Bookmarks for Vignesh Sethuraman

note: Recent links added to top of the page.

Jan 10 th: Internet dollar experiment - courtesy Karthik (kuu) (It started on 20th Dec'04: $42 as of 10 th Jan'05)
Jan 1st : New Year's day - went ski-ing at a place near Madison, Wisconsin. <photos will soon be up here>
Dec 31st: For New Year's eve, we went to Chicago ... <photos will soon be up here>
Dec 20th: During Thanksgiving break (last week of Nov), Ashvin, Karthik (kuu), Jeni, Nayak and I went to Colorado. Some pics from there, courtesy Ashvin (4 MB file)
Sep 9th: figtex2eps: Converting xfig figures with latex to eps and pdf - the link has a shellscript (same name) that'll need a shell (bash will do), latex, xfig, transfig and epstopdf. All the above are available on the solaris machines on ifp. It's advantage over psfrags / pstex is that it directly generates the eps file (rather than having to work with a tex file that uses the eps file), and hence can be used to generate figures for places other than in a latex document.

Late Summer: A link on credit monitoring agencies - here's what to do.

May 25th - Social studies courtesy - Sriram
May 24th - Blue roses in Vanderbilt?
May 21st - A link unconnected with the trip - except that it came at a time when everyone was busily making plans for the trip Casual dance moves
May 19th - No camping reservations: as it turned out, the camping reservations weren't made in time. Now there just isn't any space for camping. Just too bad. We could camp in nearby camping grounds, or find a log cabin. People are as yet undecided about what we should do to Jee. Related links (courtesy Sumalya) - camping grounds at KOA :

Pigeon Forge

Blue Ridge Parkway.

Nokia opens CDMA center in Bombay- moving from GSM to CDMA? Cdma market is supposed to be growing in India, thanks to Reliance's aggressive marketing, which had/has some issues with defaulting users.
Fark.com: Divorce: $200. Wedding Dress: $1200. The ex-husband modeling it on eBay:Priceless - courtesy Ambi
Random exercise in permutations ... courtesy couples club president.
Rana found this link on The Hindu - its about how, in Madras, dogs (or mongrels, as they are referred to in the article) are pitching in to help out kids with special needs. I'm not sure how long this link will remain unbroken.
Godav hostel nite video (105MB) - link works, as on Tue Apr 20 10:59:51 (EST)
Classical music @ UIUC - you might need to be within UIUC domain to access this site... direct all -ve comments to rana ( a r a k o n i a t u i u c ...)
DYK: Cereals might not be the best thing to start the day with.
Panchkuti Dhal recipe
Hat problem (courtesy jf)
Cingular

An Activist's Guide to Factory Farms: Cattle

It has some interesting stuff on factory farms in the US - in particular, it explains why veal here is extra tender. I have my doubts about how factually accurate this site is though. Came up on google.

New Science trivia

The Electrical and Computer Engineering department of UIUC boasts of a wide variety (in span and depth) of courses.

Here is some stuff on Ayurveda. I don't know much about Ayurveda though. Here is an online game - it claims to use Artificial Intelligence. There seems to be something to it. http://y.20q.net:8095/btest

This website has some useful links such as links to the UIUC phonebook (electronic directory), and the daily weather (which tends to vary with the wind, here in the heart of the midwest.)

Krannert Art Centre

The Krannert Centre for the Performing Arts collaborates with the College of Fine and Applied Arts, and routinely hosts excellent professional shows, in addition to the students' experimental ones. The Krannert Art Museum hosts a great collection of exhibits, some of which are circulated to the local schools libraries and other community sites. In addition to being a museum, it doubles as a resource centre, with replicas, touch-kits and slide-sets, in addition to the regular books, CD-ROMs and videotapes.

OTCR This site keeps changing... once it had something to do with some business organization affiliated to UIUC. Then, it had links to some sleaze-sites. I guess it has something else now.

Gnuplot

Gnuplot is a command-line driven program for producing 2D and 3D plots. It is ideal for a users you only need a plot of a graph, and who don't want to learn a major tool like Mathematica. For starters in Gnuplot, here is a fast way to get some simple plots. The following Help for Gnuplot is a sequence of examples and explanations. That would give you a "bare minimum" skill set. A really fun way of getting comfortable with Gnuplot is to experiment with it.

Latex is a ... Well, TeX is a powerful text processing language and is the required format for some periodicals now. TeX has many macros to which you can eventually add your own. LaTeX is a macro package which sits on top of TeX and provides all the structuring facilities to help with writing all sorts of documents, be it a thick thesis or a single side letter. I typically use Google and Leslie Lamport's book (Latex, a document preparation system). More often than not, the easiest thing to do is get a tex file (from the net, say) and make adjustments to it. This is especially true if you aren't familiar with Latex. The error messages can at times be a pain - but, after a while, you'll get the knack of getting around errors. It is an enormous help to have someone who knows a bit of Latex, if you are just getting started. For presentations on LCD projectors , I use the class "prosper". It offers a wide range of nifty tricks, and doesn't involve any additional compilation. Its the usual compiling steps. $latex file.tex $latex file.tex // Thats right, better do it twice. $dvips file.dvi $ps2pdf file.ps Georg Drenkhahn's home page has a link to Prosper - I found it a good place to start, when I was searching for Help on prosper (Latex).

Grainger

This is the main Engineering library of UIUC, and is easily amongst the most well organized of libraries, in addition to being the largest library in the country and one of the world's most technologically advanced information management and retrieval centers. It is quite a favourite hang-out place (especially at exam-time :) and has some of the coolest lounges on campus. And, its working hours are well adapted to the typical student - 9.00am to 3.00 am (!!!) - even on Sunday. (Of late, there is some talk of making it a 24 hour facility!) The other libraries of the University have their claim to fame too. The University Library is the third largest academic collection in the nation (largest public university collection in the world), housing more than 15.9 million items in the main library and in the more than 40 departmental libraries and units. Only Harvard and Yale have larger collections. The library's computerized cataloging system was the first in the world to serve as the primary access to a large academic library.

General Links

World of Mathematics - a math resource library
ECE Courses Catalog
Glyph Web - An excellent source of trivia
Merriam-Webster OnLine - Online dictionary.
Cvin_Hobbes - Neat cartoons, posted anew everyday.
Google - A good search engine.

Links to friends' homepages (hp)

This list of hp of friends of mine is by no means comprehensive. All I've done here is merely add on the homepages of friends, as and when I come to know of their urls and feel energetic enough to wait for the composer to load on this Solaris machine.

Alex (Aleksander Jovicic)
Akka (Akshay Kashyap)
JF (Dr. Jean-Francois Chamberland)
Hien / Lylya (Hien Minh Nguyen)
Nayak (Niranjan Ratnakar)
Sid (Siddartha Mallik)
Sujay Sanghavi
Tavya (Saurabh Tavildar)

Disclaimer: I created this page by hand-editing an autogenerated html file - not wanting to devote much time on this, most of my html was based on guided guesses regarding what the various tags meant. And, this was largely a one-shot attempt at creating a homepage. If you mind it being so poorly written, feel free to send me your comments - I might consider improving the webpage... unlikely, but I just might.