27 Jul 2008
With any luck, (i.e. if I managed to follow this howto properly), all the guys at Multiply should see this post as if it were from Multiply. If by any chance, you are in multiply, and you are reading this. Woohoo!!! Success. Otherwise… Just move along.
Thanks to Scion for suggesting that I cross post to multiply. This way, I get a “wider” audience (at least in the Philippines).
27 Jul 2008
After reading about it in this cool blog, I’ve enabled OpenID on The AFC.
This means that anyone with an OpenID can now comment using their OpenID url. Amazingly, that means anyone from:
I think it’s a great way of improving the inter-operability of different blogging / social networking platforms. It will definitely mean a little more convenience for those who will comment on this blog since they won’t have to type all those info to comment. Just type your OpenID url on the text box with the OpenID logo.
Enable OpenID on your own wordpress site by installing the OpenID WP Plugin just as I did. You can also install the OpenID Delegation Plugin to make your website (i.e. http://urriza.net/blog) your very own OpenID identity. So now I can comment on my LiveJournal and Blogger friends using my own URL. Nice.
23 Jul 2008
Woohoo! I’m going to the 1st ever WordCamp in Southeast Asia. WordCamp Philippines 2008.
For those who’ve never heard of WordCamp (like me, just a few minutes ago), it’s the premiere event where people can gather to talk about anything and everything related to WordPress. WordPress is the opensource blogging platform which runs the AFC (this blog). It’s community developed, meaning nobody really owns it. This also means that a lot of the features (and there are a lot) are developed by the community, for the community. This open-ness is the main reason I chose WordPress when I started the AFC.
I actually heard of this from a friend of mine, who interestingly enough, doesn’t even blog. Although, I think he reads more web content (blogs, etc.) than the average person. We both plan on going to the event which will be held on September 6, 2008 at the College of St. Benilde (watch out DLSU chicks! hehehe). As for my friend, he says he’ll start blogging just for the event, something to do with “hamsters” I think.
WordCamp T-Shirt (the Pinoy Sun is a great touch)
Very nice. I think the T-shirt alone is enough reason to go. Not to mention the DLSU blogger chicks. 
So head on over, and register to WordCamp Philippines 2008, also presented to you by, MindanaoBloggers. See you there!
This event is presented to you by:
CODE IS POETRY
20 Jul 2008
Click here to read other Pick-of-the-Week (POW) entries
For this week’s Pick-of-the-Week, I’d like to veer away from consumer gadgets like my previous POWs. I mean, there’s only so much gadgets I can personally review (Oooh! Unless manufacturers start giving me samples! That would be neat.) and besides, that’s why there’s Engadget. This week I’ll be reviewing, what is in my opinion, one of the best free and open source, personal accounting software out there. The one I personally use and of course the one that I recommend that everybody should use.
It’s kinda like Quicken (if you’ve ever heard of that), and it’s very simple to use. Okay, I’d admit that its not really the easiest program to learn, but a little patience is all you need and you won’t regret putting in some effort into learning this program.
The answer is yes! Hmmm… Ok, maybe it isn’t yes to absolutely everyone, but I’d say a majority of the population needs accounting software. Maybe you run a business, even a small one. Or maybe you just got your first paycheck and you wanna budget properly. Maybe you want to track how much you spend during the course of a week or a month. Maybe you just want to make sure you don’t overspend and end up with a negative balance. Or maybe, your like me and you really fancy seeing neat graphs and charts showing you how much money you have (or don’t have).
Or you probably have money on different investments and you want to track them. Maybe you owe a lot of money and you want to budget your earnings so that you can pay for your debts. What ever the reason may be, it’s always best to have data regarding your money.
Besides the obvious practical reasons I mentioned above, I also believe you should learn to use accounting software because in the future, you will inevitably be dealing with it directly or indirectly. If you want to be successful, then you have to master the basics of accounting while you’re still young and only need to account for a small amount of money. Good luck managing your potential millions when you can’t even manage your monthly salary.
It’s all about being the boss of you. Maybe you are an employee right now. Maybe you’re at the lowest point in the corporate hierarchy. That doesn’t stop you from being the boss of yourself. Learn the tools of the Big Boss and you won’t stay down there for long.
Go on over to sourceforge and get your copy of GnuCash. Now, I don’t usually recommend learning open source software from their own documentation (help files, etc.), but this one’s an exception. Usually FOSS software come with sucky (almost unusable) help files, but this one is a diamond in the rough. I learned the entire program from the help file which acts more like a tutorial. Actually it is a tutorial. It guides you from creating your initial accounts, filling up your data, even up to using GnuCash to track your stock investments. Simply amazing!
Head on over to the GnuCash Website to see some screenshots and also see the entire feature list.
(Unfortunately, I can’t really post screenshots from my account because that’s a bit confidential, you might discover how rich I am and have me kidnapped )
Click here to read other Pick-of-the-Week (POW) entries
19 Jul 2008
On my previous post, I showed you why you should be ditchin’ MS Word and instead learning LaTeX. In this post, I’ll give a very short glimpse of my basic workflow when using LaTeX. Which programs I use? Is there any particular way I use them? Hopefully this will get you started (if you haven’t yet) on mastering LaTeX for those technical papers.
I run all these programs in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), either on my laptop or on a desktop PC. They are all free and open source software (FOSS). Don’t worry if you don’t use Linux (although you should), because most, if not all of the programs run in other platforms (Windows, Mac, etc.). That, or they probably have counterparts that behave very similarly.
This is the program I use to generate the actual PDF file from the .tex file. Yes it’s command line only and doesn’t have fancy graphics. But if you’re converting a .tex file, do you really need fancy graphics?! Just run pdflatex [filename] on your trusty console and voila! You’ve got a perfect pdf every time. I also like the fact that it’s very fast and simple and could easily be added into scripts for batch jobs or what have you. You can even run it remotely if you ever find a reason to do so. Try that with a graphical program!
This is what I “should” be using to type the actual .tex manuscript. This is the editor that I’m trying to master. As of now, I suck and would rather edit my manuscript in gedit. I have to admit, Vim is very very very powerful and once you learn most of the tricks it has up its sleeves, then you’ll definitely regret not having learned it earlier. So this is what I’d recommend for the people who are willing to invest some time on learning a true blue text editor. There’s a pretty good tutorial here.
Although we love the CLI and would love to master LaTeX in its raw and true form, there are just some tasks when a graphical interface is best. One very good example I’ve seen, is trying to create tables. If you’ve ever created tables in HTML then you know that it can be a pain in the *rse.
There are also some formula formatting whose syntax are really hard to remember in LaTeX. For these special circumstances, I use the program LyX, which I’ve mentioned on my previous post. It’s a GUI for LaTeX and it does a very good job at it. However I seem to get better looking results as well as more customization when using PDFLaTeX. What I do is to use a raw .tex file for the stuff I know, and then use LyX to create tables, formulas and such. These snippets can easily be exported to pdflatex by going to File > Export > Latex (PDFLatex) in LyX.
Now this program is seriously a Godsend. No more worrying about whether a reference was cited properly. No more fumbling around at the last moment for a reference that you forgot to jot down. This program will keep a database of all your BibTeX entries. That is to say, all your reference including most data required for a citation. It has all the powerful features of most databases, such as searching and replacing. Did I mention that these BibTex entries are available from CiteSeer and IEEEXplore? Head on over to sourceforge to get your copy.
The easiest and best way to embed pictures onto your PDF document is to also have them in PDF format, or some other vector format such as EPS. This way, you don’t get pixelized output even if you resize your pictures unlike when using bitmap based pictures (.bmp, .gif, .jpg). These formats are frowned upon by journals and conferences because they don’t scale well.
For my drawing needs, I use OpenOffice.org Drawing, as well as a very neat diagramming program called Dia.
That’s all there is to it and you could have this system up in a few minutes. I recommend that you install LyX first because this would install all the required LaTeX components. Also, if you are in Windows, you could also try out TeXnicCenter according to a comment from my previous post.
Happy TeXing!
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P.S. I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.6 (from 2.5.1). So far I haven’t noticed anything different. But at least I learned the upgrade process and didn’t mess it up.
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