xyling, Beyond Bullets and Future

There is an excellent Latex package for drawing trees: xyling. It uses xypic behind the scenes, which means that you might face problems if you are using pdflatex to get a pdf at the end. This is specially troublesome if you are using beamer because your presentation would ruin if you first get a dvi and then a ps and finally a pdf. The solution is actually mentioned in the documentation that comes with xyling but somehow one manages to ignore such instructions when he is learning a new thing!

Some of my friends would be wondering: "What! You are not using Power Point?" No, really. In fact, I can't. Power Point is not for technical presentations at all. By the way, check out Beyond Bullets.

Which brings me to the reason behind saying all this. My thesis presentation is on 30th of this month. I'll write in detail later. I'm flying back to Karachi on 25th Dec.

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As some side remarks,

• Asim Ghaffar has been offered a job by his thesis supervisor. The best thing is that he will work from Pakistan and get Swedish wages. Wow! His thesis presentation is on 27th.


• Adnan Ijaz has won RISH scholarship. I was rejected for the same. In fact, Lars Otten was also rejected, which is a bit shocking. Meanwhile, he is flying to UK for an interview with...ahm! Nothing succeeds like success!

Adil Akif starts blogging!

Adil Akif, one of the senior FASTians (my undergrad school) in Microsoft, has started a blog about SOA, J2EE and .NET. Many of you might know him because of CSJobs mailing list that he started many years ago. He is also involved with many welfare projects and we get to read his emails on GoF and Sahics alumni mailing lists from time to time.

CSJobs was turned into Pak-Jobs-IT, managed by Sadaf Naqvi, batch of 98, FAST Karachi. With more than 25,000 members, perhaps it was one of the biggest mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups. It seems to be dead now.

A very nice effort on IT jobs seems to be rozee.com.

Google Analytics

If you use a site statistics service (such as Sitemeter), check out Google Analytics. Just launched; fresh and nice!

Child Prodigies

In case you missed this story on Slashdot (or in the other case if you are not a regular Slashdot reader), an eight year old Korean boy has been admitted to Physics department of a Korean university. Not surprisingly, both his parents are teachers. You can find the original news here.

In terms of family background, the story is not very different from that of Muhammad Hussain Tabatabai of Iran, who memorized (and understood the meanings of) complete Quran by the age of 5. Both his parents know Quran by heart. The same is true for the child from Vietnam who is a chess grandmaster at the age of 10 - his parents used to play chess amongst themselves and he picked it from them.

There is a story on TIME Asia which tries to analyze "if prodigies can be created?" You might also be interested in knowing about a family of child genii in England, born to a Pakistani father (and Malaysian mother) - though, one of the girls, Sufiah Yusof, has run away from home due to her father's over-ambitious attitude. Perhaps, BBC wrongly reports that both the parents are from Malaysia.


Does that mean these kids get a natural lead in the race of life? Well, how is it different from a child born with a silver spoon in his mouth - one who can spend a life without caring about hunger, insecurity, etc? Perhaps, one needs to analyze the definition of "finish line." Perhaps, we all have different start and finish lines - it doesn't matter if somebody has started ahead of us.

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Ejaz Asi reports his views about the earth quake casualties.