Tipps and Tricks by Thomas
I am an avid user of Linux and other derivatives of Unix.
I come up with few-line solutions that once in a while other people like a lot.
I put those where I believe they might be valuable for a wider audience.
LaTeX-Tricks
LaTeX beamerposter
Jointly with Philippe Dreuw I created the beamerposter package based on the beamer and the a0poster classes which allows to create posters of arbitrary size using LaTeX which even look nice.
The rounding package
Jointly with Philippe Dreuw I created macros to allow for rounding of numbers in LaTeX documents. This is very handy, if you have a table, but you don’t yet know to what precision you want to show the numbers in the end. Just put in the full precision and decide later.
Download: style file example
more coming soon
Shell-Tricks and tools
rowavg.py and colavg.py
Two very simple tools I frequently use are rowavg.py and colavg.py. They compute the average of columns or rows of their stdin. I use this for example when I want to compute the average result of a series of experiments I computed parallelized on a cluster:
grep '^ERROR RATE' *.log | colavg.py
joinlines.py and joinprefixlines.py
Imagine you have multiple results per file, e.g. cross-validation, and you want to have the average (see above) for them individually.
Therefore I use joinprefixlines.py:
grep '^ERROR RATE' *.log | joinprefixlines.py -d : | colavg.py
will get all lines starting with ERROR RATE from all log-files, will then concatenate all lines from one fill and average over the columns.
joinlines.py <n> reads stdin and concatenates every n lines.
Download: joinlines.py joinprefixlines.py