LaTeX template for NSF-style Biographical Sketch

On large multi-university NSF grant proposals, NSF requires that senior personnel submit a 2-page biographical sketch ("biosketch") that is formatting according to certain rules in their Grant Proposal Guide (GPG). The format is pretty simple, and so there does not seem to be much demand for a solid LaTeX template for one. Nevertheless, I thought some people might find one helpful. I've posted a PDF of my NSF-style biosketch below along with the TeX source used to generate it.

• PDF: tpavlic_nsf_biosketch.pdf
• LaTeX template: tpavlic_nsf_biosketch.tex

On a related note, you can also find my curriculum vitae (CV) tailored for faculty searches (PDF, TeX) as well as for industry searches (PDF, TeX).

Printing from your Android device (tablet or phone)

I know someone who recently purchased an Asus Transformer TF300T from MicroCenter in the store for a cool $350, which means that after tax it was still cheaper than it was selling for at Amazon ($384). Strangely, I can find no mention of the TF300T on MicroCenter's website (maybe local store was just clearing inventory and they don't plan on selling them in the long term?). Anyway, this is the first Android tablet this person has ever used, and they were interested in getting the ability to print from it to the printers in their home. Here's how I responded (text copied from an e-mail and then marked up a bit).

    Here are some tablet printing options that I've tried that appear to still be popular. I've put some footnotes at the bottom of this message that are tangential topics that may still be interesting to you. For example, the first footnote [*] is about a way to pick printers in the future that allow for cloud printing without the aid of a PC being on.

    The first two apps I currently have installed on my phone and am happy with. You would probably only need one of them. The third app is one I tried, but I gave up on because I thought the first two apps were just as good or better. I have not used the fourth app, but you should know it exists as it would be handy if on the go and you need a hard copy of something.

1. First, here's "Cloud Print," which is a free app with no limitations but will display ads unless you donate to it:
   
   https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauloslf.cloudprint
   
   To give it the ability to print, you have to also install Google Chrome (Google's web browser) on one or all of your machines. You can get Google Chrome web browser [**] from:
   
   https://www.google.com/chrome/
   
   After you install it, complete these steps to connect your PC's printers to the web where "Cloud Print" can access them:
   
   http://support.google.com/cloudprint/bin/answer.py?answer=1686197
   
   Note that if Chrome is already installed on another computer in the house, and if that person has shared her printers with you, you should already be able to print to printers connected to her computer even if your computer isn't on (but hers has to be on). Once printers are connected to your Google account's Cloud Print, then you can use the "Share" button (it looks a little like a tree with two branches, typically) from any app to export whatever you're looking at to the "Cloud Print" app. That document will then get printed to the Cloud Print printer you choose. Note that "Print to PDF" is always available (and it will store that PDF on your Google Drive, I think, which you can access using the "Google Drive" app I just e-mailed you about). There are competing Android apps to Cloud Print, like "Easy Print:"
   
   https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipdog.easyprint
   
   but I don't think they're as well developed as Cloud Print.
   
   
2. Next, there's "PrinterShare," which has limited printing for free, but unlimited printing if you're willing to buy their premium key for a pricey $12.95:
   
   https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dynamixsoftware.printershare
   
   PrinterShare's features largely overlap with Cloud Print. That is, Cloud Print does a couple of things PrinterShare doesn't, and PrinterShare does a couple of things that Cloud Print doesn't. For example, you can use Google Cloud Print with PrinterShare, and so any printer that you can use with Cloud Print, you can also use with PrinterShare. One major difference is that PrinterShare also supports WiFi printing to network-enabled printers (e.g., the HP LaserJet 2055dn) and some print servers. Initially, the support was spotty. However, I'm noticing more and more printers start to pop up on my WiFi list when I check. It's a solid app, but it's a little annoying that if you switch printers frequently, it has to re-download print drivers nearly every time. Downloading print drivers is very fast, and it's not much of an annoyance, but it's a little confusing why it can't keep these installed. Otherwise, it's a solid application that's a tough competitor, which is why it maintains such a high price for it's premium key.
   
   
3. I have also used the "PrintBot" app, which allows for 3 printouts a month unless you pay $4.50 for the full version (which is unlimited). It supports printing directly to a print server (no Google Cloud Print required), but it is not as easy to setup as PrinterShare. So unless they've improved things a bit since I used it last, I don't recommend it. In theory, it may be the only tool that can print to the print server connected to the HP LaserJet 5 upstairs without using Google Cloud Print; however, PrinterShare may have improved to be able to do that natively anyway:
   
   https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.jsecurity.printbot
   
   
4. Alternatively, HP and others(?) have apps like this one:
   
   https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hp.eprint.ppl.client
   
   that allow you to print to public printing locations, like FedEx Office stores, UPS Office stores, Walmart photo kiosks, hotels, and others. This is a neat idea if you're on the go and need a paper copy of something. The downside is that although the app is free, the place that prints your document may charge you per page.
   
   

    In summary, if you're OK with having a computer on and connecting your legacy printers to the Google "cloud print" service, then give the first free app ("Cloud Print") a shot. If you want the ability to print over WiFi directly without computers being on, then consider the second app ("PrinterShare", which is pretty expensive for an app if you want to print more than 3 things a month). Note that the WiFi option only works if you're on the same network as the printer. You cannot print from remote with PrinterShare unless you're using Google's cloud print service (and thus have a PC turned on).

    --Ted


Footnotes:

[*]: If you find yourself buying a new printer in the near future (not likely), you can choose a "Cloud Ready" printer:

http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/printers.html

These printers connect to servers at HP, Kodak, Epson, or Canon that allow access to them from remote provided the correct username and password. Google Cloud print can print directly to these without the aid of a computer being on.

In general, any network-enabled printer will probably have good Android support even if it's not "cloud ready." In fact, some vendors release their own apps to make it simpler to print to them from Android, like Lexmark (but I think generic network printer apps will connect to these too, in most cases):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lexmark.print


[**]: If you like Google Chrome as a web browser, you can use it instead of Firefox. If you have Firefox bookmarks, Chrome will import them. Also (and this might be interesting to you), you can share your Chrome bookmarks and tabs to your tablet and so you can easily go from one to the other. If you don't like Chrome but like the idea of getting your same bookmarks and tabs on your tablet as is on your Desktop, that's possible with Firefox too. Either way, we should probably install the "Chrome to Phone" app

3mindme is shutting down! Old owner recommends NudgeMail

Today I received the quoted e-mail below from David Barrett (@quinthar). His work as CEO of Expensify and some complications with maintaining the longevity of 3mindme have made him decide to shut down the 3mindme service effective immediately. He recommends the very similar but commercially operated service NudgeMail as a substitute. You can find other substitution options at an old post of mine discussing these services.

Hi! I'm David, the guy who made 3mindme. I'm very sad to inform you that I'm shutting down the service permanently, starting immediately. I strongly encourage you to check out a similar service at http://nudgemail.com -- it's essentially the same thing as 3mindme, but better.

Q: What will happen to the emails I've scheduled for the future?
A: After I send this email to all users, I'm going to send all future-dated emails immediately. My goal has always been to return every email at precisely the right time. Unfortunately, I'll need to make due with simply returning them at all.

Q: Can I do anything to convince you to keep 3mindme alive?
A: Probably not. It's been a fun service to operate these many years, but as CEO of Expensify (https://expensify.com - Expense reports that don't suck!) I just don't have the time to devote to 3mindme.

Q: Why now, after years of continuous operation?
A: Spam. I recently learned that many users (myself included) were having their emails silently dropped, meaning they got no error response, but the message was never scheduled for future delivery. Solving this problem is very difficult and time consuming, and I'd rather shut down 3mindme than leave it in a non-functioning state.

I think that's all. If you have any questions, feel free to respond to this email and I'll do what I can to help. Otherwise, give NudgeMail a shot, and keep Expensify in mind for your next expense report!

-david
Follow me at http://twitter.com/quinthar

So that is very sad. 3mindme was a nice server-side mail-me-back reminder service that didn't have the ugly commercial taste of pretty much every other alternative.

So bye-bye 3mindme; we'll miss you.

Delayed reminder e-mails: iTickleMe, LetterMeLater, FutureMe, 3mindme, and Outlook

UPDATE: On August 27, 2011, 3mindme was shut down. See a recent post for more information. The old owner of 3mindme recommends NudgeMail as a substitute.

---

UPDATE: It looks like there has been an update to the original Gadgetwise post. Unfortunately, because it seems like all technology writers are born to disappoint, the author picked a bone-headed client-side solution like the Boomerang plugin for Firefox/Chrome despite so many people pointing out existing server-side solutions. In fact, a bunch of people posted lots of johnny-come-lately server-side applications like Good Todo, FollowUp, FollowUpThen, and NudgeMail. Why you would favor any of these over something like 3mindme baffles me, but I guess it's nice to have options. You certainly shouldn't ever need to use Boomerang though!

This recent NYTimes: Gadgetwise post got me thinking about an old functionality I built into my mail server (using procmail and cronjobs) back before I switched over to Gmail. Basically, I implemented exactly this "delayed reminder" feature in a sort of GTD "tickler file" (43folders) way. I think you could already do something similar in GMail, but you'd still come a little short. Let me explain how my old IMAP-based version worked.

I would send myself messages with a subject like:

tickle10: Ask Joe to return book he borrowed

That is, "on day 10 of this month, remind me to 'Ask Joe to return...'". When my mail server received messages matching that format, it would file them into "tickler files" that were just IMAP folders for each day; each folder had a name like "TICKLE.1" or "TICKLE.25". I then had a script that would run nightly and would move contents of "TICKLE.today_number" into my inbox and mark them unread.

Consequently, this acted exactly like a tickler file with folders. I "drop" a message into the folder for a day later in this month or next month, and each day I empty the folder in the front and move the empty folder to the back. I just had a script do it for me.

You could have GMail do ALMOST all of this for you. That is, you could have it automatically file messages based on subject into tickler folders. The problem would be to automate moving the daily folders back into your inbox. Perhaps you could just manually check today's folder each day. That would be a step in the right direction.

But then I realized that if the NYTimes guy thought of it now, and I thought of it many many many years ago, then maybe other people have thought of it too. So I did a Google search, and it turns out other solutions do now exist. Here's one I just found:

• iTickleMe: http://www.itickleme.com/
  
  iTickleMe lets you schedule e-mail reminders by sending the service e-mails at addresses like INTERVAL@itickleme.com.

Of course, there is more than one way to skin an cat. Alternatives to iTickleMe include:

• LetterMeLater: http://www.lettermelater.com/
• FutureMe: http://www.futureme.org/

But then I found a really simple and elegant non-commercial alternative:

• 3mindme: http://3mindme.com/
  
  which you can find a little more information about at Lifemuncher:
  
  http://lifemuncher.blogspot.com/2007/12/3mindme-reminder-service.html
  
  However, I really recommend you just check out 3mindme.com directly; it's self explanatory. I just hope that 3mindme doesn't go under because it's not commercially supported and the author might eventually lose interest.

Finally, apparently Outlook has the ability to schedule e-mails for later delivery. This won't be an option for, say, GMail users who access GMail through the web... or Thunderbird users in general. Does Apple Mail have this feature? Well, in the meanwhile, the on-line reflector services should work pretty well... and, so long as you can count on the server being up, you don't have to worry about your mail client at home crashing and not sending those delayed e-mails while you are away (plus, do you really need to keep your computer on just as a reminder server?).

So go check out 3mindme. I haven't tried it yet. I hope it still works. Sounds great!

Tools for combining BibTeX, PDFs, and e-Readers

Quick links:

• fix_pdf_tags BibTeX+PDF+e-Reader management script
• bibtex_to_pdf Mercurial repository

UPDATE: If you are looking for a simpler solution that updates PDF's in your BibTeX database with the corresponding BibTeX data, check out updatepdf.pl. Be careful though; the old PDF::API2 module only supports Adobe PDF 1.4 (i.e., compatibility-mode PDF's).

UPDATE: Apparently, you can also manage your Kindle collections efficiently using emacs, using Calibre, or manually so long as you're okay with possibly having to reboot your Kindle after every change. So it would be possible for me to add Kindle collections.json support to my fix-pdf-tags script; I just don't anticipate having the time to do that in the near future (plus, I don't own a Kindle anymore, and so I wouldn't be able to test it).

In trying to migrate to e-Readers, I've been experimenting with both the Amazon Kindle 3 and the Sony Daily Reader PRS-950. They both have nice features... I don't have time to go into a review, but I'll give a teaser...

• Kindle PRO's: It has a nice web browser (that works on 3G too!), and makes it super easy to get new content onto the device. In fact, you can even download PDF's from Dropbox via the nifty browser (although e-mailing to your Amazon Kindle e-mail address is convenient too). Plus, Amazon makes for a nice e-Book store -- lots of the books I would want.
• Kindle CON's: However, PDF's really have to be in compatibility mode (Acrobat 1.4). Otherwise, the Kindle will miss all of the metadata. More importantly, it is basically impossibledifficult to manage collections through the USB. So if you have hundreds of PDF's, you'll spend days tagging them via the clunky Kindle keyboard.
  • UPDATE: Apparently, the Kindle uses a simple SHA-1 hash of the file's full path as a key in the collections.json file that is accessible via USB. Consequently, you can manage your collections data more efficiently. You can do so with an emacs script or with a calibre plugin or manually. However, you may have to reboot your Kindle every time you make a change. At least with the older Kindles, the collections.json file was only read on boot. It's possible that the newer Kindles are smart enough to refresh collections data every time the USB is unplugged (like the Sony does), but I honestly don't know. I have a feeling that Hannes, the author of bibtex-kindle, knows though.
• Sony Daily PRO's: It has the optical touch screen. It doesn't require compatibility-mode PDF's. It has a large screen. It has terrific page viewing options. In theory, the PDF note options are very nice, but e-Reader notes just seem tedious to me in general regardless of interface. More importantly, it is essentially an "open" platform so long as you are OK with a little bit of reverse engineering. It is easy to write a few scripts to manage your XML files, and so keeping your PDF's organized is easy for your average script kiddy.
• Sony Daily CON's: The optical touch screen means the screen is sunk down so far that it the chassis casts a small shadow around the edge of the screen. The Sony case-with-light isn't as nice as the Kindle's case-with-light. The Sony Bookstore doesn't have as many books (or at least the books I care about). The zoom modes leave much to be desired. In PDF's that work fine on the Kindle, trying to click a word for dictionary lookup often leads to selecting a phrase (and there's nothing you can do about it).

And there's plenty more to talk about, but those are the quick things off the top of my head. So it looks like I'm probably going to keep both... so I can have a diversity of e-Books available to me. Plus, the e-Book experience is a little nicer on the Kindle, but the PDF experience might be a little nicer on the Sony. It's hard to tell.

But what this post is really about is a utility I've put together that automatically manages my research PDF collection on either the Kindle or the Sony Reader. In particular,

• It updates PDF's with metatags to match author/editor/title information from a central BibTeX database.
• If you invoke it with a "kindle" argument, it converts PDF's to 1.4 so the Kindle can read the metatags.
• If you invoke it with a "reader" argument, it also automatically generates categories based on file hierarchy (i.e., the folders in which your PDF files live). In fact, symbolic links indicate that multiple tags should be applied to the same file (i.e., the target of the symbolic link).

So maybe that will be helpful to someone (at least as an example to generate some ideas). The project started out as something customized for me, but I've tried to make the documentation clear (see the chunk at the top to start). Plus, most of the important custom information (paths, preferences, etc.) are at the top of the script.

Check out the most recent version of my fix_pdf_tags script; it resides in my bibtex_to_pdf Mercurial repository where you can view its change history.

P.S. I know that Calibre is an existing software package that has very similar aims and a nice graphical environment. However, it really is a poor choice for managing PDF research. Plus, the Calibre folks have basically written off Kindle users as poor schmucks with hobbled readers. More importantly for me, I'm much happier with scripted solutions that can be fired off quickly.

pine, mutt, elm, and mousetraps

The web hosting provider for tedpavlic.com recently upgraded their UNIX boxes to a 64-bit platform, and the websites I host with them had to be moved over. There were a few small hiccups (primarily due to 32-bit apps I built that needed to be re-built), but most of the issues afterwards had to deal with apps that I asked them to install on the old machine that I then had to ask them to install again on the new machine. One of those apps was (al)pine, which is the console-based e-mail client that I use. They installed pine for me, but the guy in charge was curious. Here's a response to a question he had about my request. It's my justification for using pine (and throwing away the mouse).

But I must ask, for the few odd requests I get for pine, I am curious as to if you actually use it on a day to day basis or just for testing. I remember using it back in the day (good ol'e ISDN!), but it seems a bit redundant and quaint now that we have webmail and Thunderbird and such.

Gosh – pine is far more powerful than either of those. For example:

*) Does webmail support IMAP tags? Pine does. Thunderbird just started, and it's support is still limited.

*) When managing large folders of mail, it's often much easier to query and process the messages with pine. I can quickly select a batch of messages, invert the selection, view the selection as its own folder, etc. etc. I have much more efficacy in pine.

*) If I'm at a remote computer, it's much more convenient for me to ssh into gemini and run pine than to use webmail (which is slow and clunky) or setup Thunderbird for my one time use.

*) If I'm at a remote computer *with* pine, if I run THAT pine and point it at gemini's IMAP server, pine will use the pine configuration (and address book) that is stored in a special IMAP folder. Hence, pine is much more portable than Thunderbird.

*) With very few exceptions, I'm much happier with console-mode (or near-console-mode) apps. Similarly, I use vim on every machine I have. Not only does it give me a uniform editing environment wherever I am, but with the addons packaged with any standard vim installation, vim will download, edit, and upload networked files automatically for me without much extra work on my part.

*) Oh, and don't forget that once upon a time you could only get pico with pine. Now, IIRC, nano comes separately.

My officemate uses mutt, and I used to be a major elm fan because it integrated better with vim. I shifted to pine because it's just so very powerful.

Have you heard of Vimperator? It's an add-on for Firefox that makes it act like Vim. The same people also brought out Muttator – it's an addon for Thunderbird that makes it act like mutt.

So there are lots of us out there that are dissatisfied with the GUI. Console-mode developers don't put a lot of time into perfecting the shading of the chrome. Instead, they add features, and they make the apps fast.

(note: applications like Quicksilver, Spotlight, and Microsoft's latest knock-off are bringing people back to the keyboard. People would rather *type* the app they want to launch rather than clicking through folders. Eventually, people will realize where the mouse belongs – dead in a trap stuck in the garbage out in the garage)

Thanks. :) –
Ted

Perl script that generates CSV and BerkeleyDB versions of LTWA list

UPDATE: If you're wondering why I just didn't save the LTWA database and search it every time I needed to abbreviate a journal, it's because I wanted to optimize for speed downstream. That is, I did all the possible processing now to speed things up later. I've also augmented the script to do the opposite (and save the results in other smaller files) so that I can tell the downstream process to take longer (and possibly have better results with less spurious entries in the hash table). I've also updated the downstream script to save any successful lookups locally to speed up successive runs. Again, contact me if you want more details.

I'm sick of looking up ISO 4 standard journal abbreviations from the List of Title Word Abbreviations (LTWA) hosted at ISSN's LTWA online. The most annoying thing about LTWA online is that you can't get one big list unless you have them mail you a paper copy (for a price). So you have to resort to clicking each letter and waiting for the list for that letter to come up.

So I wrote a Perl script that automatically cURLs each LTWA online page down, processes it, and generates both CSV and BerkeleyDB (BDB) hash files containing a list of words and their associated official LTWA abbreviation. I use the BDB file in another script to automatically generate BibTeX database files for each of my journal papers (that script first checks a list of known-good journal abbreviations before trying to generate the abbreviation itself).

There were several challenges to such a task, and the list isn't perfect. I focused on one-word entries. For more complicated abbreviations, I figured I'd lean on my list of known-good journal abbreviations. That still left LTWA entries like "psycholog-" and "bulletin-" which use "-" to imply "and any other character." So I used a typical /usr/share/dict/words list to generate a list of English words that matched each pattern. Because such lists don't usually include plurals, I used Lingua::EN::Inflect to generate plurals and then took all of the plurals that included the singular (i.e., that would also match the LTWA pattern).

So that works well for me. Someday I might put the script and/or the files it produces on-line. For the moment, if you want any of these, contact me and let me know. I'll share.

I've finally done it...

After 15 years, I've finally done it.

I've put set -o vi into my profile.

(Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," performed by James Taylor as in the West Wing episode, plays in the background)

Desktop Manager for OS X

This is not anything new, but there is a very nice freeware (open source) Desktop Manager for OS X. That is, this implements virtual desktops (i.e., multiple desktops that you can switch between; this lets you spread your apps across different screens).

It has a lot of cool features.

The Quick Reference Site (Cards and Books)

UPDATE 3: I did find the source of that regular expression card at Gordon McKinney's Pro IT Blog. Well, it's not a LaTeX source, but it's at least in letter format.

UPDATE 2: I found another good list of quick reference cards at the plantOzh blog. It includes a a regexp card, Perl 5 booklet, and CSS cards (1.0, 2.0). Yes, these cards are archived at the blog, so all of the commentary below still applies.

UPDATE 1: It's also annoying when someone simply archives existing quick reference cards because sometimes those archives use A4 paper. If these were linked to their origins, the source code (perhaps LaTeX) might be available, making a conversion to letter paper easy.

Lately, I have been quick reference happy [1, 2, 3, 4]. I cannot explain why, but I suddenly want to surround myself with quick references.

I think I found a great new quick reference resource. It's The Quick Reference Site, which features quick reference cards, e-books, and other papers and tutorials. From the site:

Throughout the years I have collected a huge pile of documents that deal with almost every aspect of software development. The purpose of this site is to centralize this information and to make it available to everyone who may need it or shares my passion on this subject. There are still a lot of documents in my "archive" that I like to share with you all.
At the moment this site represents only a fraction of what I want to provide, so a lot of work still needs to be done. As a result, you should consider this site as a work in progress. I'll try to keep you updated on the most challenging, powerful and continuously evolving software technologies of the moment. I hope that especially Java and C++ fanatics (like myself) will find some valuable information over here.

As far as I can tell so far, the author archives quick references that he has found over time and links us, the readers, to those archives. The advantage of this is that it minimizes the chances of broken links. The disadvantage is that the archives may not be the most recent versions. Additionally, if this site ever goes down and our bookmarks point there, those bookmarks will be broken.

Some quick reference cards that I want to point out (if you go to his list, you can also read descriptions of these programs):

• Cascading Style Sheets 1.0


• CVS Quick Reference Card
• CVS Quick Reference Card (LG)


• PHP Cheat Sheet
• PHP 4 Reference Card


• The One Page Linux Manual
• UNIX commands reference card


• AMSTeX Reference Card 1.3


• vi Reference Card (HP)
• Vi Reference Card
• vi Quick Reference
• VIM Quick Reference Card


• GNU Calc Reference Card


• Bash Quick Reference


• LINUX System Call Quick Reference
• LINUX Admin Quick Reference


• Subversion Quick Reference Card
• Cheat Sheet Subversion


• MySQL-4.02a

So, that's fun.

On a slightly unrelated note, you can also check out Hawk Wings to find a QuickSilver quick reference and the QuickSilver user manual.

Tech. Cheat Sheets!

Check out the recent "Developer’s Alarm: 200+ Hotkeys To Boost Your Productivity" from Smashing Magazine for more hotkeys. This focusses on Windows apps, but there are some apps that have cross-platform support, and so this isn't an entirely worthless post.

In the spirit of previous posts [1, 2, 3], here are some more!

I found TechCheatSheets.com, which includes some nice reference sheets, and some broken links. However, it got me thinking about "cheat sheet," which got me searching, and I found these popular links:

• Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet (HTML, PDF)
• Mozilla Thunderbird Cheat Sheet (HTML, PDF)

That last one probably beats my Thunderbird quick reference (PDF, LaTeX). However, those do not replace my Camino quick reference (PDF, LaTeX).

My (Reference) Desk

Now that I have compiled all of these quick references [1, 2, 3], I can put them together to surround myself in easy-to-access information. In fact, I will. I did. Here it is! From left to right (pictures taken with my wonderful phone and stored in a flickr photoset)...

Hot Key References

NOTE: The two updates below may serve as good LaTeX examples featuring the use of multicol.

UPDATE 2: I have used the Thunderbird list to make a Thunderbird quick reference PDF (LaTeX source available).

UPDATE 1: I have used the Camino list to make a Camino quick reference PDF (LaTeX source available).

I have been posting about quick references a lot lately [e.g., 1, 2]. I found another good quick reference site, allhotkeys.com. It has lots of software hotkey quick references. For example,

• Mozilla Firefox hotkeys
• Mozilla Firefox extensions hotkeys
• Mozilla Thunderbird hotkeys
• Camino hotkeys
• Safari hotkeys
• Microsoft Word hotkeys
• Microsoft Excel hotkeys
• Microsoft PowerPoint hotkeys
• Remote Desktop hotkeys
• Mac OS X Keyboard shortcuts
• iTunes hotkeys
• GMail hotkeys
• UNIX and Linux hotkeys
• Command line keyboard shortcuts
• ...and lots more...

So that's potentially helpful. But right now the pages are really slow to come up, so I have no idea what they look like. Nor do I know if I can easily get them onto a landscape sheet of paper that I can tape to the wall somewhere...

TeX Reference Card (and others)

UPDATE 3: I found the source of the popular LaTeX cheat sheet. It includes a PS version, a PDF version, PNG views [Page 1, Page 2], and the LaTeX source. It's nice that the source is available. That makes it easier to shift from A4 to letter paper and back.

UPDATE 2: More reference cards can be found in the follow-up to this message.

UPDATE 1: Check out refcards.com and the old version old.refcards.com. There are lots of useful cards, including some of the ones I linked below. This TeX card and this Vim card look familiar. There are other EMmacs and Vim cards in the editors section. There is also a typesetting section that includes a LaTeX cheat sheet.

The Brown University Center for Fluid Mechanics, Turbulence and Computation (CFM) has a collection of computing tutorials. Buried in there somewhere is a useful Plain TeX reference card in PostScript format. I have generated a PDF version of this reference card.

I stress that this is a Plain TeX reference card, and so there are different ("better"?) ways of doing some of these things using other LaTeX macros (note TeX vs. Plain TeX vs. LaTeX differences: [1, 2, 3, 4, and more]). However, this is still a very useful reference card. It prints out as two landscape-oriented pages (weirdly sized: 11.7" x 8.3"). I plan on printing this out and taping it next to my desk at the office. I also found a useful longer Plain TeX reference sheet that may be helpful to some people. Of course, there are even longer Plain TeX reference documents also available.

Oh, I also found this AUC TeX reference card PDF with available source code. I don't use AUC TeX (I favor VIM-LaTeX), but maybe someone who does could use this. FYI, AUC TeX is a package for EMacs providing extra support for LaTeX (and others).

Speaking of Vim:

• Here's a cool set of multilingual Vim quick reference cards (again, PDF with 2 landscape-oriented pages) that include their sources and an HTML version.
• Here's a similar Vim quick reference card (PDF).
• Here's yet another Vim quick reference card (PDF).
• Finally, here's VIM-LaTeX's quick start introduction document.

So that's nice.