One for the folkies

The speaker is the endlessly interesting raver-novelist-turned-media-theorist-cum-philosopher Douglas Rushkoff, whose blog is syndicated at rushkoff.

I'm now back from the Edinburgh Local GRADschool, which was one of these "throw a load of strangers into a room for three days and make them do command tasks, so as to convince them of their aptitude for Creativity, Communication and Transferable Skills" events: this one was specifically for PhD students. I was only there because it was a condition of my funding - I've been on a few such events before, and have found them in the main to be ghastlily corporate and buzzword-laden. In the end, though, it was actually quite fun, albeit incredibly tiring. half_of_monty: yes, you told me so. You win. A bit more of a debrief to follow, hopefully, but for now I've got this conference proceedings deadline on Wednesday, and my paper still needs considerable tweaking :-(

Non-colliding monic arrows in XYPic

For reasons that are increasingly unclear to me, I've been using the TeX package XY-Pic for the commutative diagrams (of which there are many) in my thesis and papers. If there is one and only one Right Way to do something, you can pretty much guarantee that XY-Pic will:

1. do something else by default, producing horribly ugly output;
2. only do the Right Thing if you utter some cryptic and fragile incantation in a language that looks like the bastard offspring of APL and the Black Speech of Mordor¹;
3. hide the details of said incantation away somewhere in the depths of the voluminous, poorly-indexed, verbose and maddeningly unclear manual.

As should be clear, I'm not a huge fan.

One of its more annoying characteristics is the way it handles tails of arrows, which (by default) start after the end of the arrow, so the tail invariably collides with whatever it was the arrow is pointing away from. Like this:

That was produced by the code \xymatrix{ A \ar@{>->}[r] & B }, which, while not terribly clear, is the obvious thing to try, and the only thing you'll know how to do unless you've wasted days reading the manual.

( Fortunately, there is a fix )

¹ Thinking about it, XY-Pic is actually kinda agglutinative, much like the Black Speech...