New USM Thesis LaTeX Class Files

I just uploaded the new USM Thesis LaTeX class files (usmthesis 1.2) at http://liantze.googlepages.com/latextypesetting#usmthesis, to be compatible with the new thesis guidelines effective from Dec 16 2007 onwards.

Major changes:

• Body font is now Times Roman for serif type, Helvetica for sans serif type, and TX Typewriter for typewriter font.
• Bottom page margin increased to 4.0cm.
• Page number now placed 1.0cm from bottom edge of paper.
• All text on title page are now in bold.
• Title of bibliography/references is now "REFERENCES".
• Introduced new "plate" float and "List of Plates".
• List of Publications is now moved to after appendices.
• Re-formatting of the table of contents:
• all text are unformatted (chapter headings are neither in bold nor using larger font size
• otted leader between titles and page number
• larger separation between (sub)section numbers and titles to resemble the sample in the guidelines more closely
• Fixed bug in definition of \chapter to honour short title in \chapter[short title]{full title}

Enjoy!

(p/s I've yet to blog about our recent participation in the 11th International Conference on Translation in KL... I wonder if I'll ever get round to it?)

New Google Themes

You now have another 5 new delicious themes for your Google personalised page! Here I'm using the Hong Kong theme. Enjoy!

Drunken Kitten

Still under effect of a sedation after visiting a vet. (S)he's such a cuuuuute lil' kitty... nak cubit...

LocoRoco: Yellow Rolly Ball of (Weird) Cuteness

I can't possibly find the appropriate words to adequately describe this game. It'd be best if you watch the promotional trailer and experience the demo yourself instead:

That's... creative, dear

I might consider having kids if I could get away with this >:-D

Although, my husband and our parents are unlikely to concur...

天野喜孝 Yoshitaka Amano and Sandman

I've always been fascinated with Yoshitaka Amano's（天野喜孝） artwork, especially his illustrative work. He's greatly known for his character design for the Final Fantasy series, and also (perhaps not so greatly known) for the Gatchaman anime series (a.k.a. G-Force, soon to be a motion picture... erk. I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to that, though.)

To the joy of fantasy fans everywhere, Amano collaborated with Neil Gaiman to produce a Sandman graphic novel, "Dream Hunters" (1999). The story is actually a re-telling of a Japanese legend/story, set in Heian-era Japan (or so I think, since Onmyouji 阴阳师 and "classical" Japanese supernatural beings figures largely in the plot) -- which makes Amano's flowing style rather relevant. There's something Klimt-ish about his work in "Dream Hunters".

Gaiman's clever style here could've fooled me into thinking that this was something translated directly from a Japanese source! (Well, it is a re-telling of a Japanese story but still, I'm really happy that he took this approach instead of "Westernising" it. :p)

歌神降临

歌神降临，雨神助威！（还是来搞局的？一开场灯光一暗下就马上下雨……）

两个字，过瘾！（虽然学友的感冒还是有少许影响……）经典歌还是占了大部分啊。快歌也不少。招牌的兰花指全场没少过。“发癫”又如何？我们陪你癫过！比起新加坡人来，大马人还是比较癫的。（不然也不会有敢死队胆粗粗跑去关仔角等看海啸，真是服了。这个我就不敢陪各位敢死英雄癫。）

还要再来哦！（但算我怕了 KL 的神经交通……）

Ladybirds Red and Bamboo Leaves Green

(Well, I'm sorry that my garden is so boring, I'm sure...)

English-Malay Translation Google Gadget

So I was bored (or having a writer/researcher's block, depressed to tears, too busy P-ing, no research inspirations, whatever). So I decided to try writing a Google Gadget for UTMK's EBMT solution:



Basically, it's a "lite" version of our research group's example-based machine translation solution (read: a Universal Translator in the making). For the moment it supports English-Malay (both directions) translation, and we still have whole tons of ideas for improving its speed, accuracy, coverage etc.

I tried submitting the Google Gadget to the public searchable Directory, but apparently there's an approval process, so it doesn't show up yet. Meanwhile if you'd like to add it to your personalised Google homepage, you'll have to add the gadget by its URL: http://liantze.googlepages.com/utmk-ebmt.xml

Stay tuned!

UTMK Open Day + Didier's Farewell Party

Goooood I'm still feeling dead tired after our mini-expo and Didier's farewell party on Thursday...

I don't think I can write anything about it yet, too physically/emotionally draining, so hop along to Hussein's take on it, or take a look at the photo slideshow:



All pics were taken by either Hussein or Kak Azimah, which are also on my Picasa Web Album:

UTMK Open Day + Didier's Farewell Party

Come back again soon and often if you can, Didier!

Generating JPGs and PNGs from Tikz/PGF

Gem of a post found at Nabble.com:

Re: Generating PNG or JPG ?

by Kjell Magne Fauske Mar 23, 2007; 02:47am

On 3/22/07, Hari Sundar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is it possible to generate images from tikz code ? I would like to put these
> images on a webpage and was wondering if there is an automatic way of
> generating the images rather than taking screenshots.
>

Sure, I do it every time I update the gallery I maintain at
http://www.fauskes.net/pgftikzexamples/

My approach is to use Ghostscript. Lets say I have a tex file named
figure.tex The work flow is approximately like this:

> pdflatex figure.tex

I then run ghostscript on the generated file figure.pdf to generate a PNG:

> gs -dNOPAUSE -r400 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=figure.png -dBATCH figure.pdf

(On Windows the command is gswin32c. )

>From the resulting PNG file I generate a jpg thumbnail.

To crop the figures I use a package called preview[1]. The package
provides several ways of previewing parts of your document. For
example, adding this to your document preamble:

\usepackage[active,tightpage]{preview}
\PreviewEnvironment{tikzpicture}

will extract every tikzpicture environment. If you use pdflatex, every
tikzpicture will be put on a separate page in the resulting pdf
document. To add a margin around the figure add:

\setlength\PreviewBorder{10pt}%

[1] http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/preview.html


Regards,
Kjell Magne Fauske

People are downloading my stuff!

OMIGOSH, people are actually starting to download my LaTeX scribblings! *tears of joy*

That people wanted the workshop slides are expected; anyway the colloquium committee put up a copy at their website too. Surprisingly the LaTeX installation walkthrough for Windows is the most sought-after file now! And the Absolute Beginner short guide! And the USMthesis style files!!

w00t!!

LaTeX Workshop Delivered

I'm still catching my breath after giving the LaTeX workshop on Tuesday (26th June). Talked non-stop for 1 hour 20 minutes and I still had several things I couldn't cover in time, especially demonstrating on-the-spot how an ACM conference paper can be produced from a default article document class, and show a few pages from the USMthesis package, etc.

The audience (20~30 people including both lecturers and postgrad students) seems to have liked the talk, and although I don't have any proper feedback data, here are some comments passed to me after the talk:

• people have heard of LaTeX before, but have no idea how it's used.
• people have heard of the wonderful "beautiful" outputs of LaTeX, but until I showed them a side-by-side comparison of output from LaTeX and Word, they had no idea what kind of "beautiful" output people meant.
• people wanted to try LaTeX before, but didn't know what to install.
• although I told them that some features like auto-generation of table of contents are also available in Word, people actually told me that they know about the feature in Word but "it's too hard to use", whereas in LaTeX one line of code will definitely get it done.

The fact that the Colloquium programme book was created with LaTeX (I helped the committee to do it within 2 days) helped convinced the audience with physical proof of what LaTeX can do...

Maybe within the next week or two, I'll get more comments and feedback via e-mail, or something. But at least now I've managed to raise some interest here...

Vector Graphics Application with LaTeX PGF/Tikz

I simply must blog this before I go off for a meeting. Nicola Talbot has written a vector graphics program, JpgfDrawing, that can export to LaTeX code that renders the graphics using the Tikz/PGF package. PGF is used in the Beamer package, and I played with Tikz while preparing for the LaTeX workshop. It's the best drawing package for use with pdflatex I've encountered so far. (I'm not a fan of PS files, so I don't use PSTricks much, sorry.)

Making booklets

So I was asked to help produce the program/abstract book for the CSPC'07 (Postgrad Colloquium) with LaTeX. I said Yes since here's a legitimate opportunity to get my LaTeX fix. ;-)

The end result was to be an A5-sized booklet, i.e. 2-up pages on an A4 sheet, folded. I tried the LaTeX booklet package, but it wouldn't play nice with the geometry package, not without me twiddling explicitly with the page sizes and margins. Dear, dear./>
Thank goodness for GNU/Linux though, since we can always use psutils for producing booklets, and we want PDF outputs anyway. And so, once the full-sized A4 abstractbook.pdf is done, these commands spring into action:

$ pdftops -paper A4 abstractbook.pdf abstractbook.ps
$ psbook -s40 abstractbook.ps absbook-sig.ps
$ psnup -n2 -pa4 absbook-sig.ps abstractbooklet.ps
$ ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 abstractbooklet.ps


where the -s40 parameter to psbook signifies there should be 40 pages in the booklet. The number must be a multiple of 4. It doesn't matter if your full-size doc doesn't have the right number of pages; psbook will add blank pages as necessary, so just round up your actual page number to the next multiple of 4 to pass to psbook.

TA-DAAAAA!!!!




It was a learning experience especially the following points:

• Do not be a smart-aleck and try to reset page numberings when making twoside documents. Let \frontmatter and \bodymatter do the job. Otherwise the odd/even page margins get all messed up.
  
• Use the ltxtable package for longtable + tabularx. But then each longtable (with tabularx column specs) needs to be in its own individual file.
  
• On the whole, LaTeX is relatively easier than
  
  • coaxing printers to co-operate.
    
  • proof-reading.
    
  • proof-reading.
    
  • ESPECIALLY the proof-reading.
    

Note to Self

秀萍当妈妈了！

Cynthia's a very close friend from my A-level and Warwick days. She's the kind of person that takes on life's challenges head-on, and I admire her greatly for that. So when she and Andrew (another Warwick coursemate!) got married, I was no end happy for them, and especially for Cyn.

Now they're proud parents of little Joelle Chow! She was born 9th June, 2007 at Royal Free Hospital, London. O joyous day, congratulations Andrew and Cynthia and little Joelle!

tex4ht

曾经好玩地尝试了 latex2html, HeVeA, TtH 等等。简单的 LaTeX 文件是没问题啦，都可以生成不错的 HTML，但若有特别的宏包、自己定义的指令，那就非常对不起了。（其中 TtH 的速度还真不是普通的快！）

最近发现了 tex4ht，似乎还没有什么可以难倒它的！皆因它会先生成一个 .dvi 文件，再从这个文件生成 HTML, OpenDocument 等其他格式。默认的 HTML 是有点丑啦，但可以自己定义 CSS 或其他设置来改善。最重要的是，啥宏包（或是自己定义）的指令都可以处理哦。

起初是有个小疑问：我已习惯了 \includegraphics{file} （即不写明 file extension），结果 tex4ht 就老是要找 .eps 文件……而我又不想改动成 file.eps 那么累赘，还真花了不少时间在网上搜索。最后终于找到解决方法。先要一个 myconfig.cfg 文件：

\Preamble{html}
\DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.jpg,.png,.eps,.pdf}
\begin{document}
\EndPreamble

然后运行（基本指令，当然还可以加上其他配置值）

htlatex myfile "myconfig"

就可以了。

The Rage with Patents

Why this obsession with patents? Why? Patents for industrial and engineering designs, I understand. But patents for algorithms and software procedures and computer applications?

Maybe I should have become a lawyer like my dad secretly wished (before he realised-- happily, I think -- I had a bigger knack for maths and such).

Well here's what Computer Science's Yoda (that's what he is to me) has to say about software patents: Prof Donald Knuth's 1994 Letter to the Patent Office.

ProTeXt 2.0 is out!

After... what was it? 2 years? There's finally a new version of ProTeXt! It features MikTeX 2.5, TeXnicCenter Greengrass and TeXMaker (w00t! I loved it on Debian! Still not quite sure how it fares against TeXnicCenter on Windoze though)!

It seems though that localtexmf is no longer supported under MikTeX 2.5, apparently it provides other ways of configuring user's own TEXMF trees. We'll see how that works out, but I definitely need to get up to speed with this for the LaTeX workshop.

Well, download time.

LaTeX Workshop!

I got an invitation from Dr Dhanesh to conduct a LaTeX tutorial/workshop for the upcoming Postgraduate Co*******m! (Sorry, still some repressed memories from 3 years back there.)

The initial idea was to give a tutorial on using my usmthesis LaTeX template. But then we realised that the available slot is only 1 hour, and it's hardly practical to assume the audience having prior knowledge about LaTeX. (Now that's a vision, don't you think?)

So by today, Dr Dhanesh suggested to keep it as an "Introduction to LaTeX" walkthrough, and only talk briefly about the thesis template if we have enough time.

Boy, I am rather thrilled about this. I hope I'll be able carry it off.

VladStudio Wallpapers

Vladstudio.com 依然是我最喜欢的网络艺术家。他的笔触有种温暖的油灯感觉，又像冬天的晚上等着你回家的壁炉里的火焰……当然，更过瘾的是他还时常恶搞名画及网络2.0。

Bash commands and scripts

I love Bash shell commands and scripts. Really, I do. Where would I be without all them one-liners to *bang* *zip* process those huge dictionary text files in less than 5 seconds?

Except that sometimes I need 30 minutes to look for an obscure option and how to use it exactly to get the result I want.

For instance, sort is cool. It sorts lines so fast no spreadsheet application is worth a second, nay, even a first thought. Heck, it even ferrets out unique lines calmly!

Then I have this file, which is all fields of numbers, e.g.

1   1    0    0    0
1   2    2    0    2
...

And I needed it to be sorted by the first field, then the second. Running plain sort on it gave me

1     1     0     0    0
1    10     0    10   10
1    11     ...
...
1  1921   ...
1     2      ...

OK, so it's not seeing the numbers as numbers, it's seeing them as ASCII strings. A man page look-up later, I tried sort -n. Then sort -k, then with both options. To no avail. Time to Google.

30 minutes of surfing later, I finally found this nugget of an example that did the trick:

sort -k 1n,1 -k 2n,2

See, you have to state explicitly (via -k) that the first key starts and ends at field 1, and to treat it as a number, and repeat it with field 2 (or any other fields you'd like to use as the sort key) as well.

I love Bash commands.

Sumatra PDF Viewer

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/

Finally -- a PDF Viewer on Windows that supports document reloading! No more wrangling with Acrobat Reader DDE commands during TeXnicCenter + pdfLaTeX!

当研究生们开始脑筋不正常

点题！当大家都开始被无理的压力搞得疯疯癫癫，这就是咱的研究室的下场！


我们非常极之迫切需要一个出气筒，一个供我们暴力以待的沙包！！


然后，我们也需要一个软绵绵又温暖的大玩偶，让我们可以紧紧拥抱……（虽然也有人较喜欢也对它暴力以待啦。）

总之。我们很想要 go crazy 啦！

Penang Bridge Traffic info via SMS

While crossing the Bridge this morning, staff gave out little bookmarks re the launching of the "Online Traffic Information Management System" (OTIM) via SMS; thought I'd share it...

SMS:
(to Penang) OTIM kepen OR OTIM topen
(to Seberang Perai) OTIM keprai OR OTIM toprai

to one of these numbers: 012 344 6900; 013 388 3131; 016 339 0999

I gave it a try and here's what I received:

OTIM
CODE:toprai
DEST:To Seberang Perai
INFO:Bayan Baru=Clear; Udini=Clear; Main Span=Clear; Juru=Clear; Seberang Jaya=Clear
[Estimated time travel on the bridge: 15 minutes]>
Drive carefully & wishing you a safe journey!

Mmm, cool. I hope this one doesn't break down ever!

S.H.E. 中国话

谨此将这首歌，献给所有看不起中文，看不起华校生，看不起会说中文的人的人们。

中国话
唱：S.H.E.
曲：郑楠 词：郑楠／施人诚

伦敦玛莉莲 买了件旗袍送妈妈
莫斯科的夫司基 爱上牛肉面疙瘩
各种颜色的皮肤 各种颜色的头发
嘴里念的说的开始流行中国话
多少年我们苦练英文发音和文法
这几年换他们卷著舌头学平上去入的变化
平平仄仄平平仄 (仄仄平平仄仄平)
好聪明的中国人 好优美的中国话

扁担宽 板凳长
扁担想绑在板凳上
板凳不让扁担绑在板凳上
扁担偏要绑在板凳上
板凳偏偏不让扁担绑在那板凳上
到底扁担宽还是板凳长
哥哥弟弟坡前坐
坡上卧著一只鹅
坡下流著一条河
哥哥说 宽宽的河
弟弟说 白白的鹅
鹅要过河 河要渡鹅
不知是那鹅过河
还是河渡鹅

全世界都在学中国话
孔夫子的话 越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话
我们说的话 让世界都认真听话

纽约苏珊娜 开了间禅风Lounge Bar
柏林来的沃夫冈 拿胡琴配著电吉他
各种颜色的皮肤 各种颜色的头发
嘴里念的说的开始流行中国话

有个小孩叫小杜
上街打醋又买布
买了布 打了醋
回头看见鹰抓兔
放下布 搁下醋
上前去追鹰和兔
飞了鹰 跑了兔
洒了醋 湿了布
嘴说腿 腿说嘴
嘴说腿 爱跑腿
腿说嘴 爱卖嘴
光动嘴 不动腿
光动腿 不动嘴
不如不长腿和嘴
到底是那嘴说腿 还是腿说嘴

折纸 Origami

I know of at least one reader of this blog who'll click on this link: Star Wars Origami.

其他较合我口味的折纸：

• Joseph Wu's Origami
• Origami Database
• WannaLearn: Origami
• British Origami Society
  

News about the Bridge Closure

News story about the Penang Bridge closure in International Herald Tribune

Another official of the Penang Bridge Sdn. Bhd. ... said it was not immediately clear how badly traffic had been affected because of the move.

[Insert 10 expletives of your choice here]

Not immediately clear. Not immediately clear? NOT IMMEDIATELY CLEAR???? Holy schmolly, didn't you even try putting your head out the window?!?!!?! Wait, I thought you even had a real time camera trained on various spots on the Penang Bridge and roads leading to it!!

Update on 5 April: A more coherent story from the Star. I'd say for a very possible bomb threat, 2.5 hours closure was quite short. Well done. (...or is it the low-M'sian-expectation bar at work again?)

Bomb Scare on Penang Bridge

...So I left the lab at 5.10pm. So the bridge was closed to traffic. D*mn.

So I turned off and headed towards the ferry terminal. I mean, inched towards the ferry terminal.

7.40pm I'm finally in front of the LHDN building!!!

7:50pm D*mnd*mnd*mnd*mn they closed off the junction to turn right into the ferry terminal!! More pileup to endure, arrgh!

8:05pm Sara SMS'ed me back and seems that the bridge was re-opened.

8:07pm Mom called, she heard on the news that they received a report about a BOMB on the bridge, hence the closure earlier.

8:20pm THAT'S IT I'VE HAD ENOUGH!!

So I turned off towards Pulau Tikus and got past Penang GH and turned towards Bayan Lepas, to get to the bridge via Green Lane.

9:20pm Woo-hoo!! Butterworth!! Roti Telur dinner at Zamrud@Raja Uda!!

...but I still don't know if there was really a bomb. And I'm not in the mood to listen to news on the TV right now. Well I guess I'll read all about it in the morning.

鸟语花香

PhD Comics Soap

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=843

Oh no, no no no... how could this happen? I hate you, Jorge... just when I'm just recovering from this headache/fever, too...

数学诗之美（英文版）

我妈将上回的“数学诗”派给她的学生们后，就有几个学生说了： "Teacher, I don't know Mandarin..."

说得真是可怜啊，别担心，英文版的多的是呢。这里有一堆，节录如下：

How I wish I could calculate pi.

How I like a drink, alcoholic of course,
after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.

Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
In mystic force, and magic spelling
Celestial sprites elucidate
All my own striving can’t relate
Or locate they who can cogitate
And so finally terminate.
Finis.

But a time I spent wandering in bloomy night;
Yon tower, tinkling chimewise, loftily opportune.
Out, up, and together came sudden to Sunday rite,
The one solemnly off to correct plenilune.

这里还有个超长篇的，把 Pi 的 740 个小数位都写进去了。

死亡笔记电脑

哇哦……但还真是酷毙了。全球只有三十台，绝对限量，绝对珍贵。原文

“名字被写在死亡笔记本里的人类，必死无疑”……那，用死亡笔记型电脑处理名单资料库的话……哇咧效率不就提高几百万倍了？还可以编程 bot 去自动 Google 呢……

瓜拉牛拉生态之旅 Trip to Kuala Gula

这其实已是三个星期前的事了，但当时实在是太忙了，没时间写博。不过迟到总好过没到吧？

(This was actually three weeks ago, but I was really too busy with work then and didn't had time to blog properly. Well, better late than never, right?)

瓜拉牛拉 Kuala Gula 位于霹雳州 Kerian 区，是个小渔村，同时也在 Matang 森林保护区内，并号称东南亚其中一个最重要的候鸟“驿站”。三月十、十一日，我们随着大马自然协会的旅行团来到了这里。

(Kuala Gula, a small fishing village, is situated in Kerian, Perak. It is also within the Matang Forest Reserve, and the Kuala Gula Bird Sanctuary is one of the most important stops for migratory birds in South East Asia. So my husband and I joined a trip to Kuala Gula organised by the M'sian Nature Society on 10th and 11th March.)

闲话少说，去片！

(Enough of words, on with the pictures!)

瓜拉牛拉同时有着西马最大的沼泽红树森林系统，而高质量的红树木正是烧木炭的来源。所幸这里的烧炭业者及树木砍伐都由森林保护局妥善管理。这是其中一个烧炭厂：

(Kuala Gula also has the largest mangrove ecosystems in Peninsular Malaysia, and the mangrove trees here are excellent material for producing high-quality charcoals. Fortunately, the charcoal industry and logging activities here are all systematically managed by PERHILITAN. This is one of the charcoal factories.)




我的相机没那么“好料”，所以……观鸟时都拍不太清楚……

(My camera wasn't all that powerful, so I couldn't get any clear shots of the birds.)

但我们看见了海豚！四、五只吧，据说是跑进河口来找鱼吃的，但太快了，实在来不及按快门。照片反而看起来像是尼斯湖水怪……绝对、绝对不是大白鲨哦。



But we saw DOLPHINS! There were four or five of them, apparently they swim into the river mouth areas to look for fish to eat. But they were too quick for us to take any good pictures. The photos look almost like those of Nessie... but that's certainly no Jaws, ok? OK?

More on Google Themes

Well someone compiled (almost?) all the possible cutesy Google themes here. And they've even thrown in some Easter Eggs!

Google Themes

漂漂哦~~ ^o^

快疯了

想去一个远远的地方。
没有人认识我。
找一个安静的角落，静静的躺下来，静静的睡着。
然后，再也不要醒来……

Quest of the Holy Sticker: 夺贴奇兵

For those who know about my long, heart-wringing story about my hunt for the elusive car sticker...

I FINALLY GOT IT TODAY!

That's right, y'all! I'm not a student, not yet a full staff but Heck, they finally acknowledged my name as a research officer in their databases!

Debian 扫除

我本来是看着 df -lh 的列表，暗自神伤……怎么那么快硬碟就不够用了呢？我又不是装了多少软件包，不就是 LaTeX, 两个资料库平台，Apache, Java, Prolog, Perl, PHP……嘿嘿 ;-)

然后！然后我发现了一个沧海遗珠！那就是——

apt-get autoclean

它可以把陈旧的 .deb 文件清洁溜溜！了无痕迹！（洗衣粉吗？）若要更狠一点，把全部 .deb 都删除，就用

apt-get clean

包您的硬碟马上又有一大片空间！

Java 6 on Linux!

哇～！哇～！我不是眼花吧？ Sun Java 6 的 Debian 包出了啊啊啊啊～！而且还顺利安装了呢～！而且之后的执行速度真的很快！大感谢，大感谢！

Jawbone! WordNet!

终于找到 WordNet 2.1 的 Java API 了！看看 Jawbone 吧。

又，Ted Pedersen 等人的 WordNet::Similarity 也看来蛮有用的。但是个 Perl 包……我看了就头疼。暂时我会先用 HTMLParser 来抽出那些数据，留待他日／他人再研究把它弄成 Web service 好了。