My first paper and the consequent weekend

Well finally I have a publication on my name. I got the acceptance mail yesterday afternoon, the paper is accepted in VIE 2006 for oral presentation. Not sure if it was an after effect of the news but the weekend went superb.

Yesterday evening we(Nirnimesh, Ramneek, Sachin and I) went to this French movie "Le classe de neige". Can't comment much upon the movie but it wasn't as good as the other french movies I have seen till now, and the only possible excuse for it could be that it was supposed to be an Art movie (btw I still understand what that means) :) But the good thing was that I and Nirnimesh were able to find lots of words/phrases we know in the conversation.

After that it was a dinner at Tabla, followed by the "Titanic" ice cream at Ohri's. I must tell Titanic Ice Cream had much a different image in my mind and even others (Ramneek atleast) possibly due to the overhyped description by others :) It isn't as big as some ppl described it, but yup overall the presentation was different and looked good.

Today morning it was wat I should call a Maggi/ Top Raman diet(Lunch). Possibly the highest number of rounds (4, each time 2 cakes) till date and evening it was again Dominos pizzas. Cudn't have had a better weekend possibly :)

BTW AFAIK atleast 3 papers have been accepted from CVIT in the same conference.

Presentations in Latex

Been lacking technical articles on the blog, Well some are gonna follow now. The current post focuses on making a presentation in Latex.

Why?
Because Latex allows you to write the equations the way they should be and displays them the best. Besides the funda of Open Format (no strings) etc is upon you to decide ;)

How?
I have seen two alternatives for making presentation in latex,

1. Prosper
2. Beamer

both of them are very similar and requires little effort for installation.
Installation: Prosper and Beamer are available on net for download. Just download the tar file.
Beamer
1) You will also need to download the packages pgf and xcolor which are available in the above beamer link too. On untarring (tar -xvzf file.tar.gz) you get directories say beamer, pgf and xcolor.
2) Move the directory to the path /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex. or try reading this link for more ways.
3) After this just need to run the command texhash and you are done.

Prosper
Installation is much more simple. You can just add the path to directory proper into the $TEXINPUTS variable. by say export TEXINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS:/path/to/prosperdir

Actuall PDF making
Beamer.
A sample presentation tex file is as simple as this one.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Malmoe}
\title{ Example of a beamer presentation}
\author{ Vardhman Jain}
\institute{International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad}
\date{26 May, 2006}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{Example of beamer}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile1.eps}
\pause
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile2.eps}
\end{center}
\end{frame}

The example illustrates the use of transition the pause command will hold the display until a key is pressed. So the points can be made to come one by one. Every frame block becomes one slide.

Prosper
Prosper, gives a much simple output. To make another pdf

\documentclass[pdf,default,slideColor,colorBG]{prosper}

\title{ Example of Beamer}
\author{ Vardhman Jain }

\DefaultTransition{Wipe}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

\begin{slide}{Examples}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=4in]{filename1.eps}
\end{center}
\end{slide}

Compilation:
Normally presentation classes need to be compiled to pdf before you can view it. xdvi can't show the output properly. So you need to give commands
latex file
dvipdf file
you can actualy view the resulting file using xpdf or acroread.

Would like to thank Paresh for introduction to these presentation classes of latex.

About Reservation protest in Hyderabad

I was not very sure about joining the protest because I was not very well the past few days. But when Nirnimesh knocked my door I cudn't resist saying yes. It was the first time I was to witness being a part of such a protest, and when I vehemently oppose the RESERVATION i thought I must register my protest.

We reached the spot slightly late i.e at 10:20 AM. There was this crowd already chanting some slogans etc. but seriously saying I was shocked to see such small numbers, when we reached number could have been at max 125 or so. We hurriedly joined them. I must say I wondered if any of them had actually any idea how to do these kind of things, the initial impression to me was that a bunch of Software guys were confussed how to do a real life protest, or may be that was the way it happens.

After some time, we started moving, we were raising slogans etc and almost everyone knew that Arjun Singh was the culprit behind all this and Congress sucks too bad and all those things. The protest went of peacefully. Slogans are already shown here and photos here.

Now coming to some actual issues, At the end of protest I saw this Indian Media in action. NDTV and times now. I must say I have stopped visiting NDTV site since then. There was a sucking reporter from NDVT who was showing that she is taking some real time interviews, when a OBC guy went to them for giving a interview they started taking it and when they realized it was anti-reservation they called it of, we heard more of similar stuff there, the sold media was only taking opinion of the side they wanted to hear, It was not shocking to see a news item saying that 60% of the country favours reservation on NDTV.

Another point I wanted to make out of this post was that we are probably missing some outcome of the rallies, unless we make other ppl (who are not aware) aware of the concesequences and all and then convince them that we are fighting for a good cause. English affluent ppl would already probably understand the deepness of the issue. If we only write/speaks slogans in English they are mostly useless. In Andrapradesh if we missed telugu banners we must have failed to create an impact on the ppl.

Not strange enuf some ppl bothered to ask me what was the march for and with my poor telugu skills i wasn't able to tell them much. Again another issue that came out was that middle class in Indian society should take up the responsibility to go and cast their vote to avoid stupid government like current congress to ever come to rule.

OBC/ST/SC crap in Civil services too

I heard sometime back that the age limit for IAS/IPS exams were 30 years. It seems that restriction is only for General Category[2]. and this is not all. Number of attempts also depend on your caste. (see the image) The politicians of this country are really going crazy and making sure that almost all of the offices in the country are filled by reservations and not by merit and their breed of ppl continue to survive. Isn't this pure case of unjustice top ppl in general category ?

References:

[1] http://upsc.gov.in/general/faq.htm#PageTop
[2] http://upsc.gov.in/general/civil.htm

Changing Indian Lifestyle and still ignorant companies

I could have written it as Improving Indian lifestyle but it is actually a more subjective thing to decide. Yesterday while checking out the availability in trains I witnessed a slightly different statistics, unlike earlier times, these days its most difficult to get the costlier AC tickets and Sleeper class tickets are rather easily available.

Its nothing but an evidence of the improving lifestyle of an average Indian. Nowadays ppl are preferring better facilities for little higher costs. for e.g as air travel is becoming more and more accessible with so many new airlines coming in to picture, more and more ppl are now travelling by air. It was difficult for a middle-class person to imagine travelling by air some 2-3 years ago and now its slowly become the default mode of communication.

This trend gives a little idea of how nice the market potential is in India currently. Ppl are getting lot of money and they are ready to spend it for a better life style. If some company like Apple or Sony is still missing Indian markets for their hardware (read IMac, PS3 etc), they are soon going to regret when someone else pics up these markets.

Mobile phone vendors like Motorola have rightly benefitted from the market by introduction of new phones for affordable prices. Only time will tell when these ignorant companies recognize India as a consumer market too rather than only being a cheap labour house.