FAQ for Jeff Fessler's graduate students

Disk space
You will run out of space in your EECS home account soon enough. I have plenty of disk space on the machines in the lab. However, not all of that space is backed up, so you must use something like "rsync" to keep syncronized duplicate copies of important files, especially your source code (.c .h .m etc.) and papers (.tex .sty etc.). Most of the machines in the lab have two disks: a primary and a backup. For an rsync example, see this script: ~fessler/l/src/script/util/backup7
Fessler directory access
Things of interest to the group are readable in my unix directories. You can access them from an eecs machine as ~fessler.
LaTeX
I expect my students to learn and use LaTeX because of the mathematical nature of our work. Get a LaTeX2e book and look at examples in ~fessler/l/tex.
Specifically, there is an example in ~fessler/l/tex/misc/example.tex and example2.tex
To make life easier with LaTeX, I use many macros in my papers, all of which are here: ~fessler/l/tex/macro/def,*.tex
For more advice, go to my tech reports web page and read the document "Some tips for LaTeX, Matlab, and C".
It is tricky to make good pdf files with latex. I use these options now: dvips -Ppdf -G0 -K -t letter -o file.ps file.dvi ps2pdfwr -dCompatibility=1.3 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true file.ps file.pdf
BibTeX
The annotated bibliographies of all of the papers I have read and filed are in ~fessler/l/tex/biblio/*.b2.
The ".b2" format is my own; I run a perl script to convert them to the master file ~fessler/l/tex/biblio/master.bib that can be used with bibtex. The format for the keys is author:year:abc where a b c are the first letters of the first three words in the paper title.
For example, my NUFFT paper is titled "Nonuniform fast Fourier transforms..." so I just type \cite{fessler:03:nff} to cite it.
An exception is books, where the :abc part is usually not there, for example \cite{macovski:83} is his 1983 medical imaging book.
Please use a copy of my master.bib file rather than re-entering your own citations into latex or bibtex, to avoid making new typographical errors!

To look up papers in my bibliographies, add the following to your .cshrc
set findarg = "-type f -not -regex '.*\.swp' -not -regex '.*\.tex'" alias lookup "find ~fessler/l/tex/biblio/b2 $findarg | b,grep \!* | more"
Then you can just type something like 'lookup some_key_word' to see all the bib entries that have some_key_word in it.

I also have bibliographies of IEEE (etc.) journals here ~fessler/l/tex/biblio/jour/* and you can make a lookup alias that looks there too, like this:
find ~fessler/l/tex/biblio/b2 ~fessler/l/tex/biblio/jour/ -type f -not -regex '.*\.swp' -not -regex '.*\.tex' | b,grep YOURSTRING | more

Reprints
UM libraries have a messenger service, which means faculty can email them citations of papers and they send copies back through campus mail.
If you want papers copied this way, first check (using grep) the files in ~fessler/l/tex/biblio/* to see if I already have the paper. If the filename has the word "get" in it, that means it is a paper I want to get, but don't have yet! (so if you get it yourself, please make (or have my secretary make) a copy for me! If I don't have the paper, then please format the citation(s) *exactly* in the format used in those .b2 files (including the double spaces) and then email to me the list of papers you want. I will forward the list to UM libraries with an account number.
Example documents (quals, proposals, theses)
These can be found in ~fessler/l/tex/student/
Writing
Avoid starting a sentence with an equation.
Always punctuate equations, even displayed ones, as if they are part of the sentence, because they are!
Usually equations have a comma or a period at the end.
Usually use "that" instead of "which", except after a comma.
Put a comma after "i.e." and "e.g.", e.g., like this.
Meetings / appointments
Near the start of each week, I use Google calendar to post times I am available for reserved appointments for my group. You can use the google account fessler.group to sign up for times. Or if you have your own google account, let me know and I'll add it to the access list so that you can sign up for times directly. You are always welcome to stop by any time and see if I am available. Often this is easier than making an appointment.