Portable Dropbox, SD/USB Card, and Dropbox Upload/Download by Dragging

First item. I finally find a good Portable Dropbox program. Discussions on the program on the Dropbox forum is located here: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=33387. The program can be downloaded at http://nionsoftware.com/dbpahk/.

This program does not require administrator access, so you can install it on your school lab computers. It also allows you to sync to a removable media like a USB flash drive or a SD card.

As I have started carrying a SD/USB card in my wallet with my work files, the Portable Dropbox program allows me to sync the files between my card and my other computers elsewhere. (Yes, that’s right – a SD card with the USB interface build-in: SanDisk Ultra II SD Plus 2GB Card.) Having access to standard Dropbox features like rolling back to older versions is great also. That way, I can do work on any of the school computer labs instead of always having to carry my laptop, know that my files are backed up and automatically sync to my other computers. Now, I just need to run the program when I start working at the lab computers.

As a side note, I want to reiterate how awesome my SD/USB card is. It fits in my wallet, can go in my camera, and can also go in to any computers that takes USB. Sadly, SanDisk doesn’t seem to make higher capacity versions of it.

Second item: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=1116. Dropbox now allows dragging files from your operating system (like windows explorer or even your desktop) into your browser to upload files. Previously, you would need to open a dialog box to specific the file to upload. From my test, the Dropbox website now lets you upload files as well as download files. To download, just dragging files from your web browser to windows explorer (or your desktop).

Dropbox Can Now Pause/Resume Sync

Noticed just yesterday that Dropbox finally allows the user to pause synchronizing. Why would one want to do this?  Try running Matlab and saving your MAT file each time you go through a loop.

Dropbox locks the file while it syncs so that other programs cannot access the file. So if Matlab saves to a file very quickly and repeatedly (say because you are running regressions for daily data and saving the daily coefficients), then your Matlab program will fail. This is because Dropbox prevents Matlab from saving to the file, thus causing an error in your program.

To pause/resume sync, left click the Dropbox icon on the task bar, and select “Pause syncing.”

Unlock secure PDF documents for Commenting

Mentioned previously, I use PDF-XChange Viewer as my PDF viewing and markup program.  By markup, I mean highlighting and commenting on papers for future reference.  Couple that with the ability of Google Desktop or Windows Search Service, and I have a system where I can find many things easily. 

When I come across locked PDFs that do not allow for commenting (or copying text) and I really really want to comment for future reference, I use the free service provided by the website FreeMyPDF.com to unlock the file.  To give you an idea of the type of things that a PDF can restrict you from doing, see the image of the “Document Properties…” dialog box from PDF-XChange Viewer here:

The FreeMyPDF.com site has a simple interface that allows you to update a file.  Just a text box and a browse button allowing you to specify the location of the PDF.

Almost immediately after you finish uploading the file, the website will prompt you to download the unlocked version.  There are other sites that does the similar thing (nitroPDF for example), and also other ways to do it (using pdf2ps and ps2pdf in Linux).  But this works for me and it’s simple.  Here is an example of the type of commenting I like to do:

As a side note, while this is perfectly fine for academic papers that you download from the web, you would not want to upload a locked PDF of a treasure map given the public nature of the site just so that you can print it out.

Using PDF-XChange to Organize Papers

By the third year of your PhD program, you will be reading an average of at least a paper a week, if not many many more. There are a lot of information in these papers, and like any data set, and organization is needed to make effective use of them. PDF-XChange Viewer is a free tool that helps a great deal in accomplishing this goal.

PDF-Xchange Viewer is a free PDF viewing program that allows commenting on the PDF document, which the free Adobe Reader does not. The benefit of doing so, if you can get use to reading extensively from computer monitors, is enormous. Storing PDFs in your laptop frees you from carrying all those papers, and will save you years of back pain and medical bills in the future.

Furthermore, if you use Vista, the ability to search the text of the PDF papers all over your hard disk using Microsoft Windows Search makes looking up a paper easy. (Google desktop would do the same and runs on Vista and XP) Imagine trying to recall the author of a paper on bounding a utility function away from negative infinity in the midst of a discussion, searching for "bound utility" returns a list of papers containing those words and helps you find that person. The author I'm thinking of is Chad Jones, as you can see from the second visible result from the picture below. As you might notice from the picture, Windows search also looks through my OneNote notes.

The last feature I want to highlight is the availability of a portable version, which means the program works with no installation required. You simply unzip the program somewhere in your computer, and it will run. This is very useful when you have a campus account that doesn't allow for installation of programs.

The notable missing feature versus Adobe Reader 9 is the lack of a text reading feature, but that can be be remedied with other programs. The software maker also have paid versions with more features - but sadly, I need that money for ramen.

More information on the program can be found on the product page here.

EDIT: Here is a much more detail review of the current PDF-XChange version (as of July 27, 2010)