Time Managment and Studying

A friend on Facebook shared a link to an article about time management, by Ramit Sethi, that I thought was rather thought provoking. The author reviewed some of the work by Cal Newport which suggested using a fixed schedule to increase productivity and help evaluate what is really important and what produces results.

Cal also has a website called Study Hacks that has many good study tips on it. I haven't reviewed the majority of the website but what I did look at I was definitely thought provoking.

Since I have been working on helping my students develop better study skills. I thought that the article about How to Ace Calculus: The Art of Doing Well in Technical Courses was interesting. Here is a clip from the article that really caught my attention.

How to Develop Insight

Developing insight can be hard. (Though it gets easier with practice.) Especially when you’re given a dozen new concepts per lecture. The implication: you have to invest a lot of effort during the semester — not just right before the exam — to keep up with a technical course. Every one of those concepts described in lecture has to be translated from symbols on a blackboard to a shiver-inducing deep comprehension. It’s not easy, but at least the challenge is now well-defined.

Here are some tips that can help:

1. If you have a hard time understanding the material as the professor presents it, prep the concepts before class by reading the textbook.
   
2. Ask questions when the professor loses you. Often their answer can knock you back on track to insightful understanding.
3. Ask the professor or TA for clarifications immediately following lecture.
4. Try to review your notes as soon as possible after class to cement insights while the information is still fresh in your brain.
5. Always go to office hours. But before you show up, spend time with the troublesome concepts trying to build insight. Figure out exactly where you get stuck. This will help the TA or professor give you targeted, useful advice. Never just say: I don’t get it.”
6. Keep a running list of every concept taught so far in the semester. Mark the ones that you have an insight for and the ones you don’t understand. It helps to see clearly exactly what insights you still need.

Thanks Cal for sharing your thoughts.

OpenOffice SFxApplication Bug

While working with OpenOffice 2.4 I found an interesting bug. When I would export a document to PDF the equation editor would randomly replace numbers with their Arabic equivalent. Since 2.4 is an old version I decided to upgrade to 3.1. After waiting for the download I discovered that when I tried to install it there were many inter-related dependancies that were not met. I solved this by doing a dpkg -i *.deb from the downloaded directory. This appeared to work until I tried to run it from /opt/openoffice.org3/. I was given an error about SFx Application iso or something. Luckily that bug had already been reported but apparently it hasn't been fixed. I found the solution in the OpenOffice.org QA section.

After doing a dpk -i on the following files everything appears to work fine.

• dpk -i ooobasis-*-binfilter*.deb
• dpk -i openoffice.org3-en-*.deb
• dpk -i openoffice.org3-ure*.deb

The issue may be related to the fact that 2.4 has not been uninstalled.

Firefox Speedup on Linux

Here is a neat little trick that I found at TomBuntu to increase the speed of reads and writes to the cache for Firefox under Linux. There are many other tips relating to SSD drives but I found this one could be used with any system.

"Firefox puts its cache in your home partition. By moving this cache in RAM you can speed up Firefox and reduce disk writes. Complete the previous tweak to mount /tmp in RAM, and you can put the cache there as well.

Open about:config in Firefox. Right click in an open area and create a new string value called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. Set the value to /tmp."

Found at TomBuntu