Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill

While looking for a phrase of ‘The sixth sense: the door to the temple of wisdom” from Think and Grow Rich book by Napolean Hill which is one of the economic philosophies commissioned by Andrew Carnegie, I found this website:

http://www.psitek.net/index2.html

This website contains my books including Think and Grow Rich for free.

Good or bad depends on the mind

There is nothing either good or bad except that the thinking makes it so – Shakespeare. It was taken from a book called “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David J. Schwartz.

Bayon Temple in one of the most prestigious Computer Science magazine

I’m surprised and delighted to counter the temple of the mysterious faces (Bayon Temple) in Communications of the ACM. ACM for Association of Computing Machinery is the world first computing society, and Communications of the ACM is one of the most popular magazines available to ACM’s members for free.

The article is about preserving the current Bayon Temple in a computer 3D model by the Japanese. Bayon is at risk of collapse due to its destabilized foundation. This work by the Japanese team is significant in Computer Science due to the size and artistic complexity of Bayon Temple which is known as the temple of the mysterious faces to many foreigners.

The Japanese team used a wide range of laser sensors to generate the 3D models of the physical artifacts, and they used sophisticated computing algorithms and computer power to put the individual 3D models from the individual artifacts together in order to reconstruct the whole temple in 3D.

This article is available here ArchivingBayon.

This article is just a news item in the Communications of the ACM. Its project is called ‘Bayon Digital Archival‘ by the University of Tokyo. On their website, there are image and movie galleries where you can see the amazing images and movies generated from their computer 3D model. They also have movies to show how to they construct this amazing 3D model with a variety of laser sensors and computer algorithms. The gallery is available at http://www.cvl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/bayon/gallery.shtml.

In the commercial world, this work can be turned into many things-good, and not so good. One of the possible outcome is to make this model into a virtual museum where Internet users can visit the temple in either in 2D or 3D at their leisure time. You cannot physically go to the temple every time you miss a magnificent drawing or object if you don’t live close to the temple, especially when you are oversea. There are always something new that you haven’t seen or known unless you are the expert in this temple. This will reduce the human impact on the temple which contributes the destabilisation of its foundation.

The Japanese people rock except they kill whales on international water close to Australia. They should also do this for the grant temple (Angkor Wat).

Documentary about Cambodia on the ABC, Australia

I have just finished watching a documentary about Khmer Ballet Dancing (Royal Ballet Dancing. It’s about how important the dance is so important for our Khmer culture. Unfortunately, according to the documentation, the Royal palace is distance itself from this great cultural dance. However, the desire for this dance is very strong indeed.

I was surprised that people still use the burn national theatre (Sall Mo Ho Srab) to rehearse the dance. The place is still a spiritual place for these amazing and dedicated artists.

I went there a couple of times when I was young. It was heart broken when a fire took place over there around in 1997. There were many events happened in this year.

The URL on the ABC website is:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/guide/abc2/200907/programs/ZY9894A001D26072009T213000.htm

This URL should allow you to see the documentary briefly.

http://www.realscreen.com/screeningroom/20080402/girlandmonkey.html

Botnet, honeynet and other underground stuff

I have been an AustCERT presentation recently. They talked about something called botnet. A botnet is a network of compromised or infected PCs. It has a sophisticated Command & Control.

While reading about cyberattack on Georgia story on Google news, it prompted me to learn more about botnet.

I decided to click on these links returned from Google:

http://www.honeynet.org/papers/bots/

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/398/1

http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/topbotnets/

A compromised computer is sold in the botnet world as little as 4 US cents.

Each botnet has its nick name such as RUSTOCK which sends pharmaceutical spams which are designed to infect more computers to join their botnets.

Article explaining Thailand-Cambodia Relationship

http://kyotoreview.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/issue/issue2/

This article explained the relationship between Thailand and Cambodia. I was written after the burning of the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh in Jan. 2003.

Khmer Script in TeX with GNU/Linux examples

TeX is an open source typesetting system invented by Prof. Donald E. Knuth. One of TeX’s offspring is LaTeX which provides high-level commands similar to HTML. LaTeX was developed on TeX engine by Leslie Lamport. People use LaTeX to write books, theses and journal articles. One of its final output can be a Postscript file or a PDF file. One can make an lazy comparison between TeX and a word processor. However, they are very different, and TeX is far better than any word processor.

There is one difficulty with TeX is that it can be difficult to do some custom documents such as producing a document with Khmer scripts. Four years ago, I was to embark upon a new thesis for Khmer spell checker with my own proposal and initiative at the ANU. From the beginning, I pressed upon myself to find a way to make TeX produce Khmer scripts since it would be disastrous to write my thesis with some mathematics formulas. What I like best about TeX is that I didn’t have to care about any style or format. Most of my time was spent on generating my ideas and focus on writing since I was not a natural writer.

Let’s go to the real stuff. You may be bored with my non-sense words. It starts with a sample example. It contains pk and tfm fonts which are used by TeX and dvi driver. It also contains a macro file mapping each glyph to the human readable command. For example, short cutting the instruction that tells TeX to use a glyph at position char66 in font ‘a’ to \aksaaka. Here is the sample file: khtex . Download it at your own risk, follow your common sense and read README file. The file name is supposed to be khtex.tar.gz, but the free site I used to upload it does not like dot as part of the file name. You may need to put a dot before tar if your compression software needs it.

Glyphs in TeX are like characters in Limon or ABC. Don’t confuse a glyph and a Unicode character. A Khmer Unicode character does not necessary correspond to a glyph. Many Khmer vowels are composed of more than one glyph. Unicode represents the logical concept while a font system is the concrete representation.

If you’re very interested in what I have done and want to learn it urgently so that you can create Khmer pk and tfm fonts from a different truetype font, please send me a reminder at hputhick [_AT] gmail dot com. Otherwise, I will write it at my own pace whenever I feel like writing it. Next parts include a script to convert a piece of Khmer unicode string into a string of the TeX macros I talked earlier. How to convert a TTF into PK and TFM font at any size. This has to go through metafont which has lots history and copyright issues. If you don’t go through metafont, you can only convert a TTF into a PK and TFM at the default font size which is 10pt as far as I know. If you think otherwise and don’t mind to share your technique, please spare some of your free time to give me some guidance.

Cleanest car – Honda Civic Gx

Honda Civic Gx runs on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), containing mostly methane (CH4). Burning natural gas is less polluted than petrol making Honda Civic Gx even cleaner than Toyota Prius according to 2008 Greenest Vehicles. Honda Civic Gx (USD 25,000) is likely to be more affordable than Toyota Prius (about AUD 50,000) since it does not rely on the fancy battery technology. Using CNG in vehicles is common for buses and industry vehicles.

Although Honda Civic Gx is a perfect vehicle in terms of economic and environment, it is not available in Australia. In my perception, the Commonwealth Government of Australia does not have the courage to make Australian household cars less reliant on petrol. They are talking about excise and GST on petrol without mentioning the use of natural gas in vehicles. Sometimes because the November 2007 federal election, the Howard government introduced rebate for people who convert their cars from petrol to Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG). Since the engine was designed for petrol, it is perfect for LPG. It would be foolish to buy a band-new car and covert it to LPG. Now the new labor government and the opposition have no mention about this type of vehicles running on natural gas, which can be better than LPG.

Other people to blame is of course the Oil companies. They are making a whole lot of profit when the oil price is rising since people need cars to carry not only themselves but also other stuff. I think in Australia, oil companies are blinding the government of this development of Honda Civic Gx. Australia has significant amount of natural gas deposit making CNG is an alternative fuel during a transition time before a renewable fuel is found for cars.

Links:

Honda Civic Gx in Australia

Past Interviews with Donald Ervin Knuth

Donald E. Knuth is a legendary figure of the open-source community. A number of people in the community regards him as god of computer programming. He is the author of the multi-volume “The Art of Computer Programming”.

I found two interview transcripts with him.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

http://www.advogato.org/article/28.html

I love GNU Emacs

I started using GNU Emacs or Emacs in 2004 when I went to the ANU. I love it ever since. I will you why Emacs is the best text editor I ever used. Emacs keyboard commands are really efficient. I split window at a fraction of second, copy and paste from one window onto another without moving my hand away from the keyboard. I don’t have to remember every variable either in the same file or in a different file. I can split the window into 2 panels and open the file that I need to know the variable name while writing a new file. It is even better when text-based Emacs can do the same thing. Text-based Emacs becomes handy when I need to do these things remotely via ssh which is far more efficient than vnc. Most of the times servers don’t run in graphic mode. Vi cannot deliver these functionalities that Emacs can. Vi is good at small update or creation job while Emacs can do heavy work over an ssh connection. Emacs supports C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, Ruby and of course Lisp indentation. It can convert indentation tab character in spaces and vice versa.

Emacs is a simple tool but more efficient than most Integrated Development Environment tools. I need to learn and master one tool for every language I will have to learn and use rather a dozen of them. GNU Emacs is not only available on GNU Linux but Microsoft Windows and Mac as well. So, one tool will be the job for many languages and many platforms. So why not. It makes my life a lot easier.

Even though Emacs is efficient, it can be a bit tricky to understand the keyboard commands. “C” and “M” for pressing and hold Ctrl and Atl keys. Fair enough, C for Ctrl but what about M. M is for Meta key in Macintosh, which is equivalent to Atl in PC. These command reference cards below are from “Learning GNU Emacs” book.

Emacs command reference card page 1

Emacs command reference card – page 2