Month: October 2004

ProTeXt

New LaTeX distribution based on MikTeX. http://tug.org/ftp/texlive/protext/ It bundled MikTeX together with TeXnicCenter, ghostview, some other tools, and installation documentation. Good all-in-one CD to keep, when you have to install TeX for friends a lot. (the download is a 350 MB zipped CD image)

The Death Truck

[textile]

That is what the singapore press called it, and I expected nothing else. In fact, my only surprise is that it has taken this many days before the story was splashed across the front page.

Singapore might have been friendly when their leader visits Thailand, but they are never slow in painting the country brutal and uncivilized in local and international press. Many times in the past, such story were picked up by CNN and friends not from their correspondences in Thailand, but from singapore press. Why? The version here sounded much more gruesome. Many people has explained Singapore’s action with conspiracy theories against Thailand. And I’m beginning to believe it more everyday.

What is it with not allowing any thing to be said about your own government, yet stories with little or no research about other countries are encouraged. Lee Kuan Yew once “said”:http://www.singapore-window.org/sw01/010111re.htm

“democracy and a free press did not necessarily lead to a good government”

Super duper phone

This is not marketing talk, Joi’s phone is a 3G phone wireless payment device (multi-network) camera (2 of them) biometric reader has mini SD slot works with international SMSs (finally!) Oh, the japanese! Life is so unfair Joi Ito’s Web: My F900iC

S5

[textile]

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

Eric Meyer, the grandfather of CSS, has done it again. S5 is short for “Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System”. It uses only XHTML, CSS, and javascript to make decent slide shows, which display swiftly in all standard compliant browsers.

The goods:

* A single XHTML file for a whole slide show
* mouse and keyboard responds like normal slide show programs, jumping back and ahead, or jump to a particular page.
* Slide template = 1 CSS file. Ha! This is my stuff.
* With separate screen and print CSS, one file can be used for both the slides and compact printout
* I suppose with some “display: none” trick, one can make a _speaker’s note_ CSS as well.

Check out the “introductory slides,”:http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/s5-intro.html and make sure to see the source. Beautiful semantic XHTML!

Ring resonator becomes optical transistor

It’s not everyday you see photonic research news on slashdot, and this looks pretty interesting. A ring resonator is waveguide made into a ring shape, and light can be confined inside if it resonate with the ring cavity. If it is made of active materials, it becomes ring laser. Another straight waveguide built on the […]