LocoRoco: Yellow Rolly Ball of (Weird) Cuteness

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

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

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

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……）

Ladybirds Red and Bamboo Leaves Green

(Well, I'm sorry that my garden is so boring, I'm sure...)

English-Malay Translation Google Gadget

So I was bored (or having a writer/researcher's block, depressed to tears, too busy P-ing, no research inspirations, whatever). So I decided to try writing a Google Gadget for UTMK's EBMT solution:



Basically, it's a "lite" version of our research group's example-based machine translation solution (read: a Universal Translator in the making). For the moment it supports English-Malay (both directions) translation, and we still have whole tons of ideas for improving its speed, accuracy, coverage etc.

I tried submitting the Google Gadget to the public searchable Directory, but apparently there's an approval process, so it doesn't show up yet. Meanwhile if you'd like to add it to your personalised Google homepage, you'll have to add the gadget by its URL: http://liantze.googlepages.com/utmk-ebmt.xml

Stay tuned!

UTMK Open Day + Didier's Farewell Party

Goooood I'm still feeling dead tired after our mini-expo and Didier's farewell party on Thursday...

I don't think I can write anything about it yet, too physically/emotionally draining, so hop along to Hussein's take on it, or take a look at the photo slideshow:



All pics were taken by either Hussein or Kak Azimah, which are also on my Picasa Web Album:

UTMK Open Day + Didier's Farewell Party

Come back again soon and often if you can, Didier!

Generating JPGs and PNGs from Tikz/PGF

Gem of a post found at Nabble.com:

Re: Generating PNG or JPG ?

by Kjell Magne Fauske Mar 23, 2007; 02:47am

On 3/22/07, Hari Sundar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is it possible to generate images from tikz code ? I would like to put these
> images on a webpage and was wondering if there is an automatic way of
> generating the images rather than taking screenshots.
>

Sure, I do it every time I update the gallery I maintain at
http://www.fauskes.net/pgftikzexamples/

My approach is to use Ghostscript. Lets say I have a tex file named
figure.tex The work flow is approximately like this:

> pdflatex figure.tex

I then run ghostscript on the generated file figure.pdf to generate a PNG:

> gs -dNOPAUSE -r400 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=figure.png -dBATCH figure.pdf

(On Windows the command is gswin32c. )

>From the resulting PNG file I generate a jpg thumbnail.

To crop the figures I use a package called preview[1]. The package
provides several ways of previewing parts of your document. For
example, adding this to your document preamble:

\usepackage[active,tightpage]{preview}
\PreviewEnvironment{tikzpicture}

will extract every tikzpicture environment. If you use pdflatex, every
tikzpicture will be put on a separate page in the resulting pdf
document. To add a margin around the figure add:

\setlength\PreviewBorder{10pt}%

[1] http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/preview.html


Regards,
Kjell Magne Fauske

People are downloading my stuff!

OMIGOSH, people are actually starting to download my LaTeX scribblings! *tears of joy*

That people wanted the workshop slides are expected; anyway the colloquium committee put up a copy at their website too. Surprisingly the LaTeX installation walkthrough for Windows is the most sought-after file now! And the Absolute Beginner short guide! And the USMthesis style files!!

w00t!!

LaTeX Workshop Delivered

I'm still catching my breath after giving the LaTeX workshop on Tuesday (26th June). Talked non-stop for 1 hour 20 minutes and I still had several things I couldn't cover in time, especially demonstrating on-the-spot how an ACM conference paper can be produced from a default article document class, and show a few pages from the USMthesis package, etc.

The audience (20~30 people including both lecturers and postgrad students) seems to have liked the talk, and although I don't have any proper feedback data, here are some comments passed to me after the talk:

• people have heard of LaTeX before, but have no idea how it's used.
• people have heard of the wonderful "beautiful" outputs of LaTeX, but until I showed them a side-by-side comparison of output from LaTeX and Word, they had no idea what kind of "beautiful" output people meant.
• people wanted to try LaTeX before, but didn't know what to install.
• although I told them that some features like auto-generation of table of contents are also available in Word, people actually told me that they know about the feature in Word but "it's too hard to use", whereas in LaTeX one line of code will definitely get it done.

The fact that the Colloquium programme book was created with LaTeX (I helped the committee to do it within 2 days) helped convinced the audience with physical proof of what LaTeX can do...

Maybe within the next week or two, I'll get more comments and feedback via e-mail, or something. But at least now I've managed to raise some interest here...

Vector Graphics Application with LaTeX PGF/Tikz

I simply must blog this before I go off for a meeting. Nicola Talbot has written a vector graphics program, JpgfDrawing, that can export to LaTeX code that renders the graphics using the Tikz/PGF package. PGF is used in the Beamer package, and I played with Tikz while preparing for the LaTeX workshop. It's the best drawing package for use with pdflatex I've encountered so far. (I'm not a fan of PS files, so I don't use PSTricks much, sorry.)

Making booklets

So I was asked to help produce the program/abstract book for the CSPC'07 (Postgrad Colloquium) with LaTeX. I said Yes since here's a legitimate opportunity to get my LaTeX fix. ;-)

The end result was to be an A5-sized booklet, i.e. 2-up pages on an A4 sheet, folded. I tried the LaTeX booklet package, but it wouldn't play nice with the geometry package, not without me twiddling explicitly with the page sizes and margins. Dear, dear./>
Thank goodness for GNU/Linux though, since we can always use psutils for producing booklets, and we want PDF outputs anyway. And so, once the full-sized A4 abstractbook.pdf is done, these commands spring into action:

$ pdftops -paper A4 abstractbook.pdf abstractbook.ps
$ psbook -s40 abstractbook.ps absbook-sig.ps
$ psnup -n2 -pa4 absbook-sig.ps abstractbooklet.ps
$ ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 abstractbooklet.ps


where the -s40 parameter to psbook signifies there should be 40 pages in the booklet. The number must be a multiple of 4. It doesn't matter if your full-size doc doesn't have the right number of pages; psbook will add blank pages as necessary, so just round up your actual page number to the next multiple of 4 to pass to psbook.

TA-DAAAAA!!!!




It was a learning experience especially the following points:

• Do not be a smart-aleck and try to reset page numberings when making twoside documents. Let \frontmatter and \bodymatter do the job. Otherwise the odd/even page margins get all messed up.
  
• Use the ltxtable package for longtable + tabularx. But then each longtable (with tabularx column specs) needs to be in its own individual file.
  
• On the whole, LaTeX is relatively easier than
  
  • coaxing printers to co-operate.
    
  • proof-reading.
    
  • proof-reading.
    
  • ESPECIALLY the proof-reading.
    

Note to Self

秀萍当妈妈了！

Cynthia's a very close friend from my A-level and Warwick days. She's the kind of person that takes on life's challenges head-on, and I admire her greatly for that. So when she and Andrew (another Warwick coursemate!) got married, I was no end happy for them, and especially for Cyn.

Now they're proud parents of little Joelle Chow! She was born 9th June, 2007 at Royal Free Hospital, London. O joyous day, congratulations Andrew and Cynthia and little Joelle!

tex4ht

曾经好玩地尝试了 latex2html, HeVeA, TtH 等等。简单的 LaTeX 文件是没问题啦，都可以生成不错的 HTML，但若有特别的宏包、自己定义的指令，那就非常对不起了。（其中 TtH 的速度还真不是普通的快！）

最近发现了 tex4ht，似乎还没有什么可以难倒它的！皆因它会先生成一个 .dvi 文件，再从这个文件生成 HTML, OpenDocument 等其他格式。默认的 HTML 是有点丑啦，但可以自己定义 CSS 或其他设置来改善。最重要的是，啥宏包（或是自己定义）的指令都可以处理哦。

起初是有个小疑问：我已习惯了 \includegraphics{file} （即不写明 file extension），结果 tex4ht 就老是要找 .eps 文件……而我又不想改动成 file.eps 那么累赘，还真花了不少时间在网上搜索。最后终于找到解决方法。先要一个 myconfig.cfg 文件：

\Preamble{html}
\DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.jpg,.png,.eps,.pdf}
\begin{document}
\EndPreamble

然后运行（基本指令，当然还可以加上其他配置值）

htlatex myfile "myconfig"

就可以了。

The Rage with Patents

Why this obsession with patents? Why? Patents for industrial and engineering designs, I understand. But patents for algorithms and software procedures and computer applications?

Maybe I should have become a lawyer like my dad secretly wished (before he realised-- happily, I think -- I had a bigger knack for maths and such).

Well here's what Computer Science's Yoda (that's what he is to me) has to say about software patents: Prof Donald Knuth's 1994 Letter to the Patent Office.

ProTeXt 2.0 is out!

After... what was it? 2 years? There's finally a new version of ProTeXt! It features MikTeX 2.5, TeXnicCenter Greengrass and TeXMaker (w00t! I loved it on Debian! Still not quite sure how it fares against TeXnicCenter on Windoze though)!

It seems though that localtexmf is no longer supported under MikTeX 2.5, apparently it provides other ways of configuring user's own TEXMF trees. We'll see how that works out, but I definitely need to get up to speed with this for the LaTeX workshop.

Well, download time.

LaTeX Workshop!

I got an invitation from Dr Dhanesh to conduct a LaTeX tutorial/workshop for the upcoming Postgraduate Co*******m! (Sorry, still some repressed memories from 3 years back there.)

The initial idea was to give a tutorial on using my usmthesis LaTeX template. But then we realised that the available slot is only 1 hour, and it's hardly practical to assume the audience having prior knowledge about LaTeX. (Now that's a vision, don't you think?)

So by today, Dr Dhanesh suggested to keep it as an "Introduction to LaTeX" walkthrough, and only talk briefly about the thesis template if we have enough time.

Boy, I am rather thrilled about this. I hope I'll be able carry it off.

VladStudio Wallpapers

Vladstudio.com 依然是我最喜欢的网络艺术家。他的笔触有种温暖的油灯感觉，又像冬天的晚上等着你回家的壁炉里的火焰……当然，更过瘾的是他还时常恶搞名画及网络2.0。

Bash commands and scripts

I love Bash shell commands and scripts. Really, I do. Where would I be without all them one-liners to *bang* *zip* process those huge dictionary text files in less than 5 seconds?

Except that sometimes I need 30 minutes to look for an obscure option and how to use it exactly to get the result I want.

For instance, sort is cool. It sorts lines so fast no spreadsheet application is worth a second, nay, even a first thought. Heck, it even ferrets out unique lines calmly!

Then I have this file, which is all fields of numbers, e.g.

1   1    0    0    0
1   2    2    0    2
...

And I needed it to be sorted by the first field, then the second. Running plain sort on it gave me

1     1     0     0    0
1    10     0    10   10
1    11     ...
...
1  1921   ...
1     2      ...

OK, so it's not seeing the numbers as numbers, it's seeing them as ASCII strings. A man page look-up later, I tried sort -n. Then sort -k, then with both options. To no avail. Time to Google.

30 minutes of surfing later, I finally found this nugget of an example that did the trick:

sort -k 1n,1 -k 2n,2

See, you have to state explicitly (via -k) that the first key starts and ends at field 1, and to treat it as a number, and repeat it with field 2 (or any other fields you'd like to use as the sort key) as well.

I love Bash commands.