MikTeX misses the mark

MikTeX 2.9, a major windows based TeX typesetting suite, missed the mark. Free software is never free; you have to find and fix the problems.

In this case, MikTeX failed to update from A4 paper (European standard) to Letter size paper (US standard). The administration program did not work.

Here's the fix.
1) Find "dvips/config/config.ps" in your MikTeX install directory.
2) Move the Letter lines 

@ letterSize 8.5in 11in

@+ ! %%DocumentPaperSizes: Letter

@ letter 8.5in 11in

@+ ! %%DocumentPaperSizes: Letter

@+ %%BeginPaperSize: Letter

@+ letter

@+ %%EndPaperSize

above the A4 lines

@ A4size 594.99bp 841.99bp

@+ ! %%DocumentPaperSizes: a4

@+ %%PaperSize: A4

3) Statup the MikTex Maintenance utility and "Refresh FNDB"

Review of Prezi presentations

A colleague recently recommended Prezi (http://prezi.com/) as a presentation editor. As I had an actual high-value presentation scheduled, I decided to use it. Giving the bad news early and often, I don't recommend Prezi for technical presentations.

Starting up a prezi gives you a huge zoom-able whiteboard. One major limitation of prezi concerns the output aspect ratio.

Path lines, while an interesting method of moving, are poorly implemented.

Surprisingly, information density per "view" is LOWER for prezi than a regular slide.

A deal breaker for technical presentations is that prezi has no native mathematical typesetting or even input. Adding math equations from LaTeX involves 1) Copying LaTeX equations to single file, 2) run pdfLaTeX  and 3) importing to prezi. This is not nearly as nice as the competition.

For a multi-image prezi, the speed of navigation and information addition was too slow.

Conclusion:
Two days before the presentation, I dropped prezi from consideration. My final version used pdf generated from inkscape and openoffice impress.