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!