来自研究室的胡言乱语 ::Rants from the Lab::

汉字标准格式

2011-12-22T21:29:00.001+08:00

这个专为中文网页而设的汉字标准格式（CSS）实在很棒！前些日子和 ChinaTeX 采访／闲聊时才说起，要找专针对中文内容的 Typography 样式，实在很难，没想到两个多月后就在 Twitter 看到了。

Another Grad School Quote

2011-10-05T11:07:00.001+08:00

By Seamus Bradley, while explaining some reasons for his tendency for “over-the-top” L^aT_eX solutions to simple problems:

Because as a PhD student, procrastination is an important part of staying sane.

Closer to home, I‘m finding the need to make a little happy something everyday to carry me through. Ah, just another typical day in a grad student's career (or the lack of one).

Recursively Fixing File Permissions

2011-09-01T13:54:00.000+08:00

Ahhh, the joys of restoring/moving files from a FAT32 external hard disk to a *nix system. Everything is 777, grrrrr. The all-knowing Google kindly directed me to try the following:

$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644

to chmod all files to 644, and

$ find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755

to chmod all directories to 755.Ahhh, the joys of bash commands.

Mounting USB Devices in VirtualBox

2011-09-01T11:11:00.002+08:00

Mounting USB devices on guest systems in VirtualBox seems to be a big headache for many people (yours truly included). But I think I’d finally figured it out.

It boils down to these two most crucial points for me:

Use the same usernames on your host and guest systems.
Create an empty USB filter for your guest system. This will automatically mount any devices to the guest system as soon as they are attached physically.

Use the same usernames on your host and guest systems.

When installing your guest systems, create users with the same login name you’re already using on your host system.
To make things easier, choose a username without space characters.

Create an empty USB filter for your guest system.

With the guest system off, open the Settings of your guest system.
Open the Ports → USB pane.
Make sure you have enabled USB 2.0 (EHCI) controller.
Click the icon with a blue circle on the right. This will add an empty device filter that matches anything.

Now try starting your guest system, log in with the same user name as the one currently active on your host system, and attach a USB device. Hopefully things will… work!

ERA Journal Ranking List Dropped

2011-06-07T11:05:00.001+08:00

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has decided to remove ERA journal rankings in view of them “focusing ill-formed undesirable behavior in the management of research”.

(Although I’m guessing people here will just pretend they never read this and do nothing about it until 3 years later.)

[Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr] chastised the research community, saying: “There is clear and consistent evidence that the rankings were being deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings.

“One common example was the setting of targets for publication in A and A* journals by institutional research managers.

“In light of these two factors — that ERA could work perfectly well without the rankings, and that their existence was focussing ill-informed undesirable behaviour in the management of research — I have made the decision to remove the rankings, based on the ARC’s expert advice.”

Australian Academy of Science Secretary for Science Policy Professor Bob Williamson has this to say:

“In our recent submission to the Australian Research Council, the Australian Academy of Science argued strongly that key areas such as interdisciplinary research and new research were seriously disadvantaged by journal ranking,” Professor Williamson said.

“This affected not only areas of science and technology, but also interactions between the sciences and the humanities.”

“It has been very distressing to see some universities using publications in highly ranked journals as the basis for funding, promotions, and even staff appointments.

“The ranking of a journal as A* does not mean every paper in it is first rate, and some very good papers may appear in smaller journals.

So how would the new ERA initiative include as changes? One proposed measure is to move more towards a peer review system. More comments from various experts here: interesting reads.

Upcoming LaTeX Talk

2011-06-01T10:26:00.000+08:00

ｷｬ━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━!! MOSC2011 has posted about my upcoming L^aT_eX talk!

Spanish and Tolkien and Arrancars

2011-04-25T16:25:00.001+08:00

西班牙语是《魔戒》的作者——铎金教授最喜欢的语言之一，原因是他认为语音很美（我也这么认为），所以我其实对 Bleach 里破面们的名字非常爱不释手。

CICLing 2011: Sound Bites

2011-02-28T15:08:00.003+08:00

I just don’t have time for long posts these days T_T so here goes: a bulleted list of sound-bites.

Jun’ichi Tsujii

As engineers, you’d want to create applications that just work (so stats-based systems fit the bill nicely).
As scientists though, you’d want to know when and why things don’t work sometimes, and is it worth your while to try handle these special (if they are) cases at all.
And for this purpose, stats-based models can be like black-boxes that you can’t really inspect… and this is where computational linguistics can provide insights.

Hans Uszkoreit

Don’t believe in the F₁ score blindly. For some applications you really just want the precision; for others recall is much more important.
Example: for a system detecting possible reports of terrorist activities, a 1.0 recall means much more than 0.01 precision, because you can certainly afford a human perusing 100 reports and confirming that 1 genuine terrorist report.
Unfortunately many inexperienced journal reviewers (Hans actually said that) would still insist that the system’s F₁ is too low and can’t be convinced of the more important role of recall in such cases.

Diana McCarthy

Is word sense disambiguation still relevent especially when we talk about tagging with reference to a sense inventory? Because we increasingly feel this phenomena about words having a continuum of meanings rather than discrete ones (except in the case of homographs).
I don’t have an answer for this though. Thoughts welcome!

(Thanks Prof McCarthy. I hope my idea works! Even if only somewhat.)

Chris Manning

No, we don’t have special funding for the Stanford NLP tools development. T_T
Yes, it’s really hard to maintain the code and projects as people leave. T_T
Yes, it’d be nice if we had a long-term development team to take care of the software engineering and maintenance stuff so that the research students can concentrate on doing research, but this is really hard (impossible?) in reality. T_T

(Prof Manning… what can I say except that I/we feel the pain too? T_T)

Geilivable

2011-02-08T10:14:00.001+08:00

今天学了一个新字，或是不同语言的同一个 concept:

[英] geilivable = [大陆流行语] 给力 = [大马华语流行语] 够力

《JUMP》之巅＋科技浪潮之巅

2010-11-20T14:54:00.000+08:00

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

2010-11-19T23:24:00.000+08:00

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

2010-10-04T11:06:00.000+08:00

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!

2010-09-27T10:30:00.000+08:00

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

2010-08-23T16:37:00.000+08:00

Got a new toy: a KuroDigi toy camera!

The joke’s on all of us!

2010-07-23T17:08:00.000+08:00

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

2010-07-14T10:06:00.001+08:00

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

2010-05-31T11:17:00.000+08:00

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

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

Vote Plato!

2010-05-04T21:14:00.000+08:00

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

2010-05-03T12:01:00.002+08:00

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）

2010-03-30T15:12:00.001+08:00

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~

2010-03-27T22:51:00.000+08:00

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

2010-03-24T22:39:00.000+08:00

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!

2010-03-14T13:59:00.003+08:00

π = 3.14159265358979323846...

New Personal Site (and the Inanity of Web Filters)

2010-03-12T23:34:00.001+08:00

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

2010-03-12T22:35:00.000+08:00

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

2010-03-08T23:14:00.000+08:00

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

2010-03-08T22:47:00.001+08:00

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

2010-02-23T12:01:00.000+08:00

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

Best Grad School Advice

2010-02-18T11:25:00.000+08:00

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

Paycheck!

2010-02-02T14:46:00.000+08:00

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

2010-02-02T11:22:00.001+08:00

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

Google Gravity

2010-01-13T10:44:00.000+08:00

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

Google Reconsidering Operations in China

2010-01-13T10:30:00.000+08:00

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

2010-01-12T10:34:00.001+08:00

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

iiWAS2009

2009-12-22T21:42:00.001+08:00

I was at the 11th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS2009) last week, 14-16 Dec, held at the Asia e-University in Kuala Lumpur. AeU is very new, and they're currently sharing premises with Takaful Malaysia in Jalan Kampung Attap. (Student helpers at the conference tell me they'll be moving to the permanent campus in Nilai, or was Cyberjaya? next year.)

The Maharajalela monorail station is 4 minutes away and the hotel 2 minutes away, so I'd hop down to Berjaya Times Square 2 stops away for dinner.

So what's iiWAS2009 about? Well a bit of everything, given their focus: the Global Information Infrastructure, where "the seamless integration of information and services remains a major challenge towards a vision of semantically rich information and service oriented architecture for global information systems. This vision is at the convergence of progress in technologies such as XML, Web services, RDF, OWL, of multimedia, multimodal, and multilingual information retrieval, and of distributed, mobile and ubiquitous computing". Topics of interest included:

Web Engineering and Web Services Track
E-applications Track
Web Data and Semantic Web Track
Information Integration in Ubiquitous Computing Track

Yours truly still submitted a paper on NLP, though. To the co-located Master & Doctoral Colloquium. Only 5 papers got accepted out of 21 submissions, so I guess they didn't just let any submissions through easily. In fact they had a shepherding process to make sure that you really have incorporated reviewers' comments in the camera-ready submission...

The MDC Chair, Dr Karin Hummel, also acting as the presentation session Chair, was really friendly, enthusiastic (in a non-scary way, that's always very important) and encouraged feedback and discussion from the audience. So with that kind of friendly vibe, comments and discussions kept flowing, the presenters and audience was full of camaraderie at the end of two hours, and did not mind one bit going to lunch late.

I suppose my paper presentation was well received. The audience attending the session, having no or little background knowledge on NLP, found the topic interesting. One gentleman was initially mildly apprehensive as he perceived that NLP (in particular Machine Translation) researchers are attempting to take over the livelihood of human professional translators and interpreters with half-cooked technology. Luckily I was able to allay his doubts -- which happened to be a common misconception about MT technologies by the general public -- by describing the correct usage scenarios of MT scenarios from my slides. By the end of the discussion, the said gentleman was applauding with comments like "Bravo! Future generations will bless you."

There was a conference dinner on the 2nd night, but with a terrific rain going on, evening KL traffic being what it is, and the guest-of-honour got delayed somewhere, we waited for about 2 hours at the dinner venue at the Pullman Hotel in Putrajaya (I hitched a ride with a colleague from MMU after finishing a discussion there). It was well 8.20pm when we were finally allowed to touch the food. Too famished and tired and with presentations still to be finalised, my colleague and I left early after having just enough... to head back to the hotel where I worked till midnight, having a final glance through my slides, and revising a project grant proposal due the week after. Yawn.

U of Warwick's Seasonal Greetings

2009-12-02T16:31:00.001+08:00

I must say that the University of Warwick has a fun way of keeping in touch with its alumni. Take, for example, this "online advent calendar where you will be able to discover something new about the University of Warwick on every day up to Christmas Day."

The current V-C, Professor Nigel Thrift, goes on to say in his message:

"We hope that using this calendar, rather than mailing a traditional Christmas card, will give people a unique insight into the life of the University. This initiative is in keeping with our drive to reduce paper use by the University. The money we are saving by not producing a University Christmas card will be invested in additional landscaping to improve our campus and to benefit the environment."

Certainly much better than any boring ol' run-o'-the-mill electronic greeting card, too. Now that's a thoughtful ICT strategy.

2010 Calendar from Vladstudio.com

2009-12-01T11:27:00.001+08:00

Vladstudio.com has released a very good-looking 2010 calendar. You can either buy the printed calendar (nicely ring bound and all), or download it for free to be used as wallpaper calendars.

捏捏泥泥捏捏

2009-11-24T14:03:00.001+08:00

看官，看标题看傻了是不？呵呵，其实是我和文聪最近到家附近一所黏土手工艺教学教室上课去了。虹粘土之家在槟岛、北海有几家分店，我们去的是拉惹乌达 Raja Uda 钟灵中学对面的分店，最新一家则是在皇后湾广场 Queen's Bay Mall 二楼。

上课时间绝对自由，想什么时候去就什么时候去，想待多久就待多久。文聪拿的是黏土花课程，我则是小玩意课程。

这是我的第一个作品，装饰用笔筒。中间的小猪猪的蝴蝶结太重，胶水又没贴牢，跌了下来⋯⋯但我做玫瑰花做上瘾了。黄色的水仙花是我自己加的哦。鲜艳的黄色为整个作品增色不少。

这盆雏菊则是文聪的第一个作品。他其实共作了十朵，有粉红、黄和白色，但只插了三朵。其他的打算在家里找些形状漂亮的酒瓶来插。我本来想供在观音前，但他说假花不宜供佛菩萨。

这个信箱上的小动物们是我从教室里不同的作品样本 mix and match 出来的。黑色的底颜料还真的衬托出鲜艳跳脱的颜色了。后面还躲着一只トトロ（小龙猫）呢。

TeX Live 2009 (and MacTeX 2009) is here!

2009-11-10T10:29:00.000+08:00

TeX Live 2009 has been released!!! *Squeeeee!*

I'm downloading MacTeX now. Except that, considering Malaysia's slow internet speed (even with broadband), I'm actually getting BasicTeX and upgrading the packages with TeXLive Manager after that.

浦泽大神啊啊啊啊

2009-11-04T11:08:00.001+08:00

刚开始追看 Billy Bat。忽然间 Monster，20世纪少年, Pluto... 似乎都又回来了。只希望这一次浦泽大神可以许我们一个“比较看得懂”的结局。

又或者如某网友所说，“不烂尾，非浦泽”？（喂）

Book design with LaTeX

2009-10-30T10:49:00.001+08:00

I'm now embarking on a series of blog posts on how I produced the Grid Computing Cluster report with LaTeX for the Malaysian LaTeX User blog. Look for posts tagged with 'bookdesign'.

Nostalgia

2009-10-19T23:40:00.001+08:00

I do so, so miss U of Warwick and Coventry sometimes, especially the Cathedral...

Addicted

2009-10-13T15:52:00.001+08:00

Y'know, I think I'm actually getting addicted to this blogging stuff with Flock. :)

Flock!

2009-10-13T11:36:00.001+08:00

I'm testing out Flock, a "social Web browser" that comes bundled with an blog editor. Mainly because I'm sick of getting disconnected (Baaaad streamyx! Baaaad uni network! Baaad!) halfway through authoring a post. It's supposed to be very Web 2.0 and everything.

I looked at some desktop blogging clients alternatives, but they're either only available for Windows, or they're not free. If most websites and features load alright in Flock I'd probably even ditch Safari altogether.

Accessing Package Documentations

2009-10-09T15:55:00.003+08:00

LaTeX package authors are awesome, not only because they develop and maintain so many goodies for the convenience of other LaTeX users (especially those of us who aren't that well-versed with TeX), but also because they fully document the usage of their packages. (Well most of them anyway.)

How do you access these documentations and manuals, though? Do you google (or search on CTAN) and download the manuals every time you want to look up the details of user commands in, say, the glossaries package? Occasionally, though, you may find that the manuals you just downloaded are the wrong versions for the package files installed on your system.

Chances are that the documentations are already installed on your system, when you first installed those packages. They're usually located in $TEXMF/doc/tex/latex, or $TEXMF/doc/bibtex for BibTeX-related packages.

There's an easier way to look up a package's documentation than manually navigating the TEXMF trees, though. In TeXLive (that's probably what you have if you're on a *nix or Mac system), type

$ texdoc glossaries (or whatever package you're interested in)

at the shell prompt. Voíla! The documentation for the glossaries package would open automatically for your perusal.

If the file that appears seem like an example file demonstrating a package's functionalities and not the documentation proper, try

$ texdoc --list glossaries

instead. You'll be presented with an interactive list from which you can select the file you want to open.

MikTeX users on Windows can use the command

mthelp glossaries

at the command prompt or from the "Start → Run" dialog instead. A browser window would open, listing possible documentation files associated with the package name you supplied. Click on a link to view the file you're interested in. And if you trust the system enough to hit upon the "main" documentation file at the first try, use

mthelp --view glossaries

instead.

Malaysian LaTeX Users

2009-10-09T15:51:00.000+08:00

I just signed on as an author on the Malaysian LaTeX Users blog! :D

I'm just wondering how long I can keep this stint up though? *Peers at own lonely, lonely blog*

Using .eps Graphics with PDF output

2009-10-09T00:16:00.000+08:00

For quite some time now, the graphicx package would automatically sort out which file types to use whenever it encounters \includegraphics{some_file}, where the extension of some_file is not specified.

That is to say, if you are generating to a .dvi, the system would look for some_file.eps. If you are generating to a .pdf, it looks for some_file.{pdf|jpg|png}.

But what if you want a .pdf and you work with .pdf, .jpg and .png graphic files, but suddenly you received a .eps graphics from your collaborator? (This actually happened to a lecturer at my university.)

Well, you could always convert it manually to a .pdf yourself with GhostScript or GIMP, of course. But now the process can be automated if you're using MikTeX 2.8 or TeXLive 2009, as highlighted by Rob Hyndman.

In MikTeX 2.8, use the epstopdf package together with graphicx, like so:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx,epstopdf}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{some_file}
\end{document}

If all you have is some_file.eps, it will be automatically converted to a some_file-eps-converted-to.pdf during the first time the LaTeX document is compiled and included in the final document output.

If you're using TeXLive 2009, you don't even have to load epstopdf explicitly, but I say include it anyway, for portability's sake.

Batch Transcoding with VLC 1.0.x

2009-09-25T13:54:00.000+08:00

After I upgraded my VLC player to v1.0.x, I realised my batch transcoding script stopped working. After much tinkering with the syntax and googling, I've got it working again. Here is the updated script:

#!/bin/bash
vcodec="mp4v"
acodec="mp4a"
bitrate="3072"
arate="192"
ext="mp4"
mux="mp4"
# Modify the path to VLC on your machine accordingly
vlc="/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC"
fmt="MPG"
dst="/Dest/Path/"
for a in *$fmt; do
  echo $a
  $vlc -I dummy -vvv "./$a" --sout="#transcode{vcodec=$vcodec,\
  vb=$bitrate,acodec=$acodec,ab=$arate}:std{mux=$mux,\
  dst=\"$dst$a.$ext\",access=file}" vlc://quit
  touch -m -r $a $dst$a.$ext
done

Book Printed — Finally

2009-09-16T22:42:00.005+08:00

Early this year I was asked to help compile a technical report/book for a grid computing research project that I'm involved in. Essentially it's a group of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds (grid computing, medical imaging, animation, mathematics, natural language processing, software engineering, networking, ...) coming together to "grid-enable" their own existing applications so that the apps run faster etc.

"But not too technical, so that even lay-people can understand what we're doing. Make it look as professional as possible," I was told.

Look professional? Gee, great excuse for me to run wild with LaTeX. Whether it was the right decision might be debatable, and I haven't solved all issues to perfection (e.g. CMYK colour model with "true black")... but we managed it!

Book's Printed and Published!!

@BOOK{GridATUSM:Report,
  title = {Grid Computing Cluster:
           The Development and Integration of
           Grid Services and Applications},
  publisher = {Platform for Information
               Communication Technology Research,
               Universiti Sains Malaysia},
  year = {2009},
  editor = {Bahari Belaton and Lim, Lian Tze},
  address = {Penang, Malaysia},
  isbn = {978-983-3986-58-3},
}

Chasing after the chapter write-ups. Playing with design ideas. Lots and lots of experimenting with the memoir, tikz and various other packages. Searching for free stock photos. Adjusting the various margins and skips and spacing so that each chapter fill up each page just right. Writing to and calling the National Library to get an ISBN number and CIP data. Hiccups along the way due to requests in design changes, mismatches with the printing company's technical specs etc...

And finally all is done. We have now 200 copies of the thing. Not for sale (which would've been a nightmare with the royalties, we're not that gung-ho yet... maybe the next one. If there's a next time.) but for distribution.

Great, great thanks to the team members (principle investigators and research officers) for the write-ups, Pn Norliza for the proof-reading, Mr Tan for pointing us in the right directions every now and then, Hooi Leng for handling the liaising and PO procedures with the printing company. Couldn't have done any of this without any of you.

Use LaTeX — Or Don't Bother to Format Your Manuscripts

2009-07-17T14:23:00.000+08:00

Read it here yourself: http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55780/

Farewell Eitan

2009-06-30T08:00:00.000+08:00

Eitan Gurari, the author of TeX4ht — the best LaTeX to HTML/OO.o/etc conversion system that I've come across — has died. :-(

He was a most helpful soul on comp.text.tex . RIP Eitan.

(Yes yes yes, no tribute to MJ and yet one for Eitan, I'm a geek, yes.)

RegEx Tutorial and Tools

2009-06-02T10:20:00.000+08:00

Great article and resources round-up about regular expressions at SmashingMagazine! One for the bookmarks.

Begone, ._whatever!

2009-05-07T16:09:00.002+08:00

So Finder in OSX has this quirky habit of creating a ._blah for every blah file when transferring file between operating systems, due to the AppleDouble system and resource forking. (No idea what those mean exactly, but you can always ask Google.)

David Olinsky left this nugget of a solution as a comment here:

export COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE=true

UPDATED: as well as this attribute, introduced in Leopard as noted by nzight:

export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true

Thank goodness! Now stick those in your .bash_profile...

Oh and to remove those blasted files:

> find . -iname '._*' -exec rm -rf {} \;

PicasaWeb adds automatic translation of comments

2009-04-10T11:28:00.001+08:00

While uploading photos to PicasaWeb this morning, I was surprised when non-English comments were automatically translated to English. The results are rather entertaining, yet still demonstrating the usefulness of machine translation to non-speakers of the source language: (admit it O blog reader! Yes, you, 'cause I know there's no one else who reads this blog!)

(Original link)

S.Shen

Apr 9, 2009 12:10 PM

孩子越来越像爸爸了。妈妈别生气哈～

Children more and more like a father. Do not be angry mother ha ~

Lian Tze

Apr 10, 2009 11:17 AM

呵呵，没生气啦，早就认了⋯⋯还在肚子里作超音波扫描时就已是爸爸的翻拍版了

Oh, you did not angry, identified long ago are still ⋯ ⋯ stomach for ultrasound scan is the father had been a remake version of the

(Original link)

S.Shen

Apr 9, 2009 12:09 PM

好可爱

Good lovely

Lian Tze

Apr 10, 2009 11:11 AM

可爱得爆⋯⋯不是爆灯，是我们的脑也快爆了。;-)

Too cute not burst burst ⋯ ⋯ lights, is our brain will soon burst. ;-)

Periodic Table of Typography

2009-04-08T10:25:00.000+08:00

Compiled by Cam. Nice one to hang on a cubicle wall. Bound to confuse people, or not: perhaps they'll just assume that I'm now dabbling in Chemistry and not some funny nutty typography and leave me alone.

Batch transcoding with VLC

2009-03-20T16:45:00.006+08:00

I have a bunch of MPG videos from my videocam but neither iPhoto nor iMovie would recognise them. Now VLC has a transcoding wizard that'd do the conversion to MP4 nicely, but to do it interactively through the GUI is just too tedious. Using this tip from the VideoLAN Wiki, I used a script to perform the batch transcoding:

#!/bin/bash
vcodec="mp4v"
acodec="mp4a"
bitrate="3072"
arate="192"
ext="mp4"
mux="mp4"
vlc="/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/clivlc"
fmt="MPG"
dst="/Dest/Path/"
for a in *$fmt; do
  $vlc -I dummy -vvv "./$a" --sout "#transcode{vcodec=$vcodec,\
  vb=$bitrate,acodec=$acodec,ab=$arate}:standard{mux=$mux,\
  dst=\"$dst$a.$ext\",access=file}" vlc://quit
  touch -m -r $a $dst$a.$ext
done

If you want to try this on Linux or Windows, you should use vlc instead of clivlc. I included the touch command so that the transcoded videos would still have the original capture date/time as their last modified date.

ISBN to BibTeX Converter

2009-03-12T10:46:00.000+08:00

Kenjutsu posted about an ISBN to BibTeX converter in comp.text.tex. Given an ISBN e.g. 0471976970, it returns:


@book{0471976970,
  Author = {D. Grune and H. Bal and C. Jacobs and K. Langendoen},
  Title = {Modern Compiler Design},
  Publisher = {Wiley},
  Year = {2000},
  ISBN = {0471976970},
  URL = {http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Compiler-Design-D-Grune/dp/0471976970%3FSubscriptionId%3D0JYN1NVW651KCA56C102%26tag%3Dws%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0471976970}
}

The author of the converter stated that he's obliged to include the link to Amazon to comply with the terms and conditions for using Amazon's Web Service API to generate the information.

The converter accepts both 10- and 13-digit ISBNs, but doesn't seem to be able to recognise books with editors instead of authors (you know, a collection of articles). Still, it can be useful.

Episode IV — now in ASCII art!

2009-03-06T09:42:00.000+08:00

I first came across this at Random Determinism, where there's an embedded YouTube version as well. But I thought to myself: Is this a geeky blog, or what?^[1] And so — open up a terminal and go

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Enjoy!

^[1] OMG I can't believe I just admitted that OMG OMG OMG OMG...

The Pink Jedi Again

2009-03-03T16:11:00.000+08:00

Notice the giant Vader in the background? :)

This would make a nice parody movie poster. One of these days, when I have some precious free time on my hands...

Little Jedi in Pink

2009-02-04T10:46:00.008+08:00

Pretty in Pink.

MC turned out to know more about Star Wars than I do. The moment he saw Hui Ning in this new dress, he made a beeline for the camel humps at the Penang Municipal Park.

Correction: As it turned out eventually, no, MC doesn't know more about Star Wars than I do — Banthas don't have humps.

Can we have a much, much better Sejarah syllabus, please?

2009-01-15T10:09:00.001+08:00

For quite some now I've been reproachful about the way Sejarah was taught when I was in secondary school. I absolutely hated the subject at the time, but especially after university, I find myself wishing frequently that I learned the history of my country in a more meaningful way. As opposed to memorising tons of facts without comtemplation and questions, and going by the "heuristic" of "them bad, we good. As in, we good." (You know what that emphasis is for.) And other propagandistic stuff. You know, it's even scarier that most people don't even realise there are propagandistic stuff in the textbooks years after they graduate.

Call me a defeatist or whatever, but I can't even find the energy to start elaborating why I feel this way. I'm sure many of you know why and probably feel the same way. (OK OK, that makes only one of you.) Well nothing sums it up better than this article, "Learning Malaysian History: A Lopsided Formula" written by John Lee for Education in Malaysia. Great read. And I hope for my child's sake that the Sejarah syllabus be given a long-belated overhaul.

In the meantime I'm reading up as much as I can, so that I'll be able to at least give my child a clearer picture when she has... questions. Especially the awkward ones. I hope I'll be able to give her some answer that makes sense from a historical context instead of a lame "sorry kid, that's how it is..."

After all, that's the whole point of History, isn't it?

I want a cubicle like this!

2009-01-08T09:46:00.000+08:00

Google engineers are having lots of fun building various stuff both decorational and functional, out of giant Lego-like blocks called "Bloxes". These are

"interlocking cardboard boxes that were something like giant legos that connected on all six sides. They ... were originally intended to be used to build flexible workspaces (like easily morphable cubicles)."

Here's a cubicle office with an attached lounge area:

More photos here. Gee, I wish I could have a Blox cubicle. Can I? Can I? What? No funding? Dang.

C'mon, Tajel!

2009-01-02T09:40:00.000+08:00

Awwww c'mon, Tajel! LaTeX has lots of goodies for the Humanities, too!

Formatting Large Hard Disks with FAT32

2008-12-14T22:06:00.001+08:00

I badly needed a new external hard disk. My boss gave me one of 150GB — in NTFS.

Darn. I hardly use Windows these days, only GNU/Linux and Mac. And WinXP wouldn't let me format it to FAT32.

Darn darn darn.

Until I came across fat32format. All I did was to issue at the command prompt

fat32format e:

and the hard disk was formatted in, like, what? 2 seconds.

*Blink*.

Wheee!!!

EOL character conversions

2008-11-27T15:16:00.001+08:00

I need to inspect/process large text files (mostly dictionary data) on a regular basis, and for a quick preview I'd use the trusty less. But one thing nearly always drives me crazy: end of line (EOL) characters.

So what's up with all the EOLs? Read all about them.

Luckily since I'm working on *nix systems anyway, there are nifty little utilities, nay, bash commands that'll do the EOL conversions in a blink.

For conversions between DOS files (CR-LF EOL) and *nix files, use dos2unix and unix2dos. (Or use sed if you're old school, as shown in this Linux FAQ HowTo.)

On the other hand, if you need to convert Mac files to/from *nix files, try out this trick with tr, or awk, or perl.

And finally, if you also need to convert between character encodings/sets, you might want to use the versatile recode utility instead. I use it all the time now since I need to process multilingual dictionaries very often.

Transitional and Strict DOCTYPEs

2008-11-13T10:00:00.001+08:00

Every now and then, I write some HTML with some CSS thrown in. I'd insert the ol' XHTML DOCTYPE directive, but I'd never bothered validating my code (aaaarrghhh you sinner!!), nor finding out about the differences between Transitional and Strict DOCTYPEs. Well, I just found out today when I came across this article, extolling why we should go Strict (and CSS).

Picasa Albums in Facebook

2008-11-05T10:58:00.001+08:00

A while ago I was finally egged on by Hussein to get into Facebook. I was really reluctant at first, since I'm quite skeptical with most other social networking sites (except LinkedIn, which sorta has a more career-oriented feel to it and hence, feels less "adolescent" — sorryyyyy, didn't mean to offence!).

I was pleasantly surprised once I joined. Apparently Facebook's new interface was already in operation when I joined, so all my user experience only applies to the new Facebook. Clean interface, useful tools (non-obtrusive friend invites, people-you-may-know), etc.

I had only one gripe though. I've already uploaded tons of photos (mainly of my baby) to Picasa Web Albums, and was loathe to re-upload them to Facebook. Now there should be Facebook apps to embed/link Picasa albums in my profile/wall, right? Right. Only that they don't work with the new Facebook.

Today I finally found a new Facebook app, Picasa Tab, that actually works.

It pulls all your public Picasa albums into a Wall tab, and displays the photos right inside the Facebook interface, unlike the other apps which would actually redirect you to the Picasa website.

Viewers can even comment on the photos right in Facebook, although these comments won't be updated through to Picasa itself, as the app author wanted to keep Facebook comments more private.

The only caveat right now is that you'll only get a photo still for videos, but I guess that's asking too much for now. :)

US election day on Facebook

2008-11-05T09:58:00.001+08:00

The whole world is watching eh.

iGoogle haz new lookz

2008-10-18T10:10:00.004+08:00

iGoogle's just got a new look yesterday:

The tabs are now all lined up at the left of the screen, instead of across the top. This is quite alright if you have a wide screen, but for people like me who's got smaller resolutions, the screen real estate has really shrunk. Each widgets may now be "maximised" to fill up the whole content frame, like the Google Reader widget in the screenshot above.

My first impression: Whoa, it's like launching a new applications when you maximise these widgets, and something like a preview when you only expand them. Hmmmm... is Google going to make this into its own operating system? Y'know, do everything online, forget about installing OSes locally on your own machine and be tied to it?

UPDATE: iGoogle gives a tour of its new features.

New fun stuff from Google.

2008-09-25T10:16:00.005+08:00

Google Chrome. Ooooh. Me like.

PicasaWeb update with face recognition and name tags. Ooooooh. Me like. (Yeah yeah I know Flickr had it ages ago...)

Geeky Fan Girl!

2008-09-22T11:31:00.003+08:00

My colleagues, Sara and Gan, recently went to a Web-related conference in Singapore. Anticipating that Google and hence Dr Lee Kai-Fu would very likely be there, they took along a couple of his books (including my own copy of 《做最好的自己》 "Be Your Personal Best") to see if they could get his autograph.

Guess what? They got it! (The Google stickers and bookmark were from Google's exhibition booth. I thought at first Dr Lee had a Santa's sack with him to hand out Google goodies wherever he went...)

They told me Dr Lee was pretty surprised to see people bringing books "all the way to Singapore???" (he thought they were from Taiwan initially) just to get his autograph. Well Dr Lee, it's so rare to find someone who combines the best of both worlds from the Western "go-getter" attitudes and Oriental "ethical values of integrity and humility", and is happy to share his views on the younger generation. After reading your book and articles, I know that I'm not "stupid and naive" to want to do things my way all the time.

Wanted: Suggestions for Superheroine Moniker

2008-09-05T14:25:00.002+08:00

(I know I've said before that I'd post all baby fluff in the other blog, but she's just too cute for words and I really want more people to see her, even if it's really just one more...)

Needing the service of a superheroine? Look no further than me, the... er... ah.... hmmm. I need a superheroine moniker. Any suggestions?

Hush. I just sneaked into the enemy's secret hideout and trying to find out where they're keeping the hostages.

I hear a scream! Hang on, I'm coming!

You ain't getting away, you baddie!

Take that! *POW* *SMASH*

Another day, another baddie in the garbage can. I'm off!

Aging Laptop

2008-08-17T15:39:00.003+08:00

(Just to remind anyone who wants news of Hui Ning, my new daughter — head on to my other blog. And if you decide to venture there do be aware that there might be TMI at times...)

My Fujitsu laptop's showing symptoms of age, even though I've only had it for about a bit over two years. Then again I showed it no mercy, using it for >16 hours per day frequently, coupled with the temperature in M'sia...

Bottomline is, the fan refused to work, even at startup, about 2 months back. I get a loud beep at boot-up and an erroring declaring that the fan system is off. I was trying to knock off some projects before the baby arrived, so I continued using the laptop anyway. It probably wasn't a good idea. A few days back I found that after about 30 minutes of usage (without air-conditioning), the graphics card seems to go all wonky: in Windows, the screen just froze. I restarted the machine, and I see vertical stripes interspersed with the usual BIOS startup splash. In Debian though, X.org seemed to work OK, but come shutting down time, the console messages are a bunch of garbled text.

Uh-oh. Sounds like some stuff are getting fried. Back-up time. And only use the machine with air-conditioning on when it's absolutely necessary (like uploading Hui Ning's photos and videos, heheh.)

Then today, immediately on startup, the vertical stripes were already there in the BIOS startup. Windows is rendered unusable as even the login screen can't be displayed. Debian though... ok so the startup console messages look like some pig-latin encrypted code, but in due time X.org starts up fine and I'm here writing this blog post while backing up whatever else I should be backing up. (Why do I feel like writing "We cannot get out. They are coming. We cannot get out."??)

This laptop goes to the service centre tomorrow — hopefully we're not too late.

Welcome, Baby Hui Ning!

2008-08-04T23:01:00.000+08:00

Baby Hui Ning 慧宁 arrived roughly a week earlier, at 12:58pm on 30 July 2008. My water broke around 6a.m., so I guess my labour wasn't too long for a first child...

I'm still pretty exhausted (and time-constrained!) to blog much -- you know the drill ;-D In the meantime, here are some photos.

38 weeks

2008-07-29T15:58:00.002+08:00

Until I saw myself on film I had no clear idea how big I've actually become....

1.5 weeks to go (assuming we're following strict due dates) :D !

Double Yolk

2008-06-22T16:18:00.001+08:00

I was making a quick snack and out popped this twin of a egg into the saucepan. (Sure, call me kampung to even want to blog about this.)

iMac in the house

2008-06-10T11:06:00.003+08:00

After the desktop PC conked out yet again (the power supply this time), we've had it with PCs and Windows.

Result: We went out to Sunway carnival and got a spanking new iMac.

We love it. Lotsa things to explore.

Now we've got three OS'es in the house. BTW the wallpaper there is Semicolon from Vladstudio.com. (Also, the panda didn't come with the Mac...)

Here in My Home

2008-05-25T18:21:00.005+08:00

Nice song. Fun video (and I don't just mean identifying the personalities without looking at the credits). Soppy and too-good-to-be-true dream, though. Yes, I know I sound cynical. But I can't help the warm fuzzy feeling (and the sour cynical feeling) after listening/watching this.

The MP3 and QuickTime video can be downloaded for free at MalaysianArtistesForUnity. So go on, watch the video, download the mp3, embed the banner/video in your website/blog, spread the word. If only because it's a nice song.

Update: I badly needed a LaTeX fix, so I re-typeset the guitar chords (original .DOC version available at the site above). The LaTeX-ed guitar chord + lyrics sheet can be downloaded here.

Update 2: This is weird. My baby kicks whenever I play the song. HARD. Yes sweetie, mommy hopes that this'll be a good home for you too. A better one than now anyway.

Attack of the Sudden Visiting Researchers

2008-05-22T11:13:00.004+08:00

(This is the last in a series of ranty posts, about the events of a particularly... "exciting" week. Yeah, I hear many sighs of reliefs — or is it just one since I really only have a readership of one? )

'Twas the morning before the ScienceFund project presentation, and I was waiting for CC to come to the lab so that I could set up the demo system on his laptop.

When suddenly...

Mr T appeared and told me to quickly come to the office, 'cos the main office just made a surprise call saying that a team of visiting researchers from a Thai university are coming down to each of the labs, so, yeah, get ready to receive them and show them around.

"When's that happening?"

"In, uh, like, 5 minutes' time."

Well thank you Main Office for the short notice. Though I guess everyone forgot everything else with the ScienceFund projects for the last one and a half weeks, so it's probably unfair to blame them.

Receive the visitors, eh. (And then what?) Mr Tan the word was to brief them about the research we do. Sure, get someone to talk, but we were in a bit of a fix: Dr T wasn't around. Dr R wasn't around. I was the only RO around in the lab at the ungodly hour of 11am (hey everyone was exhausted the whole week scrambling for the presentations and reports). Mr T had already dragged out Dr S, but she's into linguistics and not really crazy about the "computational" part — and on seeing me she said "Oh good, you're here. You can do the talking then."

Ack.

Then I remembered about the brochures for last year's open day, and luckily we still have a few copies lying around in the office. And then it's scurrying back to the lab to hopefully find a big enough space for 7–8 people to huddle around a computer monitor (Dr S' suggestion) and to hopefully locate some online demos that we can show (Dr C from next door's suggestion).

They came.

I gabbed. Tried to gab. Then showed them the online machine translation prototype, the multilingual lexicontology (yeah it's a mouthful, but the real project name is even worse) and the (not quite reliable) sense tagger.

Surprisingly the visitors were deeply interested (and even impressed with the sense tagger)! The questions they asked showed that they were no strangers to NLP. They even left name cards (which I yet again embarrassingly told them I didn't have one since I'm a mere down-trodden RO. ) En A who escorted them around said that of all the labs visited thus far, this lab was the longest time they spent.

On a side note — En A (sorta cluelessly) remarked that this was also the most run-down/unimpressive (something to that effect, dunno the exact word used 'cos this was re-told to me later by Mr T) lab they've seen that day. To which Dr S retorted "Well this is the lab where the people do real work!"

Microsoft Office 2007 to support ODF?

2008-05-22T10:49:00.001+08:00

If what's reported in this PC World article is true, I'd be so happy. I can then happily work away on OpenOffice and e-mail them to all the other Microsoft Office users without converting them and getting a bunch of tables and bulleted lists wrangled in a the process!

Attack of the LaTeX Typesetting Job Windfall

2008-05-11T21:38:00.004+08:00

Well since it was a windfall I probably shouldn't call it an "attack" – but as we raced towards the end and with other stuff happening, it felt like it.

It was nearing mid-afternoon on Sunday and I was in the middle of downloading the latest versions of Apache Tomcat and PostgreSQL so that I could install my project system on Windoze, when I received an SMS from a USM PhD candidate. His conference paper was selected to be published in a Springer journal, but the catch was that it must be in LaTeX. He tried to learn it that morning (I greatly admire his courage), but gave up by afternoon. As it was a tight deadline he decided to offer me a bounty to do the job.

I'm always up for a LaTeX fix (it's the high I'm after not the $$, get that straight! ) so I said Yes. When's the deadline though? I was hoping that I could finish dealing with the ScienceFund project presentations first.

Tuesday, came the reply.

Yikes.

I decided that I still needed my LaTeX fix. Besides, this was my first paid LaTeX assignment! (Did I mention that it's the high I'm after and not the $$?)

The LaTeXing itself wasn't too difficult, although the conference organiser's failure to post the correct version of style files to be used made it a bit frustrating. We were told to go hunt the correct version down at the Springer website instead. Also a couple of not-so-trivial table formatting, but luckily the trusty LaTeX Companion book was ever helpful. In the end what proved to be my downfall were typos. With the deadline fast approaching we went absolutely frantic with the to-and-fro e-mailing and SMS-ing. These keep turning up till 11.59pm on Monday night, when I just couldn't hold my eyes open nor my head up anymore, and had to call it a night. Luckily my client didn't come across any more typos after that, and he submitted the paper in the morning.

(I'm really sorry about all those typos, J!)

In hindsight I probably charged a bit too low for so much effort, especially with my tight deadline and packed schedule at the time. I guess I should consider it as a First Client Discount though.

So if you have any LaTeX typesetting job (for a fee), why not try dropping me a line? It'd help a lot if you also attach existing text in soft copy (Word etc) if any, as well as information about the formatting or style guidelines required. A link to the conference organiser's or journal publisher's web page providing such info should do. A comfortable timeline for both you and me would be one week at least, so that we'd have time to review the outputs. Anything shorter than that and I'd either have to turn down the job or charge extra.

Please note that I will not typeset your thesis for you, though. I'd be happy to offer advice and answer questions on how to use the USM thesis template, or even design your university's template for you (price negotiable), but not typesetting your thesis itself.

And remember – I do things like this for the fun of LaTeXing, not for the money! Me, crazy? Sure, why'd you think I name this blog what it is now?

Well cheers, folks!

Attack of the Sudden Nation-wide ScienceFund Project Evaluations

2008-05-10T17:52:00.007+08:00

This, dear reader, is going to be the first in a continuous series of ranty posts. It's been an... exciting week for me.

Here's the chronology:

Apr 29, 11am:
The first inkling I had, was a fleeting comment from C.C. about his having to go down to Putrajaya on 7 May to present a ScienceFund project he's involved in. I thought his project was picked on by random, because that's what happened to another researcher before. Then he told me it's actually because MOSTI is requesting all the 1st cycle projects (ending May '08) to this evaluation/presentation workshop, so that they can decide whether they'll release the last payment.

O_O

What about my project on the multilingual dictionary then? Haven't heard anything. But I suppose all correspondences would've gone to Dr C's mailbox and she's on extended medical leave...

C.C. checked against the list of projects he had and told me my project wasn't listed. So it doesn't concern me then...

Apr 29, 1.15pm:
Back from lunch, and found a note on my table from Mr T. Well well weeeeell, whaddaya know. There's a second list of projects circulated just this morning and my project's slotted for 7 May, too. Talk about short notice.

It's all a bit spooky though, since I just finished all the programming and put the servlets online last week, and was actually going to update Dr T and Mr T via e-mail anyway.

After a quick discussion with Mr T, he went into doc compilation overdrive mode (harrassing Bendahari and RCMO for the respective docs, photocopying whatever docs and receipts he has on hand etc), and I went into PowerPoint overdrive mode. The best part is that many academics are on leave one day or another this week, since Labour Day is this Thursday, and – wait for it – almost all USM clerical staff are attending a seminar this week!

At least we didn't have to rush up on the technical development stuff. Also, Dr T will be around Cyberjaya/Putrajaya on 7 May (he'll be at a seminar in Port Dickson until 6 May) to present the project, so I won't have to travel down. Although Sara commented that if I went down nobody'd dare ask too many questions on seeing my bump...

Apr 29, 6pm:
MOSTI just won't disappoint – Dr T e-mailed to say that there's been a THIRD list and now one of his projects (in 2nd cycle) is also slotted for presentation, also on 7 May!

Apr 30:
Got most of the slides in order by last night, so today it was mainly checking over them and help brief H.H. and C.K. for Dr T's project.

Holiday tomorrow – don't care, am going to kick back and relax.

May 2:
It wasn't until late evening when the financial details came in, so I incorporated those at night. Also got together a bunch of documents to be printed out in hard copy first thing on Monday. Apparently there was also some RSVP slip (e-mailed out today) that had to be returned to MOSTI by... today. Eugh. Hopefully Dr T saw it; anyway I SMS'ed him to check his inbox in case he didn't.

May 3, around noon:
Dr T called in the morning – apparently he's already in Port Dickson since yesterday! Quickly called Mr T who's back at the office to continue all the photocopying. We'd have to send the RSVP on Dr C and Dr T's behalf; and hopefully it'd land in the right inbox since apparently we need to RSVP to different people for different panels...

Suddenly remembered that I'd better check with C.C. that he's sticking around in Putrajaya long enough to be in time to pass the projects to Dr T! More SMS frenzy. Turns out that they have the first slot 9.00–9.30am and plans to fly back to Penang by noon! More SMS frenzy to Dr T to see if he can make it to Putrajaya in the early morning.

Then decided to forget all about it as Dr T couldn't respond just yet (he's at the seminar remember?). Went to RedBox to semi-celebrate husband's birthday, semi-release stress (both of us needed a break), before heading to the World Music Festival (will blog that later! ) in the evening...

May 3, 7pm:
Was at the Botanical Gardens for the World Music Festival when C.C. sent an SMS saying that Dr T has arranged for him and H.H. to stay overnight at Dr T's place on 7 May – so no problem for him to hand over the docs to Dr T then!

Ah bliss.

But little was I to know...

May 4, 11am:
Got a call from Dr T asking me to install my system on C.C. or H.H.'s laptop, just in case there's no internet connection at the workshop venue. And we all know how very true that can be.

Yikes. I've never tried installing it, especially PostgreSQL with all that huge amount of data, on Windoze before!

May 5:
Stupid. Windoze. Wouldn't. Print. To the lab printer! Eventually I had to delete the printer, restart Windoze, add the printer again, for it to work. Bah. Well by noon I finally managed to print whatever docs I needed. Finalised the presentation slides and docs with Mr T in the afternoon, and he carried off the docs for binding/compilation.

I had to switch tracks a while and get rushing on a LaTeX typesetting job due the next morning, or today midnight... (more on that in another post.) Then spent the whole evening trying to work out the system installation/config/setup details on Windoze, till midnight. I'm getting worried. Them conceptual vectors data are really huge and seem to take a looooong while to load into the database.

May 6:
Sudden Attack of Visiting Researchers (more about that in a later post) in the mid-morning rather threw all of us off-balance. It was after lunch when I could start trying to set up the system on C.C.'s laptop. To my surprise it took less time than I expected – a bit over 2 hours. However PostgreSQL just managed to start up once: it refused to start again after I shut it down, so that I could show C.C. how to launch everything. As we were all damned tired I told C.C. and Dr T to use the demo video I created with CamStudio. The sense tagger can't run locally off the laptop anyway if the internet's inaccessible since it relies on our FDG server.

I hit home after burning the presentation slides and video onto a CD and passed everything to H.H. and C.C. I'm beat.

May 7:
So this is the day – but I slept in late anyway. Too, too tired. But I still made it to the lab relatively early (10am) to make sure that the server was still running. In the meantime Dr T called to confirm a few points in the slides; then C.C. called to tell me that while they do have Internet access there, the firewall blocks all requests to ports other than 80 (HTTP), both ingoing and outgoing.

Huh?! How stupid can that be?? They've probably just voided out all Apache Tomcat-based applications, and then some.

C.C. also appeared to have found what's wrong with the PostgreSQL installation; apparently I made a typo in postgres.conf! Once that's corrected, everything's running as expected – well except for the sense tagger, since it sends requests to port 8080 on the FDG server – and that's blocked. Meh. Luckily we still have the video.

In the afternoon C.C. SMS-ed back to say that they've finished all the presentations and the panels seemed satisfied. What a relief! (Although for some reason, the MOSTI people requested to bring back all the docs for my project with them.)

And now to bed! And now to bed!!!

iGoogle Artist Themes

2008-04-30T15:55:00.004+08:00

You can now customize your iGoogle page with themes by contemporary artists. They're all interesting, but some are definitely acquired tastes. :-D

A website of colours

2008-04-28T21:46:00.003+08:00

I'm really lousy when it comes to picking colours, especially if it's fiddling with RGB code to produce anything that looks remotely interesting. Luckily for me though there's COLOURlovers. Community users (called "lovers") post their concocted colour palettes, and can be downloaded as GIMP, Photoshop or HTML etc format. The blog posts are interesting reads, too. It's all really very nice.

More kitty fluff

2008-04-22T11:30:00.004+08:00

Awwwwwwwww me want!!! Me want!!!

Fractal Google Gadget

2008-04-19T23:42:00.002+08:00

Mmmmmm. More eye candy...

Wow. Hibernate worked!

2008-04-14T21:47:00.003+08:00

On my Fujitsu laptop. Running on Debian. Wooow.

Debian yammered about starting the snapshot process (checkpointing, Hussein sez) and proceeded to write n number of pages. Once that's done, the laptop powered down, and I went out to dinner. When I powered on the computer again, what greeted me was the GRUB menu. And I was thiking "well so much for false hopes..."

Once I booted into Debian though, it started to yammer about resuming from n pages of image (checkpoint-restore, Hussein sez) and voila! It's back to exactly where I left off!

Both the checkpointing and restoring took longer than in Windows, though.

ps: Apparently Hibernate is not expected to work usually:

<obiwan> hey guys
<obiwan> 'Hibernate' actually worked for my colleague.
<ahu> .. once
<ijuz> probably some new drug
<obiwan> No, it really worked

Hahahahahahaaaahahaha! :D

Viruses never looked so good

2008-04-12T16:55:00.003+08:00

MIT grad student Alex Dragulescu was asked to turn viruses, spams and spywares into graphics with visualisation algorithms -- and the eye candies that emerged are simply c00l. (The thing at the top is MyDoom.)

The other blog -- on Fluffy Baby Stuff

2008-04-05T23:10:00.003+08:00

My friend Hussein was expressing his trepidation of me spouting fluffy baby rants on this blog once it comes into this world come August. (I suspect he's also rather apprehensive of having cases of TMI.)

Fear not, friend. I promise that all baby fluff stuff will be posted at this blog -- since such fluff doesn't really "fit" here anyway (think baby talk, brand comparisons of baby cribs etc). So you don't have to read all about it if you don't want to, simply don't subscribe to the other blog feed. ;-)

One thing, though: kitty fluff do belong here! Any questions?

Lost Li'l Bird

2008-04-05T22:37:00.002+08:00

This little guy got lost and made his way into our house the other night.

It was getting quite a bit confused, chirping, hopping and flying around the house in frustration for not being able to find its way out of the house again. Eventually we had to turn off all the house lights except the porch light to guide it out again.

HAL's Legacy

2008-03-31T15:56:00.005+08:00

Quite a while back, while I was surfing for "fun" bits of information to be included in some course notes, I came across this e-book version of Hal's Legacy.

Hal (or more formally, Hal-9000), as you might recall, is the supercomputer in the science fiction book/movie classic 2001: A Space Odyssey who (yes, I insist, who) eventually committed murder in an endeavor of self-preservation. Hal's Legacy is a great book for students interested in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, robotics, or just geeks in general. And it's online in its entirety for free!

Enjoy!

牛奶＋柠檬＋蜜糖＋薄荷牙膏

2008-03-06T15:01:00.003+08:00

肚子里的小瓜总在我进食后呱呱叫，胃又好胀好胀气，心烧了又烧……

四处搜索，多番尝试下，竟然发现以下几个方法可行：

蜜糖泡水，再加一片柠檬。（冷热随喜）
牛奶！反正牛奶是最容易汲取钙质等营养的饮品。
饭后勤刷牙，尤其用薄荷牙膏——据说口腔清爽可以减少胃酸分泌。

iGoogle Theme Fest!

2008-01-17T10:59:00.000+08:00

Good news to "personalisation" fans out there - Google just released the iGoogle Themes API so that you can create (and post) your own themes!

A slew of new themes have been posted, and expect more as people start to pounce on the Themes API. Here are a few to whet your appetites:

"Earth-Light"

"Adventures in Lollipop-Land"

"Countryside"

New USM Thesis LaTeX Class Files

2007-12-13T11:47:00.000+08:00

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

2007-11-27T11:41:00.000+08:00

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

Drunken Kitten

2007-11-02T23:06:00.000+08:00

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

2007-10-16T19:04:00.000+08:00

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

2007-10-10T18:36:00.000+08:00

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

2007-10-01T10:35:00.000+08:00

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

2007-09-17T17:50:00.000+08:00

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……）