Allen J. Hall

The more I hear Billy Zander (Wikipedia) speak, the more I realize how he can lead a group of people to make beautiful music (Boston Philharmonic). To start your Monday off right, I strongly suggest you watch this lecture of Zander’s at Pop Tech this year.

If you’ve ever played an instrument before, you definitely need to watch this video. We get to see Zander teach a young Cellist how to play a piece by Bach, and at the same time learn why the Abundance Mentality is critical to our own playing (work). He explains mostly by showing in this talk: you’ll notice his own abundance of joy come out throughout his discussion, and in his responses to the difficulty of helping this clearly gifted student get more out of his playing.

Can’t forget the hat-tip to Tango at DesignVerb (a great blog!)

For more of Zander’s discussion on Classical Music with heart, see his TED talk given in February of this year.

I may be doing a few posts here and there about a few applications for the iPod touch. But, I want to add information that will make these posts helpful, so expect each one to have a few examples, if possible. In the least, I hope to describe at least 1 missing feature you might find important.

First, Apple for some reason did not include the ability to search LDAP servers into the iPod / iPhone Mail application. A horrible omission for someone who’s used to having To: field searches available at his fingertips. So, what to do? Well, you could use an online search (if your organization has one) via the web, or you could look for an application. I looked for an application. I found: LDAPeople by Neoos Software. [See in iTunes Store.]

To read about how to setup LDAPeople for the UIUC Campus, and more about it’s interface etc., click “more”…
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Boston rocked: I’m writing this on a new iPod Touch! Filmetrics was running a drawing for those who brought samples to test! Big thankyou’s go out to Filmetrics and AVS. I will write more about the conference in a series of posts coming soon. I’m hoping everyone had a great week while I was gone.

The society formerly known as the American Vacuum Society (AVS) is holding their international conference in Boston, MA next week! And I’ll be there! [Exciting!] If you are going to be there, drop me a line on the blog and we can snag a coffee or beer together.

The programs and cards sent out may have a familiar image!

My AFM image of the CuInSe₂ Bicrystals I grow in our lab won second place in the Art-Zone competition last year! It was great fun! [Thanks goes to AVS for being a fantastic organization!]

Wish me luck with my talk!!

A series of MATLAB functions will follow. Some of these “.m” files call each other, so ensure you have all of them before you start.

The purpose of this file is to load in all the .x00 files in a directory of Omega-Omega-2-Theta slices for reciprocal space mapping of a sample. “OmegAxis” determines the scale for the Omega axis (y) for reciprocal space mapping. [again, this is not yet in Q-space, that will come at a later date]

The first function loads data into your workspace for a directory of .x00 files that have a common base filename. The user needs to supply the first index number and last index number for loading the files. The program then attempts to load “filenameIndex.x00″ in a linear fashion for all .x00 files of that filename indexed in the cd’d directory. [Change directory to the working directory needed before starting this function.]

Read the rest of this entry »

A series of MATLAB functions will follow. Some of these “.m” files call each other, so ensure you have all of them before you start.

The purpose of this file is to load in all the .x00 files in a directory of Omega-Omega-2-Theta slices for reciprocal space mapping of a sample. Please note that as of this writing, the data has not yet been converted to Q-space.

The first function loads data into your workspace for a directory of .x00 files that have a common base filename. The user needs to supply the first index number and last index number for loading the files. The program then attempts to load “filenameIndex.x00″ in a linear fashion for all .x00 files of that filename indexed in the cd’d directory. [Change directory to the working directory needed before starting this function.]

Read the rest of this entry »

There will be a number of posts following this one that will attempt to recreate reciprocal space mapping in MATLAB. The functions that will be posted in the coming days read in .x00 files from the Philips XPert XRD system and try to recreate the slices of Omega Omega-2Theta scans produced for reciprocal space mapping.

Currently I haven’t changed the data into Q-space, so they will be reported in Omega -v- Omega2Theta space.

An example call to the function is:

DisplayQSpace1('',9,184);

Example output of the function(s):

I decided here and there to publish various MATLAB functions I’ve written for my own work. There’s just one caveat- each one of these is a serious work in progress. In fact, they may not progress much more than what is disclosed here since they get the job done for me.

But, I felt that this likely would help a few people who are trying to do the same type of thing, and I’d rather ease those who come after me, and give them a slight step ahead if possible.

For those of you with old version of the Philips XPert XRD software (specifically those who can’t output in XRDML files), I offer a crude import function for simple scans.

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One thing I find extremely helpful in my research, is the ability to download citations for articles my co-workers send. I like to import them into BibDesk and auto-file the journal articles by first-author. Unfortunately, not everyone has Bibtex export abilities. This isn’t too bad, as BibDesk imports most major citation files. One thing that I do abhorr, is when a major company decides not to offer a citation download option! Science Direct is the fellow who gets my wrath this evening. It’s so bad I’ve been looking for other companies who keep track of journals that have downloads for the ones that Science Direct publishes!

I wonder if you pay their absurd journal prices, if you get citation downloads…

For more on Absurd Journal pricing, see: Knuth and “Trapped…”

Quick one for today.  Social shipping/retailer company ShopATron seems like a great way to sell things with minimal hastle.  Why?  Because you’re not actually selling them- little shops around the country are filling the orders for you.  There’s just one problem- today’s consumer is used to fast and smooth transactions with good and fast communcation between seller and buyer.  If that’s what you want as a consumer, it sounds like ShopATron may not be the way to get it.

After not being able to find a Faber-Castell product for sale in the country (online at least), I contacted Faber-Castell for overseas retailers who spoke English. I was contaced by F-C USA, and they mentioned that I could order the item in question (quite cheaply) via their WebStore. Little did I know their WebStore is really a virtual store with absolutely nothing owned by Faber-Castell USA, but a social shopping sale-point for their retailers via ShopATron. F-C probably likes this because they can farm out the buying love to their retailers and never worry about consumer interactions on the individual level.  That’s good for them, not so good for me: I ordered the item Sunday, and it’s just now “ready for shipping”  on Friday morning!  Meaning, that it has been 1 business week since I purchased the small item (can be in a padded envelope by way of USPS), and it still hasn’t shipped. If it was available local, or through a major etailer, I would have purchased there instead. In the future, I’m going to avoid ShopATron as much as possible, except for the extremely hard to get items that are not available anywhere.

For more good detailed information about the new ShopATron virtual business model, and another purchaser with similar experiences, read here: MiniZRacing.com Interesting to note that the author mentions the “stock” information via ShopATron pages is virtual also- they have little way to know which retailer has which stock on hand, and therefore getting extremely hard to find items may also be a crap-shoot. [We'll see when my items actually ship, and when they actually arrive.]

Sorry for the non-Science post. Hopefully others will find this useful also.

An update is well past due. I’m sorry it took so long to add this note ( I should have thought of a post edit earlier):

ShopATron fills a niche. It helps companies (like Faber-Castell) serve individual consumers products that they would otherwise not sell to individuals. And for this, I thank Faber-Castell for selling to individuals when they may otherwise not. So, I’m somewhat heavy hearted that my post frustrated Faber-Castell, when in reality it is not a reflection on Faber-Castell at all. Merely a comment on ShopATron itself. Given the option- which would I rather- not being able to get an item I needed at all, or being able to get an item slightly slower than the fastest shippers online? I definitely pick the latter- In fact, I’d even be purchasing if it would take a month or two to ship. The question is really a matter of when to expect shipment. I think most internet consumers are fine with waiting for something, as long as they know it may take some time. I know I certainly am willing to wait for something I really want. [And I really wanted Faber-Castell's product- it's fantastic. I'm working on a post about it (work gets in the way sometimes), with some updates with a photo of the very well used perfect pencil.]

BTW, ShopATron is not the only fellow to have the problem of disclosing when something will be shipping. One of the biggest - Amazon itself, often has serious problems determining true leave-the-door times. I once waited over half a year- yes, half a year (it was maddening) for a book that I really wanted. In the end, I had to contact the Author, who luckily had a few books left, one of which he was willing to sell me directly (thank God for kind people!). Oh, and of course I couldn’t get a single human response from Amazon regarding the book, so we cancelled the order since every 2 weeks we’d get a “will ship in 2-4 weeks” notice for a handfull of months!

So, in the end, Faber-Castell and ShopATron shipped my item within 1 week. In fact, to Faber-Castell’s credit, the item was shipped 2-day DHL, if I remember correctly. So, it took 5 days to ship, but arrived in 2 days! So, that is quite fast, and finding it was in a 2-day envelope definitely came as a surprise after hearing it shipped only 2 days ago [at the time of the writing, I thought I was in for a week's wait again]. In the future, knowing an approximate time-frame about when to worry about the shipment would be appreciated, but that’s the only frustration I can point to. [The item I bought, the perfect pencil is completely awesome- so I really appreciate being able to purchase it online.]

I hope that updates everyone on the shipping issues I had with ShopATron, the pro’s and con’s, and my final feelings about the matter. I was happy to receive the item with fair promptness, I only wish I knew when i was to expect it to arrive or at least when it was going to ship (since it was 5 days before I heard from the company once purchased). This is all in the past, however, since I carry the perfect pencil in my pocket every single day and love it to death! Thanks Faber-Castell for an awesome product and being able to buy it online since I couldn’t buy it locally!