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！