Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft

Upgrading from Ubuntu 6.06 to Ubuntu 6.10 was a breeze. It took about 20 minutes to upgrade on my Averatec.

Program for Large Network Analysis

I stumbled on Pajek program after reading Error and attack tolerance of complex networks. At first the Pajek program seems to a very neat network visualization tool. I will have to explore it to know more about it.

Expert System

CLIPS is a good tool for building expert systems.

Wireless, Ubuntu and Dell

I faced a tough time getting wireless to work on Dell Latitude in Ubuntu. Luckily, Dell provides windows drivers on its support website. So, it must be simple now. Just use ndiswrapper. Right? Wrong. It was not straightforward. I got this useful information from Stacks and Piles.

echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
sudo rmmod bcm43xx
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-utils
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils
sudo ndiswrapper -i /home/gopal/Desktop/bcmwl5.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m
sed -e 's/RadioState|1/RadioState|0/' /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5/*.conf
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

.NET in Linux

Mono seems to be promising for developing and running .NET applications in Linux.

File Restoration

Did you delete your file accidentally? Try recovering the file using Restoration. It is a simple and user friendly software that may recover files from your hard drive even after you deleted them.

Ubuntu dapper

This version of Linux seems to be a superior operating system. I have installed this on my laptop, which seems pretty neat so far. The system seems to be performing faster than with windows XP. It must be because of the spam and spyware that a windows system typically attracts. With the availability of many free software suites for linux, I believe I can use this laptop for my everyday use.
Earlier, I had trouble installing wireless. The network component used to freeze the system. But, now I added these commands in the kernel line of /boot/grub/menu.lst

acpi = off

The Greatest Software Ever Written

Charles Babcock compiles a list of greatest software based on historical context, technical brilliance, and adopted in the real world.

The original article is posted here. The software ranking is as follows:

1. UNIX
2. IBM’s System R
3. Gene sequencing software at the Institute of Genomic Research
4. IBM System 360 OS
5. Java language
6. Mosaic browser
7. Sabre system
8. Macintosh OS
9. Excel spreadsheet
10. Apollo guidance system
11. Google search rank
12. The Morris worm

VOIP

My first experience with VOIP calls were during those days when I used the CISCO voip routers and MPLS protocols. The VOIP equipment was very expensive and only corporations were able to afford it. After 5 years, I had a chance to look at the latest broadband phone at a friend’s place last week. She got the phone for free after purchasing a broadband service from Vonage. She bought it for her folks back home in a different country (India). Even though the technology is dodgy and the equipment setup is finicky, I am very much impressed with the advances in VOIP. The main reason for use of this service by my friend is that it costs less than to make an International phone call. The MAC address of the telephone equipment was mapped to a unique US phone number. One needs a broadband connection to connect the equipment and start using. It is more practical than the computer-to-computer voice/video connection. People are used to talk over phones, not with microphones on their head in front of a computer.

Tutorial Software

I am sure many of you agree that writing a user manual is a difficult and time-consuming job. Creating a tutorial is even difficult. Wink is tutorial software that will help in quickly creating a tutorial as a flash animation or PDF file.

Backup

I realize that it is very important to maintain backups of research work. This article is a good start.

Diagnostic Tests

In a diagnostic test, true positives and true negatives are always preferred. Of the remaining two, false positives and false negatives, the former is considered more serious than the latter.

Top 10 Win XP tips

Here is a very useful collection of tips for Win XP users.

Linux Laptop and Wireless

I have had many troubles trying to install wireless card on to laptops with Linux. Madwifi provides a good collection of drivers / packages for this purpose.

Naming conventions

When I started programming the programmers followed complex variable naming standards. The most commonly used notation was Hungarian. Over time, the standards evolved and now we have some industry naming standards for programs. I am glad that I have knowledge about the earlier standards as it helps to understand legacy code. I found Pete Brown's website as a useful link for following naming conventions when coding in C#. I agree with most of the standards in that website. Most importantly, I am glad to see many people follow those standards. It makes understanding code easier even without explicit comments.

Netbeans and C# Express

I installed two IDE's today: Netbeans 5.0 for Java and Visual C# Express for C#. Both the software packages are free of cost. A cursory look at Netbeans gives me the impression that it is a very good IDE for Java. I have been using Visual Studio .NET 2003 for quite some time and C# Express seems to load faster. I love using C# Express; its design, refactoring options, colorful outlining, and deployment options are good. I think the main drawback of C# Express is that it does not support previous versions of .NET framework (1.0 and 1.1).

Firefox 1.5 vs. SeaMonkey 1.0

I installed SeaMonkey 1.0 on my notebook; it reminded me of Netscape. I am a big fan of Firefox 1.5, which I continue to use in my desktop. I will evaluate SeaMonkey and then decide if I should continue with it.

Visio and EMF

I had trouble when printing a drawing that was designed in Visio 2003 and exported as EMF. The text in the drawing would not print right on the printer even though it appears fine on the screen. I am used to exporting as EMF formats while drawing using PowerPoint. To overcome this problem in Visio 2003, I am exporting the drawing as PNG. This takes more space, but at least does not surprise me with printing issues. Microsoft has acknowledged this problem.

Named Anchor

I just came to know that named anchor is case sensitive in Mozilla, whereas it is not so in Internet Explorer.

Powerpoints for posters

It is a bad idea to use powerpoint for creating posters. They might have portability issues. Powerpoint crashes frequently and it becomes real difficult to recover the poster. In addition to that, there are so many issues for converting it to PDF.