Author Archives: admin

How to generate nice nomenclatures in LaTeX

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If you have to write up your model results, often you have to write down the model documentation. My colleague at work pointed me to a great package in LaTeX that can make your life easier with respect to the nomenclature used. It allows you to produce a glossary with all your variables, parameters and acronyms without much extra work. The package is called “nomencl” and here is an example of a pdf generated with LaTeX:

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As you can see, I have acronyms, parameters and variables as well as the reference to where they are used for the first time … Read the rest “How to generate nice nomenclatures in LaTeX”

Switching between Emacs color themes

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Emacs has lots of different color-themes. Depending on the light and my own mood, I would like to change between my two favorite themes, the “standard” light theme and a dark one.
This is the color-theme I use for my LaTeX files (“sitaramv-nt”):
But for my model files, I like the dark color-theme (“dark-laptop”), but sometimes the light one.
I searched the internet and found some code that allows me to switch easily between the themes using F11:

… Read the rest “Switching between Emacs color themes”

Migrating to R 3.0.0: TikzDevice and gdxrrw

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I am an avid user of R. Most of the time, I use R for preparing nice plots and tables for my LaTeX papers. For my plots, I use TikzDevice and for my tables I use xtable. Gams, my modeling software, developed a nice interface for using data from Gams in R and the other way around (see http://support.gams.com/doku.php?id=gdxrrw:interfacing_gams_and_r). When I upgraded from R 2.15 to R 3.0, I had some problems on my windows 8 machine, especially with TikZDevice. I finally managed to get it installed. The necessary trick is described on “The Stata Things” (!!!, http://enoriver.net/index.php/2013/04/12/keeping-knitr-happy-after-upgrading-to-r-3-0-0/ )
… Read the rest “Migrating to R 3.0.0: TikzDevice and gdxrrw”

GAMS and Excel: writing and checking results with automatic closing and opening

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I often use the Gams utility gdxxrw to write the results of my model simulations to Excel. In the testing phase, if you don’t know some nice tricks, this means a lot of closing and opening Excel: If the result file is open in excel, you get an error, when you try to write results to the Excel file, so you have to close Excel first and rerun your simulation. After writing the results to Excel you have to reopen the file again. Lots of keystrokes…
However, gdxxrw lets you reduce the number of strokes, by using the gdxxrw utility
… Read the rest “GAMS and Excel: writing and checking results with automatic closing and opening”

Using Windows Desktop Search to search for text in files with another extension than "txt"

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I use Windows Search quite often on my notebook to look for a file, E-Mail or a program. In Windows you just hit the Windows Key and start typing, which is very convenient.
If you want to start a program you just start typing the program name and hit enter Excel, hit the key and type “exc” and enter, and off you go.
The normal search (files or text within files) is also very powerful. Here is a site which explains the syntax: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965711(v=vs.85).aspx and here is a good article http://www.howtogeek.com/73065/learn-the-advanced-search-operators-in-windows-7/ on how to use it.
 
One problem with
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