Being a computer scientist is not all about doing programming, staring at the computer screen, with an inch thick glasses, while eating junk food. There are a lot of tools, that the academic community and especially the scientific community use. Particularly, all of the research work needs to be published. And publishing a research work can be competitive, and you will have to write nicely formatted papers. The problem of publishing papers is making sure that all the formatting are pretty and the formula and graphs gets displayed nicely. Apparently, despite the amazing tool that Microsoft create, called the "Microsoft Word/MsWord", it is rather inferior when it comes to publishing good scientific papers. Formatting on word is incredibly difficult. For example, putting complex formulas would be difficult in MsWord. There is just not suitable math symbols to help you write the formula. Furthermore, divisions doesn't really work well. Other symbols like delta, omega, phi,psi, lamda, summation and all of the greek symbols are sometimes not exactly how you want it to look like. For example, trying to write the formula below on MsWord would hardly be possibly, I have not tried doing it on MsWord, but I would say it would be a challenge to write the formula below on MsWord.
Hence, the academic community, particularly scientist, use Latex. Latex is an amazing tool, it's not really user friendly, but it create documents beautifully, format it like a professional, and help you display graphs and formula just like how you would like to see it on scientific journal papers. There are not much of a choice, and I too am force to use Latex, learn how to use it, to help me write papers.
The other thing that I need to learn and use as a scientist is gnuplot. Now gnuplot as the name implies, is a plotting application. Gnuplot are particularly a command line application to generate beautiful graphs. The flexibility on gnuplot surely beats MsExcel anytime. There are still a lot of functions on gnuplot that I need to learn, but I'm getting a hang of it. Of course you can use excel to make plots and graphs, but there are some things that MsExcel is just inferior in trying to make graphs for scientific research.
To the left is a graph generated by gnuplot. This is also part of the data of my research.
yes, joey! Guna Latex senang giler once u get used to it. Takde dah margin nak lari2 ke, your tab tak samer ke... :D I pernah guna Latex utk buat UAT doc dulu.
ReplyDeleteZatil: Wow, you buat UAT pakai Latex. That's the first time I dengar, for me, I have no choice, formula2 pelik nie, bukan boleh buat dalam MsWord. So terpaksa pakai Latex.
ReplyDeleteooo... tu time i keje dgn open source dulu. i suka guna Latex, mcm u tgh write html coding laks! ;)
ReplyDeleteZatil: Terselah ke-geek-an ko, maner ader orang suka pakai Latex, kalau tak terpaksa, mmg menyampah lah pakai Latex.... But geek2x pun still very cool.
ReplyDeletewow. aku pung nak belajar guna LaTex ni, but since for now tak boh math equation lagi x nampak sangat.
ReplyDeleteNajmi: Aku ingat aku leh bagi workshop on using latex and gnuplot karang bila balik Malaysia. I think as academicians nie, kena ader lah.....its not essentially important, because yang penting is your idea, but it helps lah to make things look pretty. If you get a hang of it, at least we can share knowledge sikit, on formatting and other stuff.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand WTF you're equation here, bro. Hahaha. Lama gila tinggalkan techie world. But I have to agree that CS world is more than programs and coding. Especially part cracking your head nak dptkan algo.
ReplyDeleteAyoi: Formula tu mmg mengarut jer, but in Latex, formula mengarut pun leh display gak. Hahahaha. Yea, part algo nie yang susah, usually, in a CS paper, kalau cita panjang2 pun, tapi algo takde, not many will consider it a CS paper.
ReplyDeletekalau gnuplot tu yg simple2 aku leh tahan lagi.aku pun ade guna gnuplot utk project report masters dulu.. ehehe.
ReplyDeletetapi kalau graf tu dah jadi spiral, ada contour macam banjaran titiwangsa aku rasa aku kinda avoid it.. hehe.. at least for our course takyah buat graf yg macam tu kot (?).
latex tau nama/konsep je.. guna x penah. USENIX punye conference pung guna latex.. yg best setakat aku tau kalau nak tukar format ke dokumen apa pun senang.. very versatile.
Najmi: Yang paling best, its free. Plus, it will support CVS.
ReplyDelete