Quantum Forest

As far as I know, 2008 has been my most productive year ever from a writing point of view. Besides the blogging and micro-blogging stuff (aka informal public writing), I have worked in lecture notes and I have been writing an inordinate (for me) number of words in research papers. I still hope to submit a couple of more papers this year.

I have written all blog posts using MarsEdit, which is an excellent simple editor. I used MS Word for quite a few papers because I am working with LaTeX-unaware students and colleagues. However, I have also bee using LaTeX for all my lecture notes and a number of long(ish) research papers where I am working mostly by myself.

Until recently, I was using TexShop + LaTeX, but then I discovered XeLaTeX, which added unicode support–so I can write zúñiga in my files–and font management. I can easily access all my fonts in the mac in a fairly simple way. I am documenting the switch in the wiki side of this site.

During some asreml training I re-discovered emacs during Brian’s explanations. I installed Aquamacs (an OS X emacs version), which comes with ESS (emacs speaks statistics) to interface with R and AUCTeX (a LaTeX editing environment) pre-installed. Overall, I am still finding my way within Aquamacs, but the whole system feels very powerful. Now, if I manage to get an asreml version for the mac that would be total bliss.