《JUMP》之巅＋科技浪潮之巅

承继昨天说过，小女子一闷得发慌就会下载网上的一些好文章，用 L^aT_eX 排版成 PDF 电子书的怪癖。通常都是一些属于会有人觉得“太长不看”的好文，但不是这种就没意思了。

打头阵的两本电子书课题还真是南辕北辙啊。（那本 Grid Computing 的是工作分内的成果，不算啦）

如果你有阅读日本漫画的习惯，那该知道集英社的漫画周刊《少年 JUMP》吧？大陆动漫情报杂志《动漫贩》曾在 2004–05 年做过一个名为《〈跳跃〉巅峰！日本漫画杂志传奇》的长篇专题连载，让中文读者更深了解《JUMP》及旗下作者们创刊以来的种种风浪。我初次见到是百度食梦者吧吧友钉宫理惠病毒辛苦手打的图片版，太喜欢了所以重新手打排版成电子书。

另外一本则是中国谷歌研究员吴军所撰写的《浪潮之巅》，原文 2007–2009 年刊于谷歌黑板报，对许多科技公司、人物及投资结构作了很详尽的剖析，包括 IBM、Motorola、Intel 等等。 IT 工作者、投资者、有意创业者必读！读了才知道“仰望星空，脚踏实地”的真旨！

I make e-books as a pastime

Whenever I get really, really bored, is unmotivated to do “real” work but still itching to touch a computer but not in the mood for games… I re-visit good articles I came across on the Web, and typeset them with L^aT_eX to make my own PDF e-books.

(Yes, I’m weird, I know.)

And I’m putting the e-books online, if only to fill out my Website.

Now all I’m missing is an iPad to read them on!

MacBook is admitted T_T

Worse and worse. I simply couldn’t power up my MacBook on Friday. T_T It’s now at the Apple Service Centre in Gurney Plaza. Get well soon! I miss you so!

Kernel Panic!

I think my MacBook suffered a series of kernel panics yesterday. >_<

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

After a few tries it finally managed to boot wobbly. Shaken, I did a quick google, and one of Apple’s suggestions is to perform a safe boot, i.e. pressing the Shift key while booting up.

So the next time my MacBook failed to boot properly, that’s what I did, and after a lot of clicking and whirring noises (that’s the obligatory disk scan and fix I presume)… hmm, it does seem to resolve the problem. Fingers crossed!!!

KuroDigi Lomography/Toy Camera

Got a new toy: a KuroDigi toy camera!

The joke’s on all of us!

I just read this snippet from a news article related to the SETARA rankings in the Star:

…Dr Syed Ahmad said UUM’s score from the rating was 66, which puts it in the tier four range of between 60 and 69.9.

He said UUM was the last institution included in tier four.

“But this does not mean UUM is at the bottom as the MQA lists all institutions (in each tier) in alphabetical order,” he said.

What this mean, folks, is that MMU did not necessarily occupy the top-spot for the private universities list, and the joke is on all of us who even entertained the idea! :D The list runs thus:

He said the private IPTs were Multimedia University, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Sunway University College, Curtin University of Technology (Sarawak campus), Monash University (Sunway campus), Taylor's University College, International Medical University, Swinburne University of Technology (Sarawak campus), Nottingham University (Malaysian campus) and Management and Science University.

…or did it? If the unis were listed alphabetically, then shouldn’t Curtin be listed first? Hmmmm. Ranking lists are such complex creatures.

MMU President’s Response to SETARA ‘Excellent’ Ranking

Hot on the heels of MMU being named the top Malaysian private university in the recent SETARA ranking exercise, I received the following e-mail from MMU's Corporate Communications Unit (CCU) on Prof. Zaharin’s response (all emphases are my own):

Putrajaya, 12 July 2010 – The Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin, yesterday announced eighteen top Malaysian universities. According to the rankings released to Bernama, topping the public universities was International Islamic University Malaysia. Leading the category for private institutions was Multimedia University. Professor Dr. Zaharin bin Yusoff, President of MMU, admitted his surprise at the news. “Like any university in Malaysia,” he said, “we’re just trying to do what is best for our students and our stakeholders.”

“Our strategies so far have included formulating the best academic programmes we could think of, and creating an environment to produce the most marketable graduates in the country. I am pleased that the people whose opinions we care for agree that we’re doing the right thing,” Prof. Zaharin said.

The ranking system categorized institutions into one of six tiers. “Tier-6” or Distinction, “Tier-5” (Excellent), “Tier-4” (Very Good), “Tier-3” (Good), “Tier-2” (Satisfactory), or “Tier-1” (Weak). MMU is in Tier-5, along with 17 other institutions. 25 universities are in Tier-4, and four in Tier-3. However, Prof. Zaharin is quick to stress that MMU must not allow this achievement to “get to our heads”, as other private universities in Malaysia are also extremely capable. He cautions, “If anything, this announcement will only spur others to try and knock us off the top.”

“We must pay attention to the fact that absolutely no university earned Tier-6, no one got Distinction. This means there is still room for improvement for everyone, MMU included,” Prof. Zaharin said. The ranking is formally known as the Rating System for Institutions of Higher Learning (Setara), and is outlined by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA). 2009’s exercise was led by Prof. Muhammad Jantan of Universiti Sains Malaysia. The system assessed 25 criteria covering the input, process, and output of the universities. This is the first time the rankings covered both public and private universities.

Public universities in Tier-5 are International Islamic University Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Malaya, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Mara.

Private Tier-5 institutions are Multimedia University, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Sunway University College, Curtin University of Technology (Sarawak campus), Monash University (Sunway campus), Taylor's University College, International Medical University, Swinburne University of Technology (Sarawak campus), Nottingham University (Malaysian campus) and Management and Science University.

I’m relieved that Prof. Zaharin’s response is a down-to-earth and realistic one. I was actually wincing when I first opened the e-mail (and my mouth itching to cynically form the words ‘jaguh kampung’, fearing that it will contain the usual blowing-our-own-trumpets, thumping-our-own-backs kinda of congratulatory spiel that we so often read in the local press. Thank goodness Prof. still kept his level head!

Facebook Query and Markup Language

Did you know FB has a Query Language and Markup Language of its own?

• Facebook Query Language (FQL)
• Facebook Markup Language (FBML)

Just in case anyone’s interested in these for their research. Also to KIV in case I find them useful in future.

Vote Plato!

A very different kind of election is on! Vote your philosopher (past and present) of choice into the (UK) government. Here’s the message from Warwick Alumni’s newsletter:

Warwick Plato expert Dr Angie Hobbs has had an idea for a very different sort of election. Dr Hobbs is asking people to nominate one or more philosophers, past or present, for an alternative UK Cabinet. Your proposals could be serious e.g. Hobbes for Home Secretary or more mischievous e.g. Zeno for Minister for Transport. The idea is both to have some fun and to consider whether any philosophers might actually be/have been any good at such jobs.

QS sacked from The Times Higher Education World University Rankings

Phil Baty, current editor of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings and deputy editor of Times Higher Education magazine, confessed that the rankings published for the past six years using data supplied and owned by QS, are not fit for purpose. Baty said QS achieved only a tiny number of respondents to the “peer review” criterion, which made up 40% of a university's score. QS also did not take into account different citation habits between disciplines, thereby greatly handicapping the arts, humanities and social sciences.

THE has therefore ended their contract with QS, and enlisted Thomson Reuters instead. They're also looking at a major (if not complete) overhaul of the methodology to produce the 2010 Rankings, to be published this autumn.

(suspenseful, brooding music)

Hmmmm.

I shall reserve further comments until we see the resultant rankings. ;-)

粘土小玩意（二）

这其实是个音乐盒，作成蛋糕的样子。



海底世界相框。由于遇到农历新年，又要出差，差不多用了两个月才完成。



什么？你想看看之前的作品？有啊，看看吧。

Lone~ly~the path you have cho~sen~

First of all, greatest congratulations to Tan Yifen for being an International Winner of the L’Oreal-Unesco Awards for Women in Science 2010. Making Sg Petani and SM Sin Min proud, yeah.

But what reverberated most with me were these profound quotes, excerpt from her interview with the Star (linked above):

“A researcher faces a lot of failures. When you conduct an experiment, you may have to repeat it a few hundred times, and it could take a week to get the final result, which means that everything you’d done before that is wasted.”

::nods::nods::

The lack of money is another common problem for researchers. “You see your other coursemates who graduated the same time as you did. You choose to further your studies but they opt to start their careers. By a certain stage, they already have a monthly pay of say, RM4,000 to RM5,000 and are buying houses and cars, whereas you’re still struggling with finances, and trying to get scholarships and financial support.”

::sob:: The Never-ending Quest of Grant Proposals…

Handling failure, therefore, is part and parcel of the job. How does Tan do it? “I go home and have a good cry. Next day, I go back to the lab and start all over again,” she said.

You have no idea how often I’ve done that myself.

I feel like one good big cry myself right now.

Open-Source Licenses

This article gives quite a good overview of the various open-source licenses, written in an easy-to-understand way. Don't be fooled by FUD ever again.

Happy π Day!

π = 3.14159265358979323846...

New Personal Site (and the Inanity of Web Filters)

Following the automatic migration of my personal website at Google Pages to Google Sites, I decided that Sites wasn't to my taste. I needed a new pad.

Luckily for me, Hussein very generously agreed to accommodate me on his domain at penguinattack.org. And so I now have a new pad! With all my old contents and site design intact, that is.

Well guess what surprise was in store for us? USM blocked my site because "the IP also hosts malware website"!!

How?? penguinattack.org isn't blocked, but liantze.penguinattack.org is. HUH?!

Aaaaanyway. To cut a heart-wrenching story short, after some ding-donging e-mails between Hussein and PPKT (USM's ICT department), my site was finally unblocked. Thanks again Hussein!

Oh joy, now USM-ers can continue to download my usmthesis L^aT_eX document class. If there's still anyone interested in using it, that is. Har, har, har.

Use Firefox the Vim Way

Now how cool is this? Use vi-like key bindings to navigate the Web in Firefox!

Now I wonder if the emacs-ians will be up in arms

LaTeX Introductory Workshop at MMU

I gave an introductory workshop to L^aT_eX at the Multimedia University (Cyberjaya campus) today, on my co-supervisor's invitation. Anyone who's interested in the materials can download them from the workshop webpage, including the slides, worksheet, sample code for the exercises, installation guide for MiKTeX in Windows.

We had 19 participants, and while it wasn't full capacity, I'm still thankful for that number because 1. it still took up a fair bit of the lab space, and 2. that's just about the number I can handle, because this was a hands-on workshop, so people were raising their hands left and right with questions, debugging errors, etc. We even had 4 participants who came all the way from the Malacca campus! Wow, thank you!

Overall feedback was quite positive, which is good. I'm of the opinion of the more people show aptitude, experience (however meagre) and interest in using L^aT_eX, the more willing conference organisers and journal publishers will be to accept L^aT_eX submissions.

(YES, I'm talking about you, M'sian conference organising secretariat, sir/madam. Please stop insisting on "Word submissions only" because 2 out of my 3 Word submissions have been mangled in a bad way in the final proceedings!)

Murphy's Law

I've been notified by Google Pages since April last year that they were going to shut down soon, and that all pages will be automatically migrated to Google Sites in June. I set up redirection for my automatic translation Google Gadget config XML, but otherwise, I decided to wait for the auto-migration to see how things would look in Google Site, before deciding whether I needed to hunt out a new hosting solution.

June came and went, and no migration. Then September. Then December. Then 2010, and on to March. Still nothing happened.

So when I needed to host some files for an upcoming training workshop, I thought "och, what's the odd of them migrating me now, after 9 whole months of nothing happening?" and happily uploaded a new page + files to Google Pages.

I know what you're thinking now. Perfect cliché thought to invite disaster, eh? I know, I know it's my fault to procrastinate anyway, but then again...

And so, 'twas the night before the workshop, and I logged on to Google Pages to make the finishing touches. And lo and behold, my website had been migrated, the CSS and layout in shambles. Upon logging on to Google Sites and attempting to edit the migrated pages, they lost all their CSS decorations and designs.

To be fair, since all the design was done with CSS and content/style separation and all that, the semantics and core information of pages are still present. But it's painful to look at the bare pages, you know?

And in the long run, Google Sites is not, I repeat, is NOT flexible enough to allow custom CSS and HTML and whatnots, and therefore wasn't what I liked at all.

Eventually I "borrowed" web space from my research group's web site to temporarily host the files needed for the workshop the following day. But I'm gonna re-migrate my website after I come back from the workshop, thanks to a friend who very generously agreed to let me have room on his domain (Thank you Hussein!) :D

How will the migration go? Find out!

LTNS MySQL

I've forgotten so much about MySQL administration ever since I embraced PostgreSQL. Baaaad me.

Best Grad School Advice

Probably the most profound grad school advice I've read/heard.

Paycheck!

I'd just received my payment for developing a LaTeX template for the Journal of Advanced Computing and Applications published by the School of Computer Science, USM.

Molting Millipede

I didn't know millipedes molt (shed skins) until I saw this little fellow in my garden.

Google Gravity

Awwwww this little Google Gravity show is so cute!! Works only in Google Chrome, though.

Google Reconsidering Operations in China

Gee. Just read this post on the official Google blog. And just when Google.cn came up with so many good things too.

I guess when push comes to shove...

Proposal Defence Done With

I've just completed my PhD proposal defence seminar yesterday afternoon. Well that's the first milestone of the year 2010 done. Wheee!!