Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

In Indiana university. You can tell they really want somebody in algorithms because it is listed in the bottom of the list. It is also a good place for breaking away if you know how to bike.

See here.

I currently use ipe for my drawings – it has a good integration with latex, views, layers, etc. Some “people” use it even to make complete presentations.

In the last few decades Otfried Cheong had repeatedly spoken about the upcoming new version of ipe (totally rewritten from scratch using Cobol) and how wonderful it would be (for example, world peace would be finally achievable by using one of the ipelets, etc).

Well, the beta version of Ipe 7 is now available – I was/am using it for the last few weeks and it works reasonably well…

BTW, installing it on Ubuntu or Debian is pretty easy.

Imagine there’s no universities
It’s easy if you try
No high school below us
Above us only ignorance
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no journals
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to write or submit for
And no conferences too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Imagine no rejections
I wonder if you can
No need for grants or students
A sisterhood of love
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say i’m a blogger
But i’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Inspired by this:

I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea.

But you should really read this. You might learn something.

It is sometime useful to have enumerate inside a paragraph, because: (i) it looks better, (ii) it is shorter, and (iii) its cool.

Especially as the regular itemize/enumerate environments in latex take too much space. Anyway, an easy way to achieve this is to use the paralist package in latex. You just replace enumerate by inparaenum. For example:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{paralist}

\begin{document}

Is is sometime useful to have enumerate inside a paragraph, because:
\begin{inparaenum}[(i)]
\item it looks better,
\item it is shorter, and
\item its cool.
\end{inparaenum}

\end{document}

Generates the following:

See here. That is all.

Here is a short explanation why I refuse to referee papers for CGTA (and submit papers to it myself):

1. Elsevier the publisher is evil. See here.
2. There is an open alternative: JoCG.
3. There are enough journals in CG and in my humble opinion both IJCGA and CGTA no longer have justification to their existence.
4. I find the recent style of CGTA announcements to be strange, to put it mildly.

That is all.

I just posted a short writeup showing that there is no PTAS for the problem of minimum cover of points by fat triangles of similar size. A constant factor approximation algorihtm is known for this problem.

At the end of the thesis defense, W’ clapped the two examiners on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.”

From here.

I got this morning this letter from CGTA. They want me to be excited that they let me free access papers on CGTA for free for the whole year!!! Whole year – 2009, thats like 160 days left this year to read papers in CGTA that I can already read somewhere else on the web for free!!!

There are people that says that CGTA is an irrelevant journal now that JoCG had appeared, and that ElseVier has lost touch with reality, but this email surely proves this is not true…