8 Ways to Sunday

Google Scholar — a new Google service currently in beta — uses the power of Google to search scholarly literature. From the about page:

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Man, where was this when I was in college?

(Props: SEB, via ***Dave)

I was loving the new version of Photoshop Elements, except for one little problem — I couldn’t save.

Turns out that Photoshop Elements 3.0 is incompatible with QuickGamma, a program I recommended earlier this year. Uninstalling QuickGamma fixed the problem, and now my gamma-correction needs are being fulfilled by the excellent Adobe Gamma (included with PSE3).

For those who don’t use PSE3, I still recommend QuickGamma. It’s pretty good at what it does and, unlike Adobe Gamma, it’s free. The makers of QuickGamma also have a new monitor profiling program called QuickMonitorProfile available. Between the two, you can get a decent color-managed workflow going on a budget.

If you’re serious about color management, however, I recommend springing for a professional-grade monitor profiling kit like ColorVision’s excellent Spyder. It comes in several flavors for casual, advanced, and professional users. Prices as of this writing range from $119 to $299.

Over the last four days, while I was busy playing Half-Life 2, this weblog was hit with one of the worst spam attacks it has ever endured. Over six hundred spam comments were left, but I only ended up having to manually delete 61 of them. I have Kitten’s Spaminator, a WordPress plugin, to thank for this.

As far as I’m concerned, Spaminator is the anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It’s at least as good as Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist for Movable Type — possibly even better. If you have a WP blog, get this plugin. Period.