General notes

These are things I use from time to time, but not enough to remember.

Regex for dates

To look for dates in a manuscript in Microsoft word

Use pattern search with the following [1-2][0-9]{3}

(See http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010873041033.aspx for more)

PowerPoint

To scale up a 1-slide Power Point letter size to Poster size on a Mac

If you have the original power point file

1) “Print” in PowerPoint selecting Adobe PDF as the 'printer' and pick a paper size

that's at least big enough to fit your desired dimensions.

2) Then you select a scale up (400% in this case).

3) Then save the pdf.

If you have a PDF arlready in letter size but no PPT original available,

1) you need to open with Preview (Mac's built in PDF viewer).

Then go through the same scale up as in powerpoint after selecting Adobe PDF as the ‘printer.’

(This will not work unless you have full-fledged Adobe writer installed on the mac. And you need to use both Preview and Acrobat, because Adobe Acrobat writer does NOT let you save a rescaled pdf from a pre existing one. That's why you have to open it in Preview. I was unable to find a way to do it using Preview alone. Although it went through the motions, the files produced were not readible.)

R:

To compare packages before and after an update of R n Mac OS X

1) In old R version:

> library()

This will produce a document in R editor.

Save it (and remember where)

2) Update R

3) Run the new R

> library()

This will produce a document R editor.

Save it.

4) Run Unix diff on the two files produced in 1 and 2.

See what’s missing after the new install

Then

Run TopMenu: Packages & Data : Package Installer and put in the necessary updates

(Or create an install script)

It looks like things handled through Menu Package Installer are kept in updates, those run with installer script may not be.

An installer script (R – interpretable) will look something like this (Harald Baayen’s langugeR.

install.packages(c("rpart", "chron", "Hmisc", "Design", "Matrix", "lme4", "coda", "e1071", "zipfR", "ape", "languageR"), repos = "http://cran.r-project.org")