So, how am I dealing with the switch? Surprisingly well. I’m thoroughly enjoying the interface of the new OS– Linux Mint 10 (“Julia”) is beautifully designed. My main concern was that finding replacements for favourite and often-used Windows programs would be something of a challenge, but so far so good.

Here are my suggestions for replacement or equivalent software alternatives for academics making the switch from Windows to Linux:

Happily, Firefox runs wonderfully in Linux (hurrah for open source!). I’d miss my plugins, especially customized searches for Google Scholar, WorldCat, and Wikipedia.

There are some interesting Linux-compatible programs in development right now that hold potential for academics switching to Linux. I’ll be keeping a keen eye on updates for the following:

Zotero Standalone
“We are excited to announce the alpha release of standalone Zotero, part of the larger Zotero Everywhere project. Standalone Zotero Alpha does not require Firefox to run and is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.”

Scrivener for Linux
“Scrivener isn’t meant to replace OpenOffice Writer for dedicated word processing needs but rather for help in ‘structuring and writing those difficult first drafts of long texts such as novels, scripts and thesis’.”

LyX-Outline
“LyX-Outline is a forthcoming add-on to the popular document processor, LyX, that will give it many of the same features as the writing tool, Scrivener. This add-on is a recognition that writing is about more than just plugging away at a piece of prose until it is finished. It’s also about tracking down loose ends, trying to visualize structure, and avoiding as many dead-ends as possible. In a word, it’s about getting from first to final draft by the quickest route possible, which may not necessarily be a straight line.”

This post by Cal Newport is entitled How Do the Best Professors Work?, and tries to demystify the structure of a working day of some productive scholars.

The take-away message that I found most helpful was the idea of The 3 + 2 Graduate Student Work Week:

a) Designate one day each week to be your Administrative Nonsense Day

Spend this entire day taking care of any work on your plate that doesn’t directly connect to the task of conducting research and writing research papers. This is when I fill out forms, return library books, hand in reimbursement paperwork, call the cable guy, and add new publications to my web site. You get the idea…

b) Designate one day each week to be your Big Idea Day

Spend this entire day doing literature search and brainstorming on that research project you’ve always day-dreamed about, but have been to afraid to mention to your advisor. If you don’t set aside this time, you will get stuck in the rut of happenstance papers — the projects you fall into out of convenience or advisorial coercion. This work is fine. It’s how you earn your research stripes. But some time along the way you have to be fighting to make your own mark.

c) Use the Other Three Days to Get Your Normal Work Done

Most of what we do as graduate students is working on various stages of the paper-writing process. This spans cleaning up numbers in Excel to editing the related work section of a journal submission. Use these three days to get this work done. Because you isolated the administrative nonsense on another day, you might be surprised by how much gets accomplished in just 60% of the week. I like to make my Admin Day on Monday and my Big Idea Day on Friday, so this work can happen consecutively in the middle of the week; but preferences differ here.That’s it. A simple structure. But sometimes it’s the simplest changes that yield the most consistent results over time. This approach, of course, gets complicated by classes, group meetings, and collaborators who don’t know about (or, frankly care) that a certain day is your big idea day. So it will never apply perfectly. But even the attempt can make a difference…

[from How Do the Best Professors Work? ]

In the discussion following, commenter mom suggests an alternative, though similar, type of time-grouping:

Great in theory, except that administrative nonsense doesn’t behave sometimes… I am a young prof at an R1 and I save 3-5pm, my least productive time of the day, for administrivia, coffee mtgs, etc. I’m on leave so now I do it 5x a week, but when teaching I do it 3x a week, and have office hours on the other days during the same slot.

This approach is supported by a recent post over at Signal vs. Noise, 37signals’ blog (the makers of my beloved Backpack!):

And the primary observation that comes out of all this is that multitasking is the fastest way to mediocrity. Things suck when you don’t give them your full attention.

I’m not thrilled with the work I’ve been doing lately.

This isn’t a breakthrough, it’s just a reminder. If you want to do great work, focus on one thing at a time. Finish it and move on to the next thing.

[from Multitasking is the fastest way to mediocrity ]

So: divide, time-block, conquer… and theoretically have weekends free. Sounds good; let’s see if this works.

I did some prowling through a very useful list of Linux apps to see if the functionality of the most important academic programs could be duplicated in Linux.

Referencer
PDF Manager, Citation/Bibliography Manager
Replacement for: Yep, Papers, EndNote

gPapers
PDF Manager, Citation/Bibliography Manager
Replacement for: iPapers, Papers

KeepNote
Note-taking software
Replacement for: EverNote, OneNote

BasKet
Note-taking software
Replacement for: EverNote, OneNote, UltraRecall

Alexandria
Book-cataloguing software
Replacement for: Delicious Library, Books, Book Collector

A couple of cross-platform programs to remember if you’re considering making the switch: Zotero works on Linux, as does Mendeley.

Addendum: Some bonus Linux software links from helpful commenter Xonan!

Zim
A desktop wiki under constant development

Okular
PDF reader with highlight and commentary features

cb2bib
Extracts bibtex data from the clipboard, PDFs, etc

kdissert/semantik
Mindmapping software

Argunet
Java software for building argumentation maps

Integrate Zotero with gedit
Plugin for gedit text editor that allows to add citations from the Zotero bibliography manager to LaTeX documents

Thanks, Xonan!

I thought I’d found the answer to all my PDF organization needs when I stumbled across Fluxiom. This online file management/DAM solution offers the ability to upload, tag, and search files from any computer to a hosted account.

I thought that it could be a good centralized solution to DevonThink for those of us on Windows, with the added bonus of being available from any computer. Sort of like a personal Google Books.

When I saw the price, I’ll admit that I winced a bit. Nine euros for the lowest-level plan seemed a little steep. However, the site design is amazing, and the functionality seemed well worth the price.

The About page boasts that Fluxiom provides “Full text search: Fast search inside documents like PDF, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and others.”

However… once I scrolled down to the bottom of the Overview page, I discovered to my dismay that only the Basic (29 euros/month), Pro (89 euros/month), and Deluxe (169 euros/month) plans offer the full-text search feature.

For me, the full-text search within documents was the major selling feature. And 29 euros a month is rather a stretch for any academic budget. The 9 euros I might be able to justify to myself, but 29 is a bit much…

Do any readers have an alternative online PDF organizer they’d like to share? (Or does anyone have any friends at Fluxiom who we could sweet-talk into providing full-text search on the Private-level plan?)

Helpful Guides for Writing a Dissertation

How to plan a daily schedule for a dissertation?

Dealing with Academic Writer’s Block

Thesis Writer’s Block

How do I write a thesis?

The longer you stay in academia, the more conferences that you’ll go to. Some are a chore, wedged into the most inopportune times in the semester– however, that winter conference in Hawaii would make up for it in theory, surely…

Michael Nielsen offers some tips specifically aimed at academic travellers, entitled Optimizing travel 2.0.

Daniel Lemire provides a great list of conference-related advice, including “Why you might not want to go to a conference”, “Where to submit your papers”, and “Things to do during the conference”: Conference Travel Tips.

More generally, OneBag.com and Lifehacker offer some advice on how to pack as lightly as possible (the airline can’t lose your bag if you don’t check it…).

Mike over at Getting Things Done in Academia suggests that we should all cultivate our 24-hour buddies.

He’s not advocating incredibly short-term friendships. No, he’s making the case for creating a group of academics (preferably with different specialties) who are willing to read and informally review each other’s papers on with a 24-hour turnaround. It sounds like a great idea to get speedy feedback and light a fire under yourself when necessary.

Cultivating your 24-hour buddies
[ from Getting Things Done in Academia ]

I’ve been looking for a lightweight outliner program to handle my piece-meal thesis work. I discovered Maple, which seems to be what I was looking for, from this list of outliner programs for Windows.

It lets me organize my writing into manageable sections, then easily work on each once I have the sources at hand. Also, I can export the tree as a flat file in doc, txt, html, or rtf.

In my ideal world, it would have support for footnotes or endnotes, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Maple
By Crystal Office Systems
Free 30-day trial, $21.95 US to buy

Send yourself text messages (for free) at prescheduled times. Good for remembering meetings, tasks, and so forth, if you don’t have a PDA.

Oh, Don’t Forget…
[ via Lifehacker ]

The Carnival of GRADual Progress is a monthly roundup of blog posts of interest to grad students. Hosted at a different academic blog every month, the posts range from helpful to simply hilarious.

There are six carnivals so far:
1st Carnival
2nd Carnival
3rd Carnival
4th Carnival
5th Carnival
6th Carnival

Warning: to be approached with extreme caution. Definite time-sucker.