Kaushik Lakshminarayanan

Photography

Photography is one of my hobbies. My Picasa album is located at http://picasaweb.google.com/my-gmail-id, but it has only one album for public view (that too not taken by me :-)). I use a Nikon D60 (with the standard 18-55mm VR kit lens and my brother's 18-135mm lens). I love reading the articles on Thom Hogan's web site. Occasionally, I also read Ken Rockwell's articles. I'll try to put my pics here some time.

Some Friends

Carnegie Mellon
Bodicherla Aditya Prakash
Ravishankar Krishnaswamy
Ali Kemal Sinop
Anshul Gandhi

Elsewhere
Aravindan Vijayaraghavan
Karthekeyan Chandrasekaran
Ram Krishan Kumar

Random Stuff

Camera-ready. No, this is not about photography. When you are preparing papers for camera-ready (e.g., for ACM Sheridan Printing), all fonts should be Type 1 fonts and should be embedded. As simple as it sounds, if you are doing this for the first time, it is likely to eat up couple of hours of you time. So, here are some tips for you, although you might not need all of this in your case (different parts of these are present at different places on the Internet, but I like a top-down approach):

  • pdffonts: First of all, you need to know how to list the types of fonts in a pdf file. You can use Adobe Acrobat Reader and go to File → Properties → Fonts, or use the Linux command, pdffonts ⟨file-name⟩
  • gnuplot: The fonts in your graphs need to be embedded, so make sure the first line of your gnuplot file looks something like this: set terminal postscript eps color "NimbusSanL-Regu" fontfile "/usr/local/share/texmf/fonts/type1/urw/helvetic/uhvr8a.pfb" (pay close attention to the latter part of the line).
  • dvips: For embedding all the fonts: dvips -Ppdf -Pdownload35 -Pcmz -Pamz -t letter -D 600 -G1 paper.dvi -o. The option -Pdownload35 is the important one here.
  • pspdf: This is probably not critical, but anyway here it is: ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dEmbedAllFonts=true paper.ps (good luck!).

J-1 Waiver. If you are applying for a No Objection Certificate from India (or sometimes referred to as NORI certficate), then you should know this. The address of MHRD (Ministry of Human Resources and Development), New Delhi has changed in the last couple of months (as of June 10th, 2011). This is the new address you should send your application to:

The Section Officer,
ES-5 Section,
Ministry of Human Resource Development,
Department of Secondary and Higher education,
West Block - 1, 1st Building, 2nd Floor,
Wing - 6, R. K. Puram, Sector 1,
New Delhi - 110066, India
Phone number: +91-011-23386451