If you’re making citations in a scientific document and use LaTeX for building it, you might have trouble finding the correct BibTeX-citations. Google Scholar is the tool you need in this case. Here you can search all the literature you might use.

If you have logged in with your google-account, you’ll find a bibliography-manager in the Scholar-preferences. Here you can choose to add links to all found literature that lets you export BibTeX, EndNote or whatever format you need.

Have fun citing!

About one or two month ago I decided that I would try to blog and twitter in english, in order to let my text be undestood by everyone. But how does it feel after all?

First thing I recognized is a decrease in comments and answers to me, as most of my readers / followers are german. So, if you’re deciding to switch to english, you should explicitely tell everyone that they still can answer / comment / reply to you in german. YOU MAY COMMENT IN GERMAN EVERYONE! :-D Otherwise some who are not so sure of their language skills might just decide its too hard to translate their thoughts to english. And nobody wants that.

Second thing I realized that you need to change some META-Tags, as you’ll most likely will have defined your site / (micro)blog to be a german one.

Third thing is that my english skills didn’t improve too much during this time, but I think they’re pretty good anyways. Well - you at least practice a bit.

Forth thing … you can see a world-map on the right with approximate locations of my readers. Since I changed to english, there are readers all over the world, but I definitely also lost some readers here in germany.

Fifth thing is one that bugs me … I still have the .de-Domain thats for german sites. The .com site isn’t free anymore, so this some kind of ****s.

After all, it feels good. I’ve got a free and open mind and I think I don’t write about too much local stuff, so why not train my english a bit? I don’t believe the money-making-blog-hype anyways. Did you also think about writing in english in your blog instead of your local language? Or do you use a multilanguage system? Please comment (you can also comment in german)! ;-)

Small fun for free: The Superhero Factory makes a superhero of your choice. Saw this here. Try it out.

Just tried out the FOAF-File-Maker and put the resulting FOAF-File it on my blog. So if someones out there using that stuff and knowing me, set a link to http://www.ithoughts.de/foaf.rdf … thanks :-)

Just for those who don’t know: FOAF means Friend-of-aFriend and is a technical way to express your friendship and personal info on the semantic web. As more and more services spider the web for such info, I just put it up … perhaps you’ll be able to register to websites with just pointing to your FOAF-File.

This article refers to an article I wrote while this blog still blogged in german, therefore it’s partly english, partly german. In my latest Blogparade I asked for interesting citations and the thoughts that people connect them to. I’ll present some nice quotations here and will finally announce the winner of this small little contest, who’ll get linked with a button in my blogroll (called links).

Dieser Artikel ist halb-deutsch und halb-englisch, weil er sich auf einen deutschen Artikel bezieht und daher auch vor allem deutsche Antworten bekam. Ich stelle hier einige Zitate vor und küre einen Sieger, der mit einem Button in meiner Blogroll (die hier Links heisst) permanent verlinkt wird.

rhetorikblog.com

Ein kluger Spruch, der auch zu diesem Blog passt, und zu allem, was ich gerne allen Menschen mitgeben möchte. Allerdings halte ich den Spruch für wenig einprägsam. Da kommt mir eher ein Spruch aus einem Shadowrun-Band in den Kopf, der soähnlich klingt: “Lebe und lerne, stirb und vergiß. Es sei denn, du bist ein Expertensystem.” (bei Shadowrun gehts um Science-Fiction und einen Haufen kybernetischer Implantate)

“Ich lerne vom Leben. Ich lerne solange ich lebe. So lerne ich noch heute.” Otto von Bismarck

“Man muss nicht alles wissen, nur wissen wo es steht.”

“Frisch begonnen ist halb gewonnen.”

www.shredder-blog.com

Zu diesem Post kann man nicht viel sagen, wenn der Autor einen Backlink wollte und sonst nix (da einfach ein Zitat hingeknallt wurde): Bitteschön! Das Zitat allerdings halte ich für nicht schlecht, denn oftmals ist das was in einer Situation angebracht wäre zu sagen nicht wirklich aussprechbar, weil man evtl. jemanden damit vor den Kopf stoßen könnte. Es dann als lustigen Einwurf zu formulieren ist dann gleich viel besser, und man dringt im Nachhinein vielleicht doch bei dem Adressaten mit dem Gesagten ins Gehirn.

„Was man ernst meint, sagt man am besten im Spaß.“ Wilhelm Busch

http://www.kulalu.de/blogparade-zitate-und-gedanken.html

Hier wird ein geflügeltes Wort auseinandergenommen, dass sich auf einen Film bezieht. Es geht daraum, dass der Autor Ferien vom Ich weiter interpretieren möchte, als “nur” aus seiner Arbeitswelt auszubrechen.

“Ferien vom Ich”

www.modersohn-magazin.de

Die hier beschriebenen Kommentare sind sehr speziell und auf Berlin bezogen. Hier eine kleine Kostprobe:

„Berlin – Ich fühle mich hier ein bißchen wie in Südfrankreich. Ich habe immer das Gefühl, ich müßte gleich an den Strand gehen.“  Herbert Grönemeyer

“Vor Gott sind eigentlich alle Menschen Berliner.” Theodor Fontane

Uri-Geller-Blog (in den Kommentaren):

“Die Wahrheit, das ist etwas Schönes und Schreckliches und sollte daher mit großer Umsicht behandelt werden.” (Albus Dumbledore aus Harry Potter)

www.utele.eu

Diese Bewerbung kam als letztes rein und die hat mich auch am meisten begeistert. Jedes der folgenden Zitate trifft einiges auf den Kopf: Leben ist nicht planbar; Menschen sind nicht so wie sie im Fernsehen dargestellt werden (was zwar jedem klar ist, aber wogegen sich trotzdem die meisten Mensch unterbewußt nicht wehren können); das dritte Zitat sollte sich jeder Entscheidungsträger in einem Softwareprojekt zehnmal durchlesen und bitte übers Bett hängen; und das letzte hier aufgeführte Zitat ist natürlich auch super.

“Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.” John Lennon

“There are three billion women in the world who don’t look like supermodels and only eight who do.” Anita Roddick

“Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning.”

“Killing for peace is like f*cking for virginity.”

Der Sieger steht also fest: www.Utele.eu! Sehr bald wirst du dich in meiner Blogroll wiederfinden :-) … hier noch ein paar Zitate zum Abschluss - Nachdenken ist immer erwünscht:

“There are only 10 different types of people - those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

“Das höchste Zeichen von Intelligenz ist der Zweifel.” Francois Mauriac

“Es gibt nur ein Anzeichen von Weisheit: gute Laune.” Michel de Montaigne

“Ob ein Mensch klug ist, erkennt man viel besser an seinen Fragen als an seinen Antworten.” François-Gaston duc de Lévis

Underworld is a GPS-Based trading game available for iPhone via cydia after jailbreak (… well at least its free there). You play a drug dealer and begin with some of those drugs and a loan you got from a loan-shark. You can set a price for the stuff you’re selling (which is viagra, weed or peyote) and see every other offer that exists within a certain range around you (you can also watch this on a google-map). Surprisingly, a lot of people seem to play it.

This seems really easy, but it isn’t. I didn’t really understand why people pay for that virtual stuff, as I don’t think there are any virtual comsumers. Anyways, if your price is right people will buy your stuff and sometimes, people will sell things too cheap and you can buy that stuff and sell it higher. If you’re willing to spend some money, you can buy upgrades. These can upgrade the amount of stuff you can carry, highten the range of your trade area, give you a better police evasion and enable you to trade ney illegal items. The makers of the game a-steroids are also working on new features and you can vote for them in game.

Playing tips, guides or hints which strategy to use online is not really found (the game’s name was drug lords but changed as they try to get it in the appstore). Therefore, I’ll sum up what I have learned during my first two weeks:

- Don’t take more loans. They always take back more money than they give and you should just pay it off and make money yourself, otherwise you’ll end like my first character. As soon as I couldn’t pay a rate, the amount of money you owe to the shark is doubled.

- You’ll need at least level 1 police protection before dealing weed. Otherwise your deal mitght be cought by the police and you loose the drugs or the money.

- I’d advise to take levels in trade area, as more people in your area means more nice cheap goods to get over time. I began my second character with spending 300$ on my area range.

- Use the game in at least two different locations. When you’re at work / at home, there’ll be different prices and you can make profit. You could also take a ride through your city while you have a lot of carry space left, to buy all the cheap stuff that gets mostly traded my new players and make a nice profit.

- Hope you don’t have a cheater around. Its not impossible to cheat at that game, but I can’t do it and I won’t also tell you how to do it :-)

Have fun!

A twitter-security-bug just makes it’s way around the globe as you ready this. A Tweet appears with the text:

Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6

If you click it, you’ll tweet the same message to twitter. So: REALLY DO NOT CLICK IT! Twitter says they are working on it!

UPDATE: My computer just crashed, 5 minutes after clicking the link … seems to be coincidence though ;-)

UPDATE 2: The tiny url that spread the link was killed. The exploiters of the bug could change the script on their site though to provide another link, but if they don’t react, their exploit is down for now and the tweeted links so far will not work anymore. Remember though that its not hard for them to make the trick work again.

UPDATE 3: The trick worked through click-jacking. There are a lot of malicious websites out there, usually you’ll get warned by your browser if the site youre going to is officially know as malicious site. TinyURL and other URL-shortening services undermine this security concept. Unfortunally, using this with twitter might find a lot of copycats, especially as the code for the site was easily available and can easily be used on any site.