Edit and annotate your PDF files without using expensive Adobe Acrobat tools
Converts PDFs to individual Postscript pages. Then using the application, you can annotate the document by overlaying texts. Good for filling up pdf forms
Monthly Archive for November, 2007
Blog about technology based tools for academics. It is targetted for the humanities
ACADEMIC PRODUCTIVITY is a survival guide for the 21st century researcher. Written by a small team of academics focusing on the topics on knowledge acquisition, production and dissemination, new technologies and productivity strategies.
Discussion on how LaTeX is far superior to conventional word processors. Truly computer typesetting is an art
The article stresses on using styles to layout your documents.
A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my desktops from Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn to 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Using the upgrade instructions from the Ubuntu website, I used the network upgrade method for Ubuntu servers. I did not want to use the update-manager application to manage the upgrade because of a bad upgrade experience from Dapper Drake. To resolve my previous problem, I performed a complete reinstall of my system.
Most blogs and reviews of Gutsy highlights enhanced 3D Desktop support using compiz. For my non-Linux friends, below are some screenshots of my desktop:
The figure above shows the Shift Switcher plugin. It cycles through all of the window applications through a nice panel shuffler interface. Below is the “Mac-like” Scale Window plugin. It gives an overview of all the windows present on my Desktop.
Another key upgrade of Gutsy was the shift from using the teTeX disribution to TeXlive. These are the package distribution for the LaTeX/ TeX typesetting suite. As an academic, this is one of the most important applications in my workstation’s setup. Here is an excerpt from the tetex-bin transition package:
teTeX is no longer developed upstream, and has been replaced by the TeX Live collection. This is a transitional package to bring former teTeX users a decent selection of TeX Live packages. It can be safely removed (unless some external packages still depend on tetex-bin).
Note, however, that the functionality of the TeX Live subset that is chosen is not exactly the same as that of tetex-bin, due to the different splitting schemes.
When I upgraded my home desktop, the LaTeX upgrade took most of the upgrade time because it keeps caching the fonts for every package. Thus, I first remove the tetex-* packages from my office workstation before performing another upgrade. When the upgrade to Gutsy was finished, I installed the related texlive-* packages.
Since the Asia Regionals site was moved back to Singapore from Manila. Dr. Raffy Saldana, the regional contest director wants to keep the momentum of competitive programming in the Philippines. So Computing Society of the Philippines (CSP) decided to organized an ICPC-style nationwide programming contest. The event was hosted by De La Salle University-Canlubang.
A parallel event to the programming contest is a series of talks sharing best programming practices regarding ACM-stylecompetitive programming. Ateneo de Manila University’s head coach, Dr. Pablo Manalastas shared mentoring stratagies. I was invited to speak about “Best Practices in Computer Programming” together with Topher Rigor. We were both members of The Linden BoyZ who particpated in the 2006 San Antonio World Finals. Below is the slide presentation of my part of the talk:
In the first slides of my presentation, I told the audience that ICPC-style programming contests does not promote good programming practice. I reminisced how we used obscure variable names like z, zz, zzz, ___, ___, _____ . And then the rest of the talk was about how to build skills individually and as a team. The talk we delivered was very short and I tried as much as I can to stretch the program by referring to key programming contests events and how we tackled challenges. I felt very much like a retired soldier telling war stories to his grandchildren.
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