tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31969655276426498512012-02-22T13:18:19.325+01:00Articles about topics ranging from technology and software to scientific research. Occasional book reviews. Topics of general interest such as lifestyle, and nutrition. Exploration of blogs and the technical side of blogging.Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-82218913539513251822010-12-22T01:05:00.021+01:002010-12-24T14:21:26.346+01:00

Image via WikipediaIf you use several operating systems on your computer, such as Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10, and maybe also MacOS, data sharing between the operating system becomes an important issue. You don't want to have to reboot your computer every time you need some data, do you? I now use double boot with Windows 7 for work-related stuff and Ubuntu Maverick for mostly everything else. I

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-3572891223161259722010-12-20T00:54:00.009+01:002010-12-23T16:08:51.752+01:00

If you own an iphone or an android phone you may know from your own experience that the information transmitted by applications can be disturbing. I think you should know what data applications transmit about you, so that you can make an informed decision on which applications you want to have. I compiled a table of applications and which data they transmit. Even though free and open-source

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-33519247255123499412010-12-04T13:02:00.002+01:002011-01-20T16:21:49.713+01:00

At work I now work a lot with Visual Studio on Windows 7 Professional. While I have to use Windows, I don't want to loose the functionality and power of Linux, so I run a virtual machine with Ubuntu Maverick. Both Windows and Linux run smoothly on my machine and I can share files among them. In this post I give some help for setting this up. I chose Oracle's VirtualBox (also: VBox) as virtual

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-8141459492617753222010-11-10T19:04:00.012+01:002011-01-21T10:49:34.247+01:00

Some time ago I wrote a post about Ubuntu for PhD students, where I gave instructions on how to set up programs and libraries relevant for research on the Ubuntu linux distribution. This was for Ubuntu 8.10, so now I think it's time to update the information for Ubuntu 10.10 (codenamed "maverick"), a distribution which I can warmly recommend, by the way. Software for researchWhat does

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-28781601254591534642010-06-04T21:37:00.005+02:002010-12-20T02:08:46.075+01:00

Image via Wikipedia text to speech keyboard Text-to-speech is great for the lazy, visually impaired, or people with reading disabilities. I think I read much, but I also count myself to the lazy and I like it to be read to. I found how you can select any text, for example in a webpage or a PDF, and let it be spoken using free software. It is relatively easy to set this up and here I show how.

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-38849824648010240772009-10-03T23:57:00.009+02:002009-11-28T17:48:59.871+01:00

Fed up hearing and reading about Google Chrome I wanted to try out Chromium in Ubuntu, the open-source version of Chrome. There are several ways to install Google Chromium in Ubuntu. Downloading from Google automatically adds Google to your repository list[1]. Other ways to install it are over Personal Package Archive (PPA) or building from source code. Using the repository is safest, fastest,

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-77252625014767411812009-09-20T22:59:00.005+02:002009-12-04T17:28:52.692+01:00

The other day I was compiling in Linux some files ported from a Windows system and GCC gave me the error expected unqualified-id before string constant. Normally the error unexpected unqualified-id indicates you have a syntax error somewhere in your code, although it could be anywhere. So what to do? I checked my program again and again, and was sure the files were correct. The program was

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-84497193387442270612009-09-04T22:06:00.015+02:002010-01-02T22:47:23.999+01:00

There has been a lot of fuzz about cloud computing. This IT service concept involves hosting of data and applications on remote servers. However, the concept "cloud computing" is very fuzzy and has been stretched a lot. In this post I will take a look at eyeOS, an open-source cloud operating system, developed by a small team mainly situated in Barcelona, Spain. The company makes money on

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-83103036850049367152009-08-06T15:14:00.017+02:002009-09-23T16:46:40.488+02:00

While Linux is a great operating system for computer geeks, it has been a recurring tongue-in-cheek among them to proclaim the Year of the Linux Desktop in view a market uptake of below 10%. One of the difficulties for Linux to gain broader acceptance used to be usability (especially ease of installation), hardware driver support, and availability of commercial applications. All these points are

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-15812249710646050172009-07-21T20:00:00.033+02:002011-01-29T17:59:35.423+01:00

This post explains how to create print-quality figures in Matlab. The process is efficient and results in editable vector-graphics that you can include in any document including Microsoft Word, Open Office, or latex. Before you create your figures you might also want to check my article on combinations of linestyles and markers to have clear plots in black-and-white and color. IntroductionThere

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-78436794852919964612009-06-24T19:23:00.010+02:002010-01-10T18:40:34.563+01:00

People new to linux find it often difficult to install programs from source. However, if the first hurdle is overcome, people appreciate that the fact that most programs are open-source gives you great freedom of choice. Miss a function? Maybe you find it in a nightly-build. Find a bug? Maybe you find the bug-fix already in the new source. If you want to install a program by compiling from

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-37029764162106723302009-06-09T20:01:00.007+02:002010-01-10T18:45:51.468+01:00

Getting a data projector to work can be quite annoying. You are nervous, because you have a presentation and on top of the stress the projector might not work properly. In this post I talk about some of the issues involved and give some pointers about how to resolve them. See this tutorial presentation on how to get data projectors to work. Of course, it is really bad publicity if you don't

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-26997567043862873042009-06-05T12:53:00.019+02:002010-01-02T22:22:11.367+01:00

Tomboy is an open-source desktop note-taking application for Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Notes are connected over a wiki which makes it an excellent tool for personal information management. In this post I give a short introduction to tomboy. Tomboy supports synchronization, export to HTML and pdf, reminders, and todo lists, and formulae in LaTeX. A criticism to tomboy is that it is

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-43781492415317902912009-02-20T17:48:00.008+01:002009-09-15T17:57:10.639+02:00

I encountered a really annoying issue with OpenOffice. The export function is not really reliable. I am using Impress in OpenOffice on Linux to create a presentation. The presentation is later to be reproduced on a Windows PC. During rehearsals on Windows and MacOS, the exportation exported to powerpoint ppt format had the layout messed up. Opening the presentation in OpenOffice in Windows or

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-43900543051983127672009-01-30T16:58:00.020+01:002009-09-15T18:09:21.924+02:00

Pre-Post-ScriptumThis post chronicles my attempts to install Microsoft Office on my linux box in the office in order be able to read and possibly edit files that people send to me in Microsoft formats. I now think that given third party format supported by Microsoft Office (particularly sun's odf plugin) and the difficulties I encountered, installing it should not have priority for me.My

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-47654277144540366202008-11-06T20:32:00.011+01:002010-06-05T16:10:08.900+02:00

Some linux commands are fantastic! I found some nice ones in a slashdot postings about surprising linux commands and others come from slashdot user tpwch. Alarm Clocks and NoticesWant a simple alarm clock? Try this one: echo "cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp" | at 7am tomorrow Your food is in the oven? sleep $((20*60)); xmessage "Dinner is done" You can also use zenity to get a popup message:

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-65886321141451770772008-10-30T23:40:00.017+01:002009-10-04T11:42:52.067+02:00

Ubuntu 8.10 is released. You might want to read the release notes and the press release. I waited until today to try out the ibex on my laptop, because my wireless card from intel had some firmwire issues with the new linux kernel (2.6.27) which weren't fixed in 8.10 for the beta version. A lot of people are downloading from the servers. Before you start, make sure you have configured a

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-68213688229541687032008-10-23T17:01:00.007+02:002009-09-15T18:09:21.953+02:00

Suppose your computer at work is in a private network that does IP masquerading. You want to access that machine from home or from another computer outside the network. Suppose you have sent your admins about 30 mails in about 14 weeks about you wanting to access your machine from outside and suppose they answered about a third of the mails, but you haven't made any significant progress towards

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-7502690672577858632008-10-14T15:54:00.025+02:002009-11-09T18:45:34.306+01:00

We are talking about software installation on the beowulf cluster. A beowulf is a dedicated compute cluster that runs scientific computations in parallel. Usually there is one head node (also called master) and several slaves, connected over the network. Processes are started from the master and distributed from there on the slaves. Installing and configuring the OS on each machine manually is

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-28982605741094866002008-10-09T11:36:00.052+02:002009-11-09T18:41:48.565+01:00

In this post I want to share some experiences and to tell about the software installation on our beowulf cluster. Short reminder: a beowulf cluster is a cluster of computers designed to run computing jobs in parallel, running linux, and dedicated to scientific calculations. In an earlier post I explained the hardware setup of the beowulf, now it's time to install operating system and software. In

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-79452284889858574952008-10-05T14:53:00.011+02:002009-09-15T17:57:10.689+02:00

After three days resting in bed trying to recover my health I thought it was time to get up and show some spirit. I had read in bed on the decline of civilization in "The Clash of Civilization." Decline of civilization is associated with decadence which shows in (among other characteristics) loss of motivation and moral ethics, and refusal of intellectual effort. Still coughing and struggling

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-45148271426293806912008-09-29T19:04:00.006+02:002009-09-19T03:15:56.091+02:00

A friend asked me how to find out which linux version he is using. Strictly speaking, what he meant was not the linux kernel version, but he was referring to distribution and version of distribution. A simple way to get some system information is uname -a, but this only tells you about whether you are using GNU/Linux and the version of the linux kernel. There are several possibilities to

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-33159472188415358992008-09-26T16:51:00.010+02:002009-09-19T03:18:41.098+02:00

A friend asked me, how to kill processes in linux. Killing processes in linux is done using the function kill. By default kill sends term signals to the processes and waits until they terminate. The option -9 speeds this up. kill takes the process id as argument, however often you want to specify rather the name of the program. In this case you can use pkill. xkill allows you choosing a window on

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-8476474648142560212008-09-08T19:22:00.017+02:002010-12-24T12:01:42.074+01:00

Subversion is a software for version-control that allows you to store changes you make to files, so you can revert edits, restore deleted files, and much more. If you are new to subversion you might want to start with my introduction to subversion, where I explain how to use subversion (svn) for making incremental backups of your data to a repository and keeping track of different versions of

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-19529105222621258792008-08-30T15:12:00.003+02:002010-01-01T16:21:26.273+01:00

This post is about ubuntu software installation for scientific computing and research in general. I wrote this post some time ago (with hardy heron in mind), but I update it every now and then with new software and links. It is updated for intrepid ibex (ubuntu 8.10) and most should still be valid for 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I use ubuntu at my work mainly for searching scientific articles,

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com1