and POP3 accounts from Digsby.

Digsby can display popup email notifications from all of your configured accounts. Clicking a popup will launch a browser window, auto-log-you-in, and bring up the message.

Don't want to use a browser? No problem. At the bottom of the Digsby buddy list is the email InfoBox, which provides a preview of your unread messages, and allows you to perform actions such as mark as read, archive or report spam right from Digsby!
Digsby makes sending email easy too. You can compose and send emails directly from the conversation window. The email is sent directly from your account - as if you composed it in your browser.

Lets say you've configured your Gmail account in Digsby, and while typing up an email you realise that you want to add an attachment, or do something requiring your browser, simply hit the Edit in Gmail button and Digsby will launch the browser, log you in, and copy your text for you, pasting into the body of the compose window. Brilliant.

Social Networking
Digsby can notify you of everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter or MySpace account - and apparently other networks will be supported in future. You can receive friend requests, messages, group invites, new photo notifications, status updates, upcoming birthdays, and so on. You can even set and change your status from within Digsby.

Synchronisation
Do you use Digsby across multiple computers? No problem. Digsby will completely synchronise between computers. Log in to Digsby on a friend's computer using your Digsby id and password, and your settings, skins, fonts, colours, notification settings etc. will load automatically from the server. Log off and everything returns to how your friend had it.

Conclusion
I could go on and on about how good Digsby is, and I still wouldn't do it justice. Just install it and use it for yourself. After ten minutes, you'll see what I've been raving about.

Digsby raises the bar for mulit-protocol IM clients, and IM chat programs in general. It's features, power and the simplicity of the Digsby UI put it in a class of its own.

Distraction free writing with Q10

2008-03-15T00:11:00.003+11:00

Writing can be hard. This is especially true when you are working on a first draft. After reading a large body of literature, it can be hard to get your head around the big issues. This makes it hard to focus on your writing. Distractions such as email notifications, instant messaging, Facebook and Youtube do not help. You need to minimise distractions and start writing - get your thoughts out of your head and on to the screen in front of you. You can fix it up and edit it later. You need to get it out first.

Q10 is a full-screen text editor. Launching Q10 turns your entire screen black. Start typing and all that you will see in front of you is text, that is all. No notifications, no update requests, no firewall messages. Customise the text colour, font, size and spacing so that it is easy on the eyes.

Along the bottom of the screen is a thin ribbon that provides live text statistics such as word, page and character counts all of which are updated as you type. There is also a clock in the corner so that you can keep track of the time.

Q10 remembers the last file you worked on, meaning that you can pick up from where you left your work just by launching the program. Q10 also has a built in timer and alarm. Want to spend 30 minutes per day writing? No problem.

Importantly, Q10 is small, fast and stable. The filesize is less than 360KB.

Q10 is a free download.

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Comment, markup and highlight PDF files with the free PDF-Xchange Viewer

2008-02-20T11:18:00.001+11:00

As a researcher, you will collect and store an ever-increasing number of electronic journal articles (see my post on Managing a continuously growing journal article collection). Printing out hundreds of journal articles is time-consuming, costly, a waste of paper, and a storage nightmare. However, many researchers print out articles because they want to highlight important sections of an article, or scribble notes in the margins.

Adobe Acrobat allows the user to markup a PDF file in this fashion, however, it is quite expensive. Well, I'm happy to tell you that there is a free piece of software that allows the user to markup a PDF file in this fashion: PDF-Xchange Viewer.

PDF-Xchange Viewer allows you to highlight text, draw circles and other shapes, add sticky notes, strikeout and underline text.

PDF-Xchange Viewer is a free download.

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Replace No Response trials in DMDX: avoid missing data points

2007-10-10T16:27:00.001+10:00

As experimenters, we often want the participant to respond to all trials. A non-response is a missing data point. Missing data points are not good. Therefore, non-responses are not good.

Here is a simple experiment in which participants have to respond to an item by pressing the shift keys:

<ep><fd 1><d 50><vm 800,600,600,8,60><dfs 36><dbc 210210210><cr><rcot><t 3000><id "keyboard"><s 4><g 2><cr><eop>
$
11111 "Beginning of the block" <ms% 1200>;
$
+1 "Item 1" <ms% 1200 > * ;
-2 "Item 2" <ms% 1200 > * ;
-3 "Item 3" <ms% 1200 > * ;
+4 "Item 4" <ms% 1200 > * ;
$
0 "THE END" l;
$

Long response window = no No Response trials = no missing data points
Lidija's solution to this problem was to give her participants a very long response window - for example, 30 seconds. This would be achieved by changing the value of <t N> (currently set for 3 seconds) in the header to 30000 (which is 30 seconds). This almost certainly eliminates the occurrence of No Response trials. However, how would you interpret a 10 second response? Did the participant remember what they heard/saw? Were they guessing? Was it a genuine response? It is very hard to say. You could hope for the best. But, in experiments, things usually go wrong rather than better than you had hoped for.

In order to avoid very long response times, it is often desirable to replace missing trials. This means that participants may only have a small response window, and that No Response trials are re-presented again and again until the participant makes a response.

The question then becomes: when will the No Response trial be re-presented?

Re-present a No Response trial immediately
In DMDX, it is very easy to re-present the last trial if a No Response was recorded. Simply add this code <binr N> to the end of an item before the semi-colon. Here is an example:
e.g. before +1"Item 1"<ms% 1200>*;
e.g. after +1"Item 1"<ms% 1200>*<binr 1>;

This will cause DMDX to loop back to item 1 over and over until the participant responds. You would add <binr 2> to the end of trial 2 and so forth. However, this technique has one major disadvantage: it will continuously present the No Response trial again and again in consecutive trials until the participant responds. The danger is that participants might figure out that they can see/hear the same trial again and again just by not responding. This is also not good.

Re-present a No Response trial at the end of a block of trials
A more useful option might be to re-present No Response trials at the end of a block of trials. Unfortuantely, re-presenting missed trials at the end of a block is very difficult in DMDX. However, I have figured out how to do it :) It is possible through the use of counters (a big thank you goes out to Arman for all of his advice and patience re: counters).

Think of it this way: In an experiment where participants respond by pressing either the left or right shift key, for every + trial, there are three possible outcomes:
left shift = Wrong
right shift = Correct
no response = No Response

Note: for - trials, left shift would be Correct, right shift would be Wrong.

Create a counter for each response. This means you need (3 * no. of items per block) counters - in my case 3 * 4 = 12 counters. Counters are initialised using the <set cN> keyword. Now, we need keywords that will increment a counter depending on the participant's response.

<incic N> increments n when a Correct response is registered.
<incinr N> increments n when a No Response response is registered.
<inciw N> increments either when a Wrong response is registered, or when a No Response is registered. Note: this is very tricky. I only figured this out by looking in the DMDX help manual. Pay close attention to this sentence:

"In keeping with the precedent set by early branching code wrong responses include no responses."

So, No Response trials increment both <incinr n> and <inciw n> keywords. This is very important.

Lets run through the three possible outcomes and see how they affect the incrementing of the three counters for a trial. I have coloured the Correct counters blue, the Wrong counters red, and the No Response counters yellow.

So, if there's a Correct response in trial 1,
c11=1   c21=0   c31=0.
If the participant makes a Wrong response in trial 2,
c12=0 c22=1   c32=0.
If the participant makes a No Response in trial 3,
c13=0   c23=1   c33=1. This is because a No Response is counted by the <incinr n> and the <inciw n> keywords.

At the end of the block, we need to check if there were any No Response trials, using some fancy math:

999 <branchif 11111, (c11 + c12 + c13 + c14 + c21 + c22 + c23 + c24 - c31 - c32 - c33 - c34 .LT. 4)>;

The .LT. 4 means less than 4 - because I have 4 trials in this example, and want to check whether I have received 4 responses (either Correct or Wrong). If the result of the fancy math above is less than 4 (my number of trials), then it means that there was a No Response trial in this block, and the <branchif -11111 comes into effect, branching back to trial 11111 (at the start of the block).

Now that we have branched back to the beginning of the block, we need to add conditions to each trial to determine if it was a No Response trial on the previous attempt, in order to decide whether it should be re-presented. We insert this code before every trial:

999 <branchif 999, (c11 + c21 - c31 .GT. 0)>;

This line of code tests whether the previous response for the item below it was Correct, Wrong, or a No Response (using a scaled down, 1-item-only version of the fancy math from before). It will only re-present the trial below if the previous response was a No Response. Otherwise, it will skip to the next 999 trial, check what the previous response for the item below that line was and so on. In effect, it is re-presenting No Response trials at the end of the block, and it will continue presenting No Response trials until the participant makes a (Correct or Wrong) response. Note the counters will change for each item.

Any item lines that are not presenting stimuli may be preceded the skip display ~ indicator so they only take a fraction of a millisecond to execute.

Here is the finished code:

<ep><fd 1><d 50><vm 800,600,600,8,60><dfs 36><dbc 210210210><cr><rcot><t 3000><id "keyboard"><s 4><g 2><cr><eop>
$
~100 <set c11=0> <set c12=0> <set c13=0> <set c14=0> <set c21=0> <set c22=0> <set c23=0> <set c24=0> <set c31=0> <set c32=0> <set c33=0> <set c34=0>;
$
$
11111 "Beginning of the block" <ms% 1200>;
$
~999 <branchif 999, (c11 + c21 - c31 .GT. 0)>;
+1 "Item 1" <ms% 1200 > * <incic 11> <inciw 21> <incinr 31>;

~999 <branchif 999, (c12 + c22 - c32 .GT. 0)>;
-2 "Item 2" <ms% 1200 > * <incic 12> <inciw 22> <incinr 32>;

~999 <branchif 999, (c13 + c23 - c33 .GT. 0)>;
-3 "Item 3" <ms% 1200 > * <incic 13> <inciw 23> <incinr 33>;

~999 <branchif 999, (c14 + c24 - c34 .GT. 0)>;
+4 "Item 4" <ms% 1200 > * <incic 14> <inciw 24> <incinr 34>;

$
~999 <branchif 11111, (c11 + c12 + c13 + c14 + c21 + c22 + c23 + c24 - c31 - c32 - c33 - c34 .LT. 4)>;
$

$
0 "THE END" l;
$

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Unlocker: remove your USB flash drive when you want to

2007-10-08T00:13:00.002+10:00

Have you ever tried to delete a file or folder but Windows didn't let you? It tells you that the file or folder is being used by another program.

Have you ever tried to eject a USB flash drive but Windows didn't let you? You usually receive an error like this:

Often, it is not clear which program is accessing your files. This can be time consuming and frustrating - often requiring you to perform a restart just to get your hands on your own USB flash drive! Well, I'm happy to say that those days are over :)

Unlocker is a free, tiny 191KB, program that allows you to "unlock" files, folders, or external drives that are being used by (often hidden) processes on your computer. Kiss those unnecessary restarts good bye.

You simply right click on the file or folder and select Unlocker from the menu. This will bring up the Unlocker program window which displays all of the programs that are accessing that file or folder. Click Unlock All and you're done.

Mac OSX users: I was unable to find an OSX equivalent to the excellent (and free and tiny) Unlocker :( However, I have found this article which describes how to deal with locked files in OSX.

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Organise files on your hard disk

2007-10-02T22:59:00.002+10:00

Keeping your files organised is very important... but hard. Some people argue that in our age of desktop search we don't need to worry about folder structures. I disagree.

Many times, when I ask people for a copy of a file, they cannot find it. They realise that they aren't organised. They swear that they will go through and organise their files asap. Of course, when I ask them for another file a few months later, they cannot find it. Keeping you files organised is hard.

So, here is my guide to file organisation.

Keep your desktop clean
The desktop should only contain a few shortcuts to often used programs and the recycled bin. No files should be permanently stored on your desktop. None. Think of the desktop as your workspace. You cannot work efficiently if it is cluttered. As your workspace, the desktop should temporarily house files that you are currently working on. When you are done with the files, they should be archived - moved off the desktop to another folder for permanent storage.

To My Documents or not to My Documents, that is the question
Some people do not like the My Documents folder, usually located here: C:\Documents and settings\YourUsername\My Documents\
There are a few problems with the default path. The spaces in the pathname can be problematic for scripts. It is a silly design choice by Microsoft. If you are going to use the default path, put double quotation marks around the pathname to ensure that your scripts will work. Another problem with the default My Documents location is that (by definition) it is a well known storage area and is often targeted by malicious programs, such as viruses and trojans.

You may change the location of the My Documents folder by right-clicking on it, selecting Properties, and changing the Target Folder Location. My advice is to create a folder called Docs (C:\docs\), and to use this as your My Documents folder.

One Folder to Rule them All
Placing all important documents and files in one folder:
1. makes backing up files easy - just sync one folder and you're done
2. makes files easy to find
3. makes archiving easy

I name my top level folder according to the year, eg., 2006, 2007 etc. All documents to do with work go into this folder (not audio or video files). My 2007 folder currently contains the subfolders DMDX, ERC, Experiment, Greece Trip, MMM, NCN, PDF library, Praat scripts, Reading group, Thesis, UWS Ethics. Of course, your subfolders will differ depending on your purpose. Every day before I go home, I sync the 2007 folder on my laptop with the 2007 folder on my USB flash drive. When I get home, I sync the 2007 folder on my USB flash drive with the 2007 folder on my home PC.

A Year folder allows you to archive files that are no longer being used - for e.g., when 2008 begins, create a new, empty 2008 folder and start organising yourself again. From this point on, sync the 2008 folder every day. There will be some files from 2007 that you will need to keep working on, such as thesis.doc. Simply, use file versioning and create a new file (e.g. thesis02.doc) in your new 2008\Thesis\ folder. Leave your 2007 files where they are.

Using a Year folder has the added bonus of archiving your important documents in an intuitive, chronological order. This folder structure allows you to see which experiments were conducted, pdf files read, documents written, MMMs given, presentations prepared, ethics amendments approved, and so on, during which year.

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So far so good

2007-09-27T23:21:00.001+10:00

Thank you to everyone who has provided me with feedback re: the speechblog. Your emails and support are very encouraging. I'm really glad that so many people like my speechblog and find the information useful.

I will be in Greece, at the University of Athens, from 12 October until 4 February 2008. Although the rate of speechblog-posting may slow down during this period, I'm sure that things will pick up again once I get back.

What about the Mac users?
I've had several requests to include information for Mac OSX users. The bottom line is that I don't have a Mac, and am a little uncomfortable saying too much about software that I don't use. However, I am not the UWS IT department, and refuse to leave Mac users out in the cold. In future, I will try to include Mac alternatives to the pieces of software that I write about (e.g. I've already left a comment in the Roboform post). Of course, posts about multi-OS software such as Praat apply to Mac users as much as they do to Windows users.

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A Praat Christmas

2007-09-21T09:50:00.004+10:00

**************************
Please note that new versions of the Praat scripts on this page, as well as completely new scripts are available on my updated Praat scripts post.
**************************

A treasure trove of Praat scripts
Opening a large number of files in Praat is a tedious and time consuming process. Praat does not allow you to select all of the files in a directory and read them in at the same time. You can only read in one file at a time :(

Thankfully, Praat scripts can take care of many repetitive actions for you. Praat scripts are not magical. They don't do all of the work for you. Think of it this way: a script can carry out any Praat command that you can, which can save you many mouse clicks. A script cannot do anything that requires human judgment, such as labeling segments. When using a script, you have to know exactly what it is doing.

Here are the Praat scripts that I have used:

1. textgrid-maker.praat - This script is used when creating text grids. It will read in all of the .wav files in a folder one at a time, create a text grid, and open the editor for you. Once you have labeled the segments, click the Continue button. The text grid will be saved and the editor will close. Then the next .wav file and text grid will open in the editor. This cycle will continue until you run out of .wav files.

2. textgrid-reviewer.praat - This script is used when checking or modifying existing text grids. It will read in all of the .wav files and text grids in a folder, and open them one at a time in the editor. When you have finished making changes to your labels, click Continue. The script will stop running when you run out of .wav files and text grids.

3. duration-logger.praat - Will output all of the durations of labeled segments to a text file.

4. segment-start-end-duration-dB.praat - As the name suggests, this script will output the start, end, duration and average loudness (in dB) of labeled segments to a text file.

5. xlang_measurements.praat - This script is an extended version of segment-start-end-duration-dB.praat, and will measure formants, f0, and amplitude at 3 points in the vowel (25%, 50%, and 75%).

6. target-chopper.praat - Will chop out your target word/segments, apply onramping for 10ms and offramping for 20ms (to fade your sound file in and out smoothly - without audible clipping), and create a new set of .wav files containing the target only. This script would be used when you are generating stimuli for a perceptual experiment.

For more Praat scripts, I refer you to Katherine Crosswhite's excellent Praat script page.

Praat syntax highlighting for Notepad++
The first time you see a Praat script, you may feel the urge to rip your hair out by the roots in despair. Don't worry. A little colour goes a long way.

Syntax highlighting changes the colour and font of sections of text to improve readability. It is a common feature in advanced text editors such as Notepad++. It is easy to find syntax highlighting for HTML or programming languages, or even Matlab, but syntax highlighting for Praat is a different story. This is because not many people around the world use Praat (certainly not many non-Dutch-non-Linux users).

I know of three text editors that have Praat syntax highlighting:
1. Ultra Edit - which costs $US50
2. TextPad - which costs $US30
3. Emacs - which is horrible (sorry Christian, but it is).

So, I have created a Praat syntax highlighting file scheme for the excellent (and free) Notepad++. You will need to:
1. install Notepad++
2. download the Praat syntax highlighting scheme
3. save the userDefineLang.xml file to C:\Documents and Settings\InsertYourUserNameHere\Application Data\Notepad++\

.praat and .script files will automatically open with Praat syntax highlighting in Notepad++. You can apply syntax highlighting to any file manually by selecting the syntax scheme from the Languages menu within Notepad++.

By downloading and using my Praat syntax highlighting scheme, you agree to become a beta tester :) So, if you notice any problems or inconsistencies in the Praat syntax highlighting, please post a comment below so that I can improve the consistency of the colouring.

Praat auto-completion for Notepad++
Autocomplete is a feature where the program predicts a word or phrase that the user wants to type in without them actually having typed it in completely. In Notepad++, the autocomplete list box is displayed using Ctrl+Space. The list is sorted alphabetically, and filters suggestions as you type. For example, if you type re and then press Ctrl+Space, only words beginning with re will be suggested.

I have converted a Praat autocomplete file that was originally designed for the powerful, but expensive, Ultra Edit, so that it is compatible with (the also excellent but free) Notepad++. You will need to:
1. install Notepad++ (if you haven't already done so)
2. Download the Praat autocomplete file
3. save the praat.api file to C:\ProgramFiles\Notepad++\plugins\APIs\
Note: this is the folder where you installed Notepad++. This is different to where the syntax highlighting file is stored.

Please communicate with me by posting a comment below, rather than emailing me. This way, others can refer to my answers here, saving me many hours of responding to similar emails.

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Backup your files in five places

2007-09-21T08:49:00.000+10:00

Picture this: you are in the fourth year of your PhD. You have written six chapters of your thesis. You have finished your statistical analysis. You are putting the finishing touches on your Interspeech conference presentation. You are drafting the final chapters of your thesis. The finish line is in sight. A virus reformats your computer. Or a power surge kills your laptop. Or your hard drive dies. Or...

File versioning
Backing up is very, very, very important. But you have to be smart. When you are working on an important document, such as a thesis, you will inevitably make numerous revisions. Do not save over your original file. Why? Imagine that you are working on thesis.doc, and as you are saving the document Word crashes and the file is corrupted. If you sync your files between devices, this corrupted file will overwrite your older, non-corrupted file because it was edited last and is therefore newer or more up-to-date. Bad news: you no longer have a working version of your thesis. Don't reach for a gun; instead save incremental versions (use Save As, not Save). For example, thesis01.doc, thesis02.doc, thesis03.doc, and so on. If thesis03.doc becomes corrupted, at least you will have a working version of thesis02.doc to fall back on, and will only lose some (not all) of your work.

Backing up
Make backing up easy for yourself. Keep all of your important files in one folder. I have a folder called 2007, with all my 2007 work. Every day before I go home, I sync the 2007 folder on my laptop with the 2007 folder on my USB flash drive. When I get home, I sync 2007 folder on my USB flash drive with my home PC. This means that every day my files are saved to three places. Of course this is not enough. Every week I save my work using other storage devices.

Here are seven backup options that I came up with. Choose five of them, and you'll be safe:

0. Your original files are on your hard drive (this doesn't count).

1. USB flash drive (also called USB key, pen drive, thumb drive, whatever) - Buy a good USB flash drive. Use it every day.

2. Communal external hard disk - Each postgraduate student room has an external hard disk. Use it.

3. Drive U: - You have 2GB of storage space. Keep an updated copy of your important documents there (not your sound or video files).

4. Home PC - Not everyone owns a home computer. Those who do should use it as a backup device.

5. Recordable media (CD or DVD) - MARCS laptops come with Nero. Burn a copy of your important files to CD or DVD. If you use a re-writable disk, you can use the same disk over and over again.

6. Online storage - There are many sites that allow you to store your files online. My favourite is Box.net because it's fast, but there are heaps of them. Find one that you like and use it.

7. Email attachments - Chances are that you email documents to your supervisor fairly regularly. Different versions of your files are probably sitting (as attachments) in your Sent Mail. This isn't really backing up, but it can save you in an emergency.

Roboform: stop using the same password for everything

2007-09-20T20:54:00.001+10:00

Roboform is the best password manager and web form filler available for Windows. It completely automates password entering and form filling. No other password manager can match Roboform. I spent two entire days looking for a (preferably free) Roboform replacement. Let me save you the time: there is no password manager available for Windows that can match Roboform in security and convenience.

What is so good about Roboform?
Roboform integrates right into the browser, and requires one click to save a passcard (your login details for a particular site). The next time you visit that website, Roboform will bring the appropriate passcard to your attention. Roboform allows you to insert your username and password and log in all with one click. You never have to type that user name and password again. Why is this secure? Because if your computer is ever infected by a key logger, your passwords will not be stolen - because you are not typing them :)

Apart from automation, the other great advantage of Roboform is that it can generate long, complex passwords for you, and it will remember them so that you don't have to.

All you have to remember is the Roboform master password which unlocks all others - so make it a very good one! If you forget the master password, then you will have to reset all your passwords and start again. If your computer is ever infected by a key logger, and your master password is stolen, it doesn't really matter because the thief doesn't have your copy of Roboform on their computer, and therefore cannot do anything with your saved passcards :)

Roboform works with Internet Explorer and Firefox (and Firefox-based browsers such as Flock and Camino). This is great because Roboform will log me in to Outlook Web Access (for my MARCS email), even if I view this page in IE Tab - so that the advanced features of Outlook are enabled.

Blogged with Flock

Recording speech in the anechoic chamber: an ideal recording setup

2007-09-20T17:18:00.000+10:00

Following extensive discussions with my supervisors and our in-house recording techniques expert, Robert Sazdov, I have come up with a near ideal recording setup. People have often asked how to replicate my recording setup. Here is my detailed guide to recording speech in the MARCS anechoic chamber.

Praat: An introduction

2007-09-20T16:15:00.001+10:00

Praat is a computer program which allows phoneticians (or anyone else) to analyse, synthesise, and manipulate speech. It is quite an unintuitive program to use, especially for people who are only familiar with Windows. Praat was created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink from the Institute of Phonetic Sciences at the University of Amsterdam - initially for their own use. Over time the user base has grown: at first, other people in the UoA Phonetic Sciences department, later, people at other institutions, and now, you. Today, it is the most powerful and (pretty much) the only program that allows you to do phonetics by computer.

Praat was not designed for Windows - it was ported. For this reason, it does not perform (or look) like a typical Windows program. There is no drag and drop, control+A does not select all, and pressing tab will not allow you to navigate around the window. Think of it like this: "when you are using Praat, you are using Praat, not Windows."

Get Praat
Praat can be downloaded for free from the Praat homepage. You only download one file: praat.exe - this is the Praat program. Place the file in a folder somewhere on your hard drive, and create a shortcut to it on your desktop and/or in your start menu. New versions of Praat are available for download every few weeks. Updating is as simple as overwriting your old praat.exe with the newly downloaded one - which is kind of nice.

How to think like a Praat
Forget whatever you know about files. Praat does not deal with files. Praat deals with objects. An object is a thing that you can work with in Praat. This might be a sound, a table, a textgrid, a pitch, a number of strings, etc.

An object does not always equal a file, so don't think of objects as files. If you create an object in Praat, and want to store it on your hard disk, you will need to write it to a file (the Praat word for save).

The Praat interface
When you launch Praat, two windows will open: Praat objects and Praat picture. Lets focus on Praat objects for now - Praat picture will be described in a future post.

The menu items that I have drawn a yellow box around are basically used to create, load, and save different types of Praat objects.

The buttons at the bottom of the Praat objects window (in the orange box) perform actions on the currently selected object(s). These buttons do not change - they are always there.

In the screenshot, three objects have been read in to Praat: a sound, a text grid, and a formant object. Note that the sound object is currently selected. The buttons on the right (in the green box) change depending on what type of Praat object is currently selected. This is where you can edit Praat objects and extract information from objects.

Familiarise yourself with Praat
Praat isn't a friendly program. The only way to learn how to use it is to practise.

Praat comes with a number of tutorials that are accessible from the Help menu within Praat. Admittedly, I'm not sure how helpful these tutorials are.

Also take a look at the Praat Language Lab website, which was designed to help students learn to use Praat. They have numerous potentially helpful Praat videos. If you find them (or any other tutorial) helpful, post a comment about it below.

Blogged with Flock

Notepad++ : start using a real text editor

2007-09-20T15:18:00.001+10:00

Have you ever used Notepad? It's very simple, which is good. However, it lacks the power and features of more advanced text editors.

Notepad++ is a free and very powerful text editor. Here are some Notepad++ features:

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
Print text in colour
User Defined Syntax Highlighting
Auto-completion
Edit several documents at the same time
Synchronised scrolling between two documents
Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
Full Drag 'N' Drop support
Zoom in and zoom out
Place bookmarks in the text
Macro recording and playback

For more details, check out the Notepad++ homepage.

If you ever need to do any programming or scripting, Notepad++ will make your life a lot easier.

Paint.NET: a free image editor

2007-09-19T01:32:00.000+10:00

Very few people need Photoshop. It's powerful, but complicated. It takes for ever to open. It costs one bajizilion dollars. I only use a very small number of Photoshop's features, anyway. It is the personification of overkill.

Paint.NET is my image editor of choice. It allows you to create, edit and manipulate images. People often comment on the images that I come up with (like the header of this blog) - well they all come out of Paint.NET. It is a free program. It is a 1.5MB download. It is fantastic. Who needs Photoshop? Not me.

Paint.NET requires the Microsoft .NET framework (which you probably have already installed, esp. if you use any of Johnson's programs, e.g. SerialPref, HabitPref, Opa).

Managing a continuously growing journal article collection

2007-09-19T00:24:00.001+10:00

As a researcher, you will collect and store an ever-increasing number of electronic journal articles. Where you store them will depend on what piece of software you use to manage your collection.

I use Google Desktop to access my PDF files quickly. I store all of my journal articles in a folder called pdf library. I cannot see how placing PDF files in different folders helps the user - it just slows you down. For example, deciding which folder an article belongs in can be difficult and misleading. Should a Spanish-Catalan bilingual infant study go into an Infant folder, a Bilingual folder, a Spanish folder, a Perception folder, etc.? How will you remember where it was saved when you want to find it? You won't.

Also, it's a very bad idea to keep multiple copies of the same article in different folders. If you edit one copy of a file, the other copies will remain unchanged - not good. If you absolutely insist on storing your PDFs in multiple folders (I can't see why you would), and encounter the dilemma of having an article that belongs in multiple folders, then instead of creating copies of the file, store the file in one place and place shortcuts to it in the other folders. However, I strongly recommend keeping all of your PDFs in the same folder. If you wish to group certain articles together or link specific files to a project(s) that you are currently working on, you can add tags to your PDF files with the excellent research tool Zotero (I am working on a Zotero post as we speak).

I name PDF files using the following template:

Author1, Author2 & Author3 Year Journal keywords.pdf

An example might be Arvaniti & Joseph 2004 JoMGS.pdf, where JoMGS is an abbreviation of Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Most PDFs contain searchable text, meaning that the contents of the PDF file is searchable from Google Desktop. When you scan a printed journal article and create a PDF file, make sure that you use OCR to recognise the text. If for some reason a PDF is not searchable (e.g. poor quality scan; OCR fails to work properly), then include a few keywords before the .pdf extension - in this case I would have included Greek voiced stops, as that summarises what the article is about and will make it easy to find in future searches.

I know that some people in MARCS use Endnote to manage their journal article collection (as well as their citations and references). However, if we focus solely on productivity and speed of retrieval, there is no comparison between Endnote and Google Desktop. By the time the Endnote user launches Endnote (let alone searches for and locates the correct PDF), the Google Desktop user will already be reading the PDF.

IZArc: Open any archive format

2007-09-18T16:53:00.000+10:00

Archive files are basically containers of a number of other files, which make transportation and/or storage easier. They may also be compressed, meaning that they take up less room.

You are probably familiar with .zip files. This is the most popular archive format. Winzip is a popular program, which can create and unpack .zip files. However, Winzip cannot open many of the other archive formats. The same can be said for Winrar and .rar files, or Winace and .ace files, and so on. What's more, these are all commercial programs that cost money.

There is good news: IZArc is an excellent, free archive utility, supporting nearly 60 archive formats, such as: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO.

Why would anyone buy Winzip, Winrar, Winace etc.? I don't know. You can replace all of these programs with IZArc. Do it now.

Opa: stimulus presentation software for speech production experiments

2007-09-18T11:44:00.001+10:00

Opa is a text presentation program designed to be used by researchers conducting speech production experiments.

What does Opa let you do?
· Display words (optionally on a second monitor).
· Place words within a carrier phrase.
· Randomise the presentation of words.
· Ensure that certain word combinations are not presented on consecutive trials.
· Loop the presentation so that all words are displayed x number of times.
· Judge a participant’s productions as either good or try again.
· Append rejected productions of words to the end of the list, so that you may have x number of approved recordings.
· Log the presentation order of words and researcher ratings in a results file.

What are the advantages of using Opa?
· It is small (384KB) - memory footprint is negligible.
· Present text in any language.
· The Opa algorithm allows for complex randomisation.
· User centred design – Opa status bar displays onscreen text (including the carrier phrase), allowing the researcher to know what the participant can see at all times.
· It is free – created in-house by MARCS programmer Johnson Chen.

System requirements
Opa was designed for Windows XP and requires the Microsoft .NET 1.1 framework.

User guide
For detailed instructions, please download the Opa manual that I created.

Google Desktop: find files fast

2007-09-18T02:35:00.000+10:00

Google Desktop is desktop search software, allowing the user to search his/her files, email, music, images and so on.

When you first install Google Desktop, it indexes the files on your computer. It indexes the names of the files and the text within the files as well. Once this is done, you can search your files right from your desktop.

This means, if you search for "bilinguals," it will return all of the documents, PDFs, images, etc. that contain the word "bilinguals" in the filename or in the actual body of text. This is a tremendous time saver.

Google Desktop actually searches as you type, meaning that after each key is pressed, the results change. For example, when I hit b, it displayed files containing b, then when I hit i, it only displayed files containing bi, and then bil and so on.

Lets say that I wanted to open this PDF file

C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\My Documents\Uni\2006\Confirmation of Candidature Proposal\COC final.pdf

From my desktop, all I have to do is press Control twice (to bring up the white search box), type in coc and then select the correct file from the list of results. It took me less than 2 seconds. This is much quicker than navigating through many folders and trying to remember where you have saved a file.

And remember, this is just like using Google search. You may specify a particular filetype (e.g. filetype:pdf), or remove search results containing a specific word by using a minus sign (e.g. -German), and you may combine operators to create powerful searches.

Google Desktop can also be used to launch applications. For example, if you type calc, you may launch the calculator program. Again, this is much quicker than clicking Start, then All Programs, then Accessories, and finally Calculator. If you type add, you may open the Add or Remove Programs window without using the Control Panel.

For those of you who are looking for a few more advanced Google Desktop uses, I refer you to the excellent Get more from Google Desktop.

Security, it's important

2007-09-18T01:25:00.001+10:00

Please, oh please, keep your data safe from viruses and spyware.

Viruses
Viruses are computer programs that can copy themselves and may damage programs, delete files, cause crashes or even reformat a hard disk! The antivirus that comes with our laptops is ETrust Antivirus by Computer Associates. This may be the worst antivirus program in the world. Don't believe me? Here's a review. I don't know of anyone in MARCS who has detected a virus using ETrust - that is not good.

Here is some good news: there are several great, free antivirus programs - I recommend Antivir or Avast. I have used both, both are excellent, and neither put a large strain on your CPU, meaning that your computer won't slow down to a crawl *ahem* Norton *ahem*. Personally, I prefer Antivir, and generally speaking, it performs better in reviews - detecting a higher percentage of viruses than any of the other free (and many paid) antivirus packages. If you install Antivir, here is how to turn off the Antivir splash screen:
Control Panel - administrationtools - local security principles - additional rules + right click and choose new hashrules - browse for and add avnotify.exe (shows as a lot of letters and numbers) and set this rule to "dont allow" - OK

Spyware
Spyware slows down your computer, can make programs stop working, steal your data, log your keystrokes, and annoy you with popup advertisements. Spyware is a big problem. To maximise your chances of staying spyware free, I recommend using a combination of antispyware programs. I have all 4 of these installed, and have listed them in order of importance (if you only want one, install number 1; if you only want two, install numbers 1 & 2, etc.):

1. Spyware Doctor Starter Edition - This is a really nice program, useful for both prevention (from infection in the first place) and removal (of spyware once it's on your system). It automatically scans incoming files, auto-updates, and scans your computer for spyware. It is only available as part of Google Pack.

2. Spyware Blaster - You only run this program once, and it prevents spyware from getting on your computer in the first place. Make a habit of updating it once a month and enabling protection for all of the updated, and therefore unprotected, items.

3. Spybot - Needs to be started and updated manually. Will scan your hard disk for spyware. If it finds any, it will remove it. It does not automatically scan incoming files like Spyware Doctor does.

4. Adaware 2007 - What I said about Spybot applies equally well to Adaware. However, they detect different things - Adaware might find something that Spybot missed and vice versa.

All of the software mentioned in this article is free, and can be installed on one machine without causing conflicts or crashes.

Set up your laptop for work: Make Word useable

2007-09-15T00:42:00.000+10:00

Microsoft Word 2003 is a powerful word processor and can be a valuable tool. However, some of the default behaviours are less than ideal for research students (or anyone else). I don't know how many times I've heard people scream "I hate Word," and with good reason. There are a number of changes that I make and a number of features that I turn off when I first install Word that make it a much friendlier program.

Turn off Word annoyances
Don't you hate it when you try to select only one or two letters, but Word 'helps' you by selecting the whole word? How about auto-correcting words such as customise, summarise, colour? How about when a quotation mark 'helps' you by turning the wrong way? How about having to click on those two little arrows at the bottom of the menu so that you can 'unhide' the command that you want because Word 'helped' you by hiding infrequent commands? There is a long list of Word annoyances. Lets begin by turning off those annoying things that Word does automatically.

1. First things first - lets set the language to Australian English. From the Tools menu, select Language and then Set Language... and choose English (Australia). No more -ize endings.

2. Select Options... from the Tools menu. Click on the Edit tab. Untick When selecting, automatically select entire word. Now you can select only one character of a word.

3. From the Tools menu, select Autocorrect Options... and click on the Autocorrect tab. Untick Capitalize first letter of sentences and Capitalize first letter of table cells.

4. While in Autocorrect Options... click on the AutoFormat as you type tab and untick Straight quotes with smart quotes.

5. From the Tools menu, select Customize... and click on the Options tab. Select Always show full menus and Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips.

Customise your toolbars
The default Word 2003 toolbar layout isn't terrible, however, it can use a little research-student-tweaking. Luckily, you can add, remove, or edit toolbar buttons.

To customise a toolbar, select Customize... from the Tools menu and click on the Commands tab. From here you may add any command to any of your toolbars by simply dragging it into the desired position on your toolbar. To remove a command from your existing toolbars, simply drag it off the toolbar and drop it onto the Customize... dialog box.

Here is what the default Word 2003 toolbars look like (click toolbar to enlarge):
Ok, lets get started. I always remove these buttons:
Print - we will replace this with a more useful print button.
Email - who emails from Word?
Research - what is this?
Tables and borders - if you need to insert or modify a table, just use the Table menu.
Insert Table - as above.
Insert Excel Worksheet - if you need to insert or modify an Excel worksheet, just use the Insert menu.
Drawing - you will never use this.
Help - there's a search box in the top right corner.
Read - you will never use this.
Outside border - accessible via right click if you ever need it.

Now that we've gotten rid of the useless buttons, lets add some buttons that will make our lives easier and save us time in the future. Remember that toolbar buttons are added by selecting Customize... from the Tools menu and clicking on the Commands tab.
Save As - (from the File category) allows the user to save the document under a new name. This is very useful for saving different versions of your important documents.
Print... - (from the File category) when clicked, it will bring up the Print dialog box, allowing you to specify the number of copies, zoom, staple, double sided printing, two pages on each etc.
Paste Special - (from the Edit menu) allows you to remove formatting from text that has been copied to the clipboard.
Find - (from the Edit menu) allows you to search for (and replace) text in your document.
Header and Footer - (from the View menu) place text at the top or bottom of a page.
Symbol - (from the Insert menu) insert special, foreign, phonetics characters.
Superscript - (from the Format menu) useful for transcription e.g. the superscript h that indicates long lag VOT.

Of course, you might have some buttons that are useful to you that I haven't listed here. You should add them to your toolbar. Let us know which button you added in the Comments at the end of this post.

In the Customize... dialog box click on the Toolbars tab. Check the box next to Word Count. This will make the word count toolbar appear. This toolbar displays the number of words right in your toolbar.

After the above modifications, here's what my toolbars look like:

Set up your laptop for work: Turn off the crap

2007-09-10T01:08:00.000+10:00

When it comes to setting up your work laptop, I suggest that you should only care about speed and efficiency. This means that your computer should be (a) booting up quickly, and (b) running smoothly (without crashes).

The key to a quick startup is minimising the number of programs that run automatically when you bootup Windows. Click the Start button, then Run, and type msconfig. Click on the Startup tab and deselect all of the programs that you do not want to run automatically. For more detailed advice, I refer you to the excellent Make XP Boot Faster from Wikihow.

In order to keep your computer running smoothly you should turn off all of the useless services that run by default in Windows XP. I recommend that you read A Guide To Turning Off Useless XP Services by JasonN and make the necessary changes. If in the future MARCS students begin using Windows Vista *shudder* then I recommend you find a similar guide for turning off all of the useless crap in Vista.

Hello world

2007-09-09T00:20:00.000+10:00

Welcome to my speech blog. My name is Mark Antoniou. I am a PhD student at MARCS Auditory Laboratories at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. I study cross-language speech production and perception. If you don't know what that is, then this is not the blog for you.

Within the lab, I often create user guides based on my experiences. These guides are intended to save people (including myself) time when trying to figure out how to do something in the future. Rather than sticking guides all over the lab, I have decided that all of my guides will live in the same place: online. Here, on my speechblog, you will find guides for using particular pieces of software, tips for being productive, as well as my thoughts on some more speechy topics. I've got a long list of posts to type up. My hope is that this blog will serve as a reference for future MARCSists. Time will tell if this will be a huge waste of time.

This is actually my second blog. I have created it so that I can separate my professional life from my personal life. When you're doing a PhD, you cannot really keep your work from affecting your personal life (esp. your social life). What you can do is keep your personal life blog posts away from your work blog.

If you are looking for my personal blog, you will find it at http://markbfm.blogspot.com/. Please be warned that my personal blog contains ramblings, venting, swearing, and poor attempts at humor - all part of my coping strategy for getting through a PhD.