Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Latex with Adobe Illustrator

I have been a linux user for a long time but last year I bought a laptop with a digitizer screen and the lack of good results in linux made me switch to Win 7. In the last year, I have learned that a lot of GPL software is ported to Windows and the switch is not painful at all. Problem is that the last update in one of my favorite page editing software: Inkscape has made my figure editing work flow (I never thought I would use this word) stall a little. So, I decided to give Adobe Illustrator a try as CS education is not so expensive. 

Basically, I need to add latex formulas to Illustrator, there's a nice script to do so here. I encountered a minor problem with this script; it seems like page frame is no longer the last element in the pdf compiled by pdflatex. Thus, the formulas generated by the script and imported into Illustrator were lacking the first element and had a full A4page frame. 

The script file is efficiently commented and a quick look into it brought me to Line 66:
for( var i=grp.pageItems[0].pageItems.length-1; --i>=0; )
After a few iterations, I found that the page frame is now the first page item and so the final modified line is:
for( var i=grp.pageItems[0].pageItems.length; --i>=1; )
This fixed my problem and now I have complete latex formulas in Illustrator with just the minimal frame around the object.

I hope this solves your issues too.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Last week papers (20th week of 2012)


From May 6th to 12th, 2012, a complete mess of a week with no time for small talk about the papers. Sorry...

Published
Preprints
  • "Quantum phase transition in the Dicke model with critical and non-critical entanglement" by L. Bakemeier, A. Alvermann and H. Fehske, arXiv: 1204.4974v1 [quant-ph].

Monday, May 7, 2012

Last week papers (19th week of 2012)

It has been an awful busy short week, I can barely keep my eyes open. This week from April 29th to May  5th 2012, I will point out the articles that caught my attention, I'm sorry for the lack of comments...

Published
Preprints

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Last weekend movies (19th week of 2012)


Life has become too busy, I like busy but too busy is really not my kind of thing and it is weird: I enjoy too busy a lot because there's no time to think about stupidities—which are usual when life is not busy at alla—the problem comes when it's too busy that you cannot actually finish one of the 6 things you are working on. Anyway, I have forced myself into the video store, movies and the networks web pages, this came out...
  1. Sherlock Holmes: A game of Shadows, ****
    I enjoyed all of the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and really lost myself thinking that Holmes died in Switzerland even though there was a third of the book left. Now, I just hope movies Holmes comes back as magazine Holmes came in the past.

  2. Carnage, ***
    Polanski's take on Le Dieu du Carnage, I wish I had seen this on theater. Two couples of parents devolve from civilized sophisticated person into prejudiced childish asses. It has beautiful takes involving a mirror in the set, I loved them.

  3. Underworld Awakening, ***
    I remember I got very excited for the first one nine years ago and, now, I'm far from excited as it seems there's gonna be a fifth one in the series as the ending of this leaves the door open to follow the search for Michael. Oh, most probably I will go to the movies and watch the new one if they make it.

  4. Young Adult, ***
    This is a sad sad comedy. I'm really hoping this is a satire and the third star is just because I still believe in people and this has to be a satire if we are gonna survive as a something close to a rational race.

  5. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, **
    Probably the best of the Mission Impossible series.

  6. Contraband, **
    I love movies about cons, that's why this has the second star.

  7. The Darkest Hour,  
    This film could have been awesome. The story is just terrific, good old war of the worlds invasion and funky aliens but, why o' why, had it to degenerate into a teen movie? 
End of season is almost here and I finally managed to catch up with the series I'm following. Any suggestions for the in-between season?
  1. Last Man Standing S01-E19-23, ****
    Still fun to watch the angry man!

  2. Castle S04-E17-22, ****
    It seems like we are gonna get a change in the episode formula sometime soon!

  3. Hawaii Five O S02-E15, ***
    I can keep on with this, there's no big changes or twist but the crossover with NCIS: Los Angeles was a refreshing thing.

  4. Big Bang Theory S05-E19-23, ***
    It has gotten a second air but not enough to recover the lost star.

  5. Once upon a time S01-E14-20, **
    It has become too slow, please do something!.  
I think I'm gonna go sci-fi and animation for the summer break. 

Monday, April 30, 2012

Last week papers (18th week of 2012)


From 22 to 28 of April 2012, well it was really from 22 to 26 as I took a long weekend off the office...

Published
  • "Quantum Computing with Incoherent Resources and Quantum Jumps" by  M. F. Santos et. al., Physical Review Letters 108, 170501 (2012).

    So, let us say that you have logarithmic spare time and want to make nature do computation for you. Well, Marcelo and coauthors have just show that, in principle, you just need time, patience, clickers and a way to put/remove them clickers from your open system. 

  • "Optical Forces and Torques in Nonuniform Beams of Light" by D. B. Ruffner and David G. Grier, Physical Review Letters 108,  173602 (2012).

    I don't remember seeing an optical tweezer paper in PRL. The authors analyze linear and angular momentum densities of light beams to show how amplitude, phase and polarization profiles contribute to optical forces. One interesting thing they found is how the curl of the spin angular momentum can exert torque on objects without contributing to the orbital angular momentum of the beam. 

  • "Equilibrium and disorder-induced behavior in quantum light–matter systems" by E. Mascarenhas et. al., New Journal of Physics 14,  043033 (2012).

    Coupled two-level system cavity arrays in the polaritonic regime have been proposed to realize the Bose-Hubbard model and Insulator-Superfluid transition  in the past. Now, by using a mean field approach the authors study the effects of disorder on the phases of the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard model and find glassy phases using entanglement measures. Interesting, ain't it?  
Preprints
  • "Supermodes of Hexagonal Lattice Waveguide Arrays" by J. S. Brownless et. al., arXiv: 1204.4974v1 [quant-ph].

    A modal approach to hexagonal  photonic waveguide arrays. I'm still trying to follow it and get their results and see if it helps me solve some other waveguide lattices.

  • "Relating the quantum mechanics of discrete systems
    to standard canonical quantum mechanics" by G. Hooft , arXiv: 1204.4926v1 [quant-ph].

    So, imagine you are working near the Planck scale and you want to see if there's something happening there, most probably you want to go from continuous to discrete modelling of the system. Well, here's an approach focused on applications to the harmonic oscillator. I need time to sit down and follow this, discrete dynamics is always interesting for me.

  • "Dynamical scattering models in optomechanics: Going beyond the `coupled cavities' model" by A. Xuereb and P. Domokos  , arXiv: 1204.5301v1 [quant-ph].

    An analysis of membrane-coupled cavities from first principles. In short, we are safe using the coupled-cavities simplification if the coupling element reflectivity is not way below 50% .

  • "Morse potential derived from first principles" by R. Costa Filho et. al., arXiv: 1204.5931v1 [quant-ph].

    I .