Another Grad School Quote

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!! 

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

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?

Aging Laptop

(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.

Attack of the LaTeX Typesetting Job Windfall

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

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!!!

当研究生们开始脑筋不正常

点题！当大家都开始被无理的压力搞得疯疯癫癫，这就是咱的研究室的下场！


我们非常极之迫切需要一个出气筒，一个供我们暴力以待的沙包！！


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

总之。我们很想要 go crazy 啦！

News about the Bridge Closure

News story about the Penang Bridge closure in International Herald Tribune

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

[Insert 10 expletives of your choice here]

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

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

Bomb Scare on Penang Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PhD Comics Soap

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

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

快疯了

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

Quest of the Holy Sticker: 夺贴奇兵

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

I FINALLY GOT IT TODAY!

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

我终于向宽频低头

是，我家终于装了Streamyx。可笑的是，网速竟然可以比 dial-up 还慢或是完全没有线！

别对顾客/消费人那么苛刻可以吗？我的耐心是有限度的！别怪我有其他选择的时候，毫不犹豫的移情别恋！

继续发牢骚

结果 MIMOS-USM 的卫星研究所又泡汤了：链结

若想太多的话，还真的可以有一千零一个阴谋论。;-) 得了得了，想那么多干嘛？做事去！

好久不见

啊啊，好久没写帖子了。又忙，又累。有时一些想法又不想留下日后的呈堂证据。（那干嘛学人开部落格啊？？）呵呵。顺其自然吧，我才不想写帖子这回事又变成再一单差事呢。