Avinash Meetoo

Presentations made with LyX and Prosper

4 March 2006 By Avinash Meetoo 4 Comments

LyX is a document processor which acts as a frontend to LaTeX. LyX is mostly used to write articles, reports and books.

LyX can also be used to create presentations (a la Powerpoint or OpenOffice Impress) if a suitable document class is installed (think of a document class as a predefined layout). One example of such a layout is Prosper.

As the documentation for Prosper is difficult to read, I have written my own in PDF format. Here is the LyX file to generate this nice PDF.

Please feel free to comment…

How to become a great programmer

1 March 2006 By Avinash Meetoo 18 Comments

Do this :

Read Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig.
Install Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, whatever…) and become proficient with it.
Learn Scheme, Python and/or Ruby.
Scratch Where It’s Itching (find a problem that is really bothering you and solve it using your newly acquired programming skills)
Release your software as opensource.

Trust me!

Intel-based Mac mini launched!!!

1 March 2006 By Avinash Meetoo 1 Comment

Apple has done it again!

The Intel-based Mac mini has just been launched today by Apple. Here’s what you get for $799 (Rs 24,700) :

1.66GHz Intel Core Duo processor
2MB on-chip L2 cache
667MHz frontside bus
512MB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
80GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA
Slot-loading SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD+R DL/DVDÃ‚Â±RW/CD-RW)
Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
One FireWire 400 port
Four USB 2.0 ports
DVI, VGA, S-video and composite video output
Built-in speakers
Analog & Digital audio in/out
Built-in 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet
Built-in 54 Mbps AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi (802.11g)
built-in Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)
Apple Remote
Mac OS X v10.4
iLife Ã¢â‚¬â„¢06

Wow! This is what I call a perfect media center!!! It even has a remote control to drive the Front Row software. Only thing missing is a hardware video encoder. The networking capabilities are simply fantastic. I’m not too sure about the graphics card but this is not supposed to be a gaming machine after all…

There is a less expensive ($599) version with a single core processor.

And, in parallel, Apple has also launched the iPod Hi-fi :

It’s easy to guess its purpose. It sells at $349 which seems somewhat expensive but the sound quality must be top-notch.