Starting your Jupyter Notebook with a double-click

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Jupyter Notebooks are a great way of working with Python and R. You can add your notes in Markdown and write code in a cell that can be evaluated over and over again.

However, one thing I didn’t like is that you have to start (on Windows) the Jupyter Notebook server in the directory where you have your notebook saved. Double-clicking a Jupyter notebook (with the extension ipynb) doesn’t work if you don’t install an additional package. Luckily, there is an easy way to get this working found on Axel’s blog.

I used the following code to enable double-click … Read the rest “Starting your Jupyter Notebook with a double-click”

Fighting chaos: Collections

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If you work on multiple projects you might have problems remembering the names of the files you are working on. Was the LaTeX file in the subdirectory “Documentation” or in “Notes”? Was the name “model.tex” or “logit.tex”? Was it “bench.gms” or “benchrd.gms” or “bench1.gms”? I loose often time searching my directories for the file I want to work on and, unfortunately enough, I am not that systematic in naming and filing my files.

I tried to solve this by keeping a list in a note, creating links, and so on, but nothing seemed to work (or I was not consistent … Read the rest “Fighting chaos: Collections”

Looking for infeasibilities in Gams

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A good CGE modelers always checks the calibration of a CGE model using a simple trick: If you set the iteration limit of the model to zero and you try to solve the model, GAMS should find a solution if you correctly initialized and wrote down your model equations with the use of the benchmark data. Often, the calibration is not done properly and this can be seen (using the iteration set to zero) by looking at the infeasibilities of the equations and the variables.

If you use MPSGE to write down your model, the infeasibilities are easily interpreted. If … Read the rest “Looking for infeasibilities in Gams”

Why I don’t like Matlab

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Working with a group of researchers can be very interesting but also very frustrating if you have to use their software tools. In my case, I have to use Matlab. If you are used to R, Python, and Gams this is more than a nightmare. This post is after a frustrating day with Matlab.

Most of my researcher colleagues use in their Matlab code matrices, so no row names or column headings. What you see are just numbers. If you want to know what the number represents, you need to look at vectors that contain the sets/row names/headers. Some of … Read the rest “Why I don’t like Matlab”

Showing a beamer presentation with preview of next slide

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If you use LaTeX with the package Beamer instead of Powerpoint to make presentations, you will probably miss the possibility to present a slide and at the same time have a quick glance on the next slide (Powerpoint has this great feature).

Searching the internet, I found the following solution: pympress:

“It is designed to be a dual-screen reader used for presentations and public talks, with  two displays: the Content window for a projector, and the Presenter window for your laptop. It is portable and has been tested on various Mac, Windows, and Linux systems.”

You can download it … Read the rest “Showing a beamer presentation with preview of next slide”