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.comBlogger49125tag: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-51946514645360563592010-12-03T16:16:00.004+01:002011-02-02T11:55:00.553+01:00

You spent a long time extracting statistics from data and creating meaningful figures with appropriate line-styles and markers. Now you want to create a video by just concatenating these figures. Some lines of matlab code and you are done. Just spent too much time to create a movie in matlab. This script takes 10 figures which are already displayed, resizes them to full screen resolution (all

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com3tag: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-51682997085199104972009-11-11T19:49:00.000+01:002009-11-11T19:49:03.986+01:00

When I am browsing internet sites and using different services I am required to enter a lot of passwords. Memorizing all passwords grants best security, however this is inconvenient and usually annoying. It's much easier to let firefox fill in the passwords for me, however the problem is that if my laptop gets stolen or somebody gets physical access to the computer all private information will be

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-272575041658916892009-10-28T17:55:00.012+01:002009-12-16T22:12:15.091+01:00

In articles about programming it is very important to embed source code so that people can see the code and even download it directly. Sometimes I include code snippets in my posts and the code reads much nicer if the syntax is highlighted. There are different ways to embed source code from different programming languages in HTML and in this post I comment on them. The different methods for

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-62604978907688653352009-10-12T07:56:00.001+02:002009-10-12T07:56:00.242+02:00

There are different methods to list related posts in blogger. I have tried several of them and after reviewing, I think Yu-Jie Lin's blogger related posts is the best for several reasons. It is very fast and updates from feed once a day. Installation is very fast and can be done by installing the widget from Yu-Jie's blogger related post service and adding a code to your blogger template. However

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-77311146980741298322009-10-11T17:36:00.000+02:002009-10-11T17:36:19.257+02:00

Augmented Browsing refers to systems that allow to customize the look and function of web sites. It allows to customize web pages on-the-fly and make the changes persistent, so that every time you enter a website, the site gets automatically adapted to your need. In this article I give a short introduction to augmented browsing. Augmented Browsing allows you to change the feel and function of

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com17tag: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-69427887610096911732009-09-01T15:43:00.009+02:002010-12-24T00:05:37.564+01:00

When you are doing some computations in C++ you might not want to write everything yourself including optimizing advanced algorithms. You would want to reuse code or write it in a numerical computing environment such as matlab, octave, R, or python. In this post I link to sources that explain how to include such high-level code in C++ or to call it from a C++ program. How to embed matlab code

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-4068246388881805762009-08-29T22:07:00.009+02:002010-01-03T00:11:14.777+01:00

Subversion is a program that allows you to store different versions of files, so you can revert edits, restore deleted files, and much more. If you never used subversion before you might want to see my introduction to subversion. There are only few simple steps to migrate svn repository from one server to another. In this post I describe them. As I told in several other posts, we had severe

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag: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-60358989018396662502009-08-04T10:52:00.009+02:002010-01-10T18:35:31.659+01:00

In my last post I showed how to write mex functions with the armadillo library to get both fast and clean mex functions. Armadillo is a library for C++ that has a syntax similar to matlab. Here I give an example of a mex function using armadillo. It computes the Mahalanobis distance and is based on the template from the last post. Code snippet - Mex Function for Mahalanobis Function on

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-46250578877189323542009-08-02T11:35:00.014+02:002010-01-02T23:59:46.547+01:00

Typical situation: you run a matlab script for some simulation or experiment and need to run it faster. You find out with the profiler that there is a function that takes a lot of time and want to optimize that function. You want to write it in C/C++ and wrap it as a mex. In an earlier post I did a review of different C/C++ libraries for scientific computing (among them IT++, GSL, and others)

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com4tag: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-65155301792684325042009-07-16T14:15:00.006+02:002009-09-15T17:57:10.604+02:00

I was thinking about some business ideas recently.One idea was to give users recommendations based on collaborative ratings. It would use nearest neighbor search to find items which are probably liked by similar people. Similarity is evaluated by metrics.This is already implemented with books on amazon.com, where you can get a message "users who looked at [...] also looked at." Netflix, a

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-14337440671751105262009-06-16T17:08:00.010+02:002010-01-10T18:44:27.484+01:00

I often switch between different computers and synchronization of data can be painful at times. Fortunately, my online reading list is completely unaffected by the change of computer, because my browser bookmarks get automatically synchronized. In this post I show how easy it is to set this up. I can synchronize my browser bookmarks on different computers, and access and edit them on-line.

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com3tag: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-19622390962327009102009-06-04T22:54:00.009+02:002010-01-10T18:47:34.801+01:00

I was searching for a hosting service that I could use for remote backup, synchronization, and revision control. It should have reliable and easy access and allow me to use scp, rsync, and svn, among other programs. In this post I explain what I found and motivate my final choice. I started in wikipedia, checking the list of online backup services and the article on online storage, then I read

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-70367373932389840842009-06-02T11:59:00.004+02:002010-01-10T18:48:56.294+01:00

Sun provides the Java Platform Debugger Architecture, an API for debugging. The debugger JDB (java debugger) is a simple demonstration of how to use the API. JDB works similarly to GDB. Netbeans and Eclipse offer more comfortable controls. Anyways, in this post I give a short introduction to the JDB command line interface. Here come the most important commands in JDB: To run jdb in ubuntu (as

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-39341310983211642032009-04-20T19:09:00.010+02:002010-01-10T18:34:27.920+01:00

For a long time already I have wanted to post about this cool tool. If you haven't hear of it yet, you maybe should. Graph Visualization Software (short graphviz) is an open-source software package that visualizes graphs, structures, networks, and dependency diagrams. In order to show how neat, simple, and useful it is, two examples: An Undirected Graph Write a text file "graph.dot". We'll

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0