粘土小玩意（二）

这其实是个音乐盒，作成蛋糕的样子。



海底世界相框。由于遇到农历新年，又要出差，差不多用了两个月才完成。



什么？你想看看之前的作品？有啊，看看吧。

Lone~ly~the path you have cho~sen~

First of all, greatest congratulations to Tan Yifen for being an International Winner of the L’Oreal-Unesco Awards for Women in Science 2010. Making Sg Petani and SM Sin Min proud, yeah.

But what reverberated most with me were these profound quotes, excerpt from her interview with the Star (linked above):

“A researcher faces a lot of failures. When you conduct an experiment, you may have to repeat it a few hundred times, and it could take a week to get the final result, which means that everything you’d done before that is wasted.”

::nods::nods::

The lack of money is another common problem for researchers. “You see your other coursemates who graduated the same time as you did. You choose to further your studies but they opt to start their careers. By a certain stage, they already have a monthly pay of say, RM4,000 to RM5,000 and are buying houses and cars, whereas you’re still struggling with finances, and trying to get scholarships and financial support.”

::sob:: The Never-ending Quest of Grant Proposals…

Handling failure, therefore, is part and parcel of the job. How does Tan do it? “I go home and have a good cry. Next day, I go back to the lab and start all over again,” she said.

You have no idea how often I’ve done that myself.

I feel like one good big cry myself right now.

Open-Source Licenses

This article gives quite a good overview of the various open-source licenses, written in an easy-to-understand way. Don't be fooled by FUD ever again.

Happy π Day!

π = 3.14159265358979323846...

New Personal Site (and the Inanity of Web Filters)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use Firefox the Vim Way

Now how cool is this? Use vi-like key bindings to navigate the Web in Firefox!

Now I wonder if the emacs-ians will be up in arms

LaTeX Introductory Workshop at MMU

I gave an introductory workshop to L^aT_eX at the Multimedia University (Cyberjaya campus) today, on my co-supervisor's invitation. Anyone who's interested in the materials can download them from the workshop webpage, including the slides, worksheet, sample code for the exercises, installation guide for MiKTeX in Windows.

We had 19 participants, and while it wasn't full capacity, I'm still thankful for that number because 1. it still took up a fair bit of the lab space, and 2. that's just about the number I can handle, because this was a hands-on workshop, so people were raising their hands left and right with questions, debugging errors, etc. We even had 4 participants who came all the way from the Malacca campus! Wow, thank you!

Overall feedback was quite positive, which is good. I'm of the opinion of the more people show aptitude, experience (however meagre) and interest in using L^aT_eX, the more willing conference organisers and journal publishers will be to accept L^aT_eX submissions.

(YES, I'm talking about you, M'sian conference organising secretariat, sir/madam. Please stop insisting on "Word submissions only" because 2 out of my 3 Word submissions have been mangled in a bad way in the final proceedings!)

Murphy's Law

I've been notified by Google Pages since April last year that they were going to shut down soon, and that all pages will be automatically migrated to Google Sites in June. I set up redirection for my automatic translation Google Gadget config XML, but otherwise, I decided to wait for the auto-migration to see how things would look in Google Site, before deciding whether I needed to hunt out a new hosting solution.

June came and went, and no migration. Then September. Then December. Then 2010, and on to March. Still nothing happened.

So when I needed to host some files for an upcoming training workshop, I thought "och, what's the odd of them migrating me now, after 9 whole months of nothing happening?" and happily uploaded a new page + files to Google Pages.

I know what you're thinking now. Perfect cliché thought to invite disaster, eh? I know, I know it's my fault to procrastinate anyway, but then again...

And so, 'twas the night before the workshop, and I logged on to Google Pages to make the finishing touches. And lo and behold, my website had been migrated, the CSS and layout in shambles. Upon logging on to Google Sites and attempting to edit the migrated pages, they lost all their CSS decorations and designs.

To be fair, since all the design was done with CSS and content/style separation and all that, the semantics and core information of pages are still present. But it's painful to look at the bare pages, you know?

And in the long run, Google Sites is not, I repeat, is NOT flexible enough to allow custom CSS and HTML and whatnots, and therefore wasn't what I liked at all.

Eventually I "borrowed" web space from my research group's web site to temporarily host the files needed for the workshop the following day. But I'm gonna re-migrate my website after I come back from the workshop, thanks to a friend who very generously agreed to let me have room on his domain (Thank you Hussein!) :D

How will the migration go? Find out!

LTNS MySQL

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

Best Grad School Advice

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

Paycheck!

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

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

Google Gravity

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

Google Reconsidering Operations in China

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

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

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.

U of Warwick's Seasonal Greetings

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

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

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!

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.