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.

Burning ISO Images

The default CD and DVD-R burning application for Debian is called "wodim" (Write Optical Disc IMage). It's a fork of Jörg Schilling's cdrecord, which changed its license to the GPL-incompatible CDDL after... well, we won't go there.

To burn a CD or DVD image I usually do something like the following:

$ /usr/bin/wodim -v -data -eject -dao speed=10 dev=/dev/cdrom file.iso

The options are -v for verbose, -data for CD-ROM mode 1 (Yellow Book, the usual data format), -eject for ejecting the disc after burning, -dao for Disc-At-Once mode, speed=10 indicates a data transfer rate of 10 (replace with something sensible for your drive) and dev=/dev/cdrom should point to your CD device. The file you want to burn is file.iso. This apparently works as well for DVD ISO images as well as CDs. The wodim manual page recommends doing this as root.

To create an ISO image quickly from a directory, you can do this:

$ genisoimage -r -J -V CDLabel -o image.iso /path/to/files

The options are -r for generating the SUSP and RR records (it's a necessary step), -J for Joliet, -V CDLabel for the 32-character volume label and -o image.iso specifies the output file (replace as needed). The /path/to/files will contain the root directory of your CD.

You can test mount the ISO image as follows:

$ mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0 image.iso /path/to/mountpoint


If you want to verify that the data was written correctly, see the guide I wrote here.

I put this post up here because I keep forgetting how to burn ISO images :).

Farms

After leaving the hotel, my mom and I took a trip round Penang, visiting some fun places. Our first stop was the Butterfly Farm, which I hadn't visited in ages. They have some interesting critters there, which I took pictures of.

There are displays like this set up all over the place, with hibiscus flowers arranged in the shape of a butterfly to attract the bugs.

This is a butterfly close-up on the red hibiscus display.

Here's a blue one on a leaf.

In this tank you can see a large pig-nosed turtle.

There's an iguana!

Another one!

This praying mantis perches on a twig, waiting for hapless little insects to chew up.

A butterfly flaps its wings in Penang, and it rains in New York. If it rained in New York recently, it's this guy's fault.

A giant brown gecko in a glass display crawls on the wall.

This is an interesting lizard, but I forgot to note the name of the species.

After a trip around the Butterfly Farm, we headed off to the Tropical Fruit Farm. We didn't actually explore the place, but I did have a glass of overpriced guava juice.

Here I am having a drink.

The view here is breathtaking.

At The Beach

We had a 3-day seminar at a hotel near Feringgi Beach in Penang from Friday till Sunday morning. I managed to take a few shots which I am quite happy with.

This looks fun.

A hut which nobody lives in. I bet it's just there for tourists to take photos of.

Two penguins who know where their towel is. Thanks to Moosey for editing this photo to make it look spiffier (no, the penguins were not pasted in, they are actually there).

10 Things To Remember When Your Doctor Is House

1. Don't lie to your doctor, he hates that.
2. It's not lupus. It's never lupus.
3. Beware the MRI machine of doom! Something bad always happens in there.
   
4. You will get a seizure at least once.
   
5. You may go into cardiac arrest at least once, but they'll zap you back to life, no worries.
6. You may bleed like crazy from your orifices too, watch out for that.
   
7. Leave the key to your home somewhere easy to find. Your doctors need to break in to save your life.
   
8. If you're taking drugs it means you have a serious problem. However, it's perfectly ok for your doctor to be an addict.
9. If you need a transplant, you'll probably get it. Your doctor always gets his way with such things.
10. If you're getting worse, it just means you're going to get better soon! Or maybe you'll die, which is a bummer.