汉字标准格式

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。

Upcoming LaTeX Talk

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

《JUMP》之巅＋科技浪潮之巅

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

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

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

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

Vote Plato!

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

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

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.

Happy π Day!

π = 3.14159265358979323846...

New Personal Site (and the Inanity of Web Filters)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Grad School Advice

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

Google Gravity

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

iiWAS2009

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.

Book Printed — Finally

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.

RegEx Tutorial and Tools

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

PicasaWeb adds automatic translation of comments

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

 

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.

Transitional and Strict DOCTYPEs

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).

iGoogle haz new lookz

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.

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...)

iMac in the house

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...)

iGoogle Artist Themes

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

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.