OLS 2007 Proceedings Available For Download

Ottawa Linux Symposium has come and gone again, and for yet another year I didn't get to attend.

However, for those of us who missed it, we can always live vicariously through the proceedings.

Rise Of The Ogonek

An ogonek is a diacritic mark for some alphabets in Polish, Lithuanian, Navajo, Western Apache, Chiricahua and Tutchone (the last four are indigenous languages of the native Americans) which is used to indicate nasalisation. It looks like a little hook under a letter, like so : ę.

I encountered it back when I was writing my thesis, when I had to cite a Polish professor named Jan Węglarz and had trouble rendering the ogonek with LaTeX. It turns out that you need the following package:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

Once you have that, you can use \k{} to add an ogonek to the letter in the curly braces, say for example:

Jan W\k{e}glarz

The above produces:



Ta da! An ogonek!

Ogoneks should not be confused with cedillas, which is a hook that goes the other way (ç). For more information on ogoneks, check out the Wikipedia entry.

The Kittens Are Growing Up

The little kittens in my yard are growing up fast. The grey one is the friendliest, and loves to run up to us and roll around and nuzzle his human friends. The other two are more reserved. Here are the ginger and grey ones, growing up into fine cats.

Bumblebee

Here is a Bumblebee action figure from the new Transformers movie. He turns into a Chevrolet Camaro. This edition of the toy is the "2008 concept Camaro" which he turns into later in the film.

These shots were taken with the H2:

Camera

Today I went out to get myself a neat new camera, as a birthday present for myself. It was really hard to find the one I was looking for, a Sony DSC-H2. The slightly better H5 was completely unavailable, so I got the H2 instead. It's a neat little prosumer device, with a lot of manual control. Sure it's no DSLR, but I can't afford DSLR lenses anyway, so there isn't much point in getting one.

There is a review of the H2 at dpreview.com. The CCD is six megapixels (it's more than enough, since megapixels don't matter much past 6 for this kind of camera) and it's got 12x optical zoom which will come in very handy for photographing birds and other animals that are camera-shy. Thanks to Megan, Michelle and Jeff for helping me decide upon a suitable camera.

Hanim's Wedding

Hanim, my old friend from my undergrad days, has tied the knot. Her house was all the way in Serendah, so I had to go to KL for the weekend last Saturday and hitch a ride there (thanks Aliza and Nazarul for the transportation).

Here are photos from the wedding:

On Sunday, I had some time in KL so I met Azri for breakfast in the morning, and met my old schoolmates later in the day.

I took some nice shots of KL:

KL's iconic skyline, with the Petronas twin towers.

My penguins in KL, taken from a hotel window.

The penguins inside the food court in Suria KLCC.

The trip back was no fun though. I got caught in a flash flood on the way to the bus station, had to wade through knee-deep flood water and the bus was late. Something has to be done about the flood problem in KL.