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Latex your instant messaging
Probably one of the most useful thing that I’ve discovered this month:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-latex/
Pidgin-latex lets you write Latex code normally in your chat conversation and renders the result in real time.
For both parties to be able to see the result, they will have to install this plugin or any other one that is handling the mime type [...]
Tilda: The ubiquitous drop-down terminal
I was commenting on Guake in http://pierrelucbacon.com/2008/09/19/3-useful-applications/ but found that it was slightly buggy and polluting the tray in the top panel under gnome with its icon.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Tilda which turned out to be at least equally, and so far, much more usable and interesting to use than Guake. My point [...]
PGF and Expected Value of the Poisson Distribution
Probability Generating Function for the Poisson Distribution
Let p(y) be the probability generating function for Y.
Expected Value of the Poisson Distribution
Merging pdf files together
From the gs package in Ubuntu:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=outputMerged.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf
jPdf Tweak, the “Swiss Army Knife for PDF files”, is also a great tool and run out of the box with Java but it might be faster just using the above command rather than browsing through jpdftweak’s GUI.
Installing a LaTeX package under Ubuntu
In two easy steps:
Download, extract and create a directory under /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/ if necessary. Copy the entire directory, or the single .sty file to that location. (You need to be root)
Run “sudo mktexlsr“
From the man pages:
mktexlsr is used to generate the ls-R databases used by the kpathsea library. Kpathsea: A library for path [...]
RDI en direct sous Linux
Depuis quelques temps, j’arrive à écouter sans problème le flux video de Radio-Canada sous Ubuntu Linux. Il en va pas de même avec tous les vidéos sur le site cependant.
Je ne sais trop comment je suis abouti à la bonne configuration. Dans tout les cas, il faut se procurer les codecs appropriés dans les bons [...]
Running Kamikaze with WRT54G under Client Mode
Having the internet cable modem and the router in one place in the apartment, I needed a way to connect all my gadgets in my room/office without having to run a dozen of ethernet cables in the hallway. More specifically, I wanted to have my IP phone close to the bed and not to have [...]
Installing Spim/Xspim
Spim is A MIPS32 Simulator freely available for Linux, Mac and Windows. The process for installing the software from source is not as nice as we would expect it to be.
Download source code from:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/SPIM/spim.tar.gz
You will probably need to get Bison and Flex:
sudo apt-get install bison flex
Don’t forget:
sudo apt-get install libxaw7-dev
Otherwise you’ll get “X11/Xaw/Cardinals.h: No such [...]
Check start up date under Linux
Obviously “uptime” provides that information but only gives the number of days. On one of my server, it shows:
01:39:53 up 445 days, 11:15, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
But when did that happen ? I don’t know any option which can compute the actual date using uptime.
I realized the other day that [...]
Fun with isograms
An isogram is a meaningful string, generally a word or a phrase, made of distinct letters. When playing with combinatorics, it’s fun to learn about the existence of such words. Let’s take the word COMBINATORICS, then there are 13!/(2!2!2!) ways to form a new 13 letters words from its letters. In fact, we must divide [...]
BBC video: Cantor, Gödel, Turing
I found this nice video about probably the most famous logician and early computer scientists of all times. The documentary has this quality that we are expecting from the BBC.
Dangerous Knowledge Part 1
Dangerous Knowledge Part 2
Even if the concepts are quite deep, they’ve been able to make it accessible to anybody.
How to draw a tree with Latex
I had a bad time last night trying to draw a graph for a tree representation of a game. My researches to find a usable tool to draw graphs, preferably a GUI editor, have been unsucessful so far. I was reluctant to use Pstricks even though this was probably the best way to achieve high [...]
NSLU2 and MPD
Having a functionnal setup for playing music on my unslung box, I decided to install and configure mpd on it for more flexibility.
Mpd is available as an ipkg package but some work must be done to make it work. I had to create /opt/etc/mpd.conf with the following content:
port “6600″
music_directory “/share/flash/data/public/mp3″
playlist_directory “/share/flash/data/public/mpd/playlists/”
db_file “/share/flash/data/public/mpd/mpd.db”
log_file “/share/flash/data/public/mpd/mpd.log”
error_file “/share/flash/data/public/mpd/mpd.error”
state_file “/share/flash/data/public/mpd/state”
audio_output_format [...]
La limace qui fait tout
Lors de ma participation à Eurobot 2007, j’avais expérimenté l’utilisation d’un NSLU2 pour le robot. L’ordinateur embarqué à base de processeur ARM permet beaucoup malgré ça taille et son prix plutôt abordable (quelques 50$ sur Ebay). Cette année-là, j’avais utilisé OpenEmbedded et OpenSlug comme distro sur le bidule (”slug” pour les intimes). Une modification électroniques [...]
Per process disk read/write monitoring
One of the most annoying thing for me is to hear this clicking noise coming from my hard drive. Last day, while I was trying to concentrate on some algorithms, there was this sound coming out of my laptop which was starting to drive me crazy. The frequency was constant and continuous, so I asked [...]
3 useful applications
I’ve just discovered these 3 applications two days ago and I think it worth to give it a try.
Conky
Conky is lightweight system monitor. Screenlets might be great, but I don’t find it integrated good enough to my desktop and makes my session to load slower. Conky is available in the Ubuntu repos.
Terminator
I was normally [...]
Bluetooth et le Macbook Pro 4.1 sous Ubuntu Hardy
Je n’arrivais pas à faire fonctionner ma sourie bluetooth au cours des dernières semaines. Toutes les indications sur les forums ou dans les tutoriels indiquaient que le bluetooth devait fonctionner parfaitement dans les dernières versions d’Ubuntu. Pourtant, je n’arrivais pas à faire apparaître aucun dispositif bluetooth par l’applet bluetooth-manager de gnome. En passant en ligne [...]
Recevoir des appels en provenance d’un téléphone sur Ekiga
Ayant réussi à configurer Ekiga pour appeler à des numéro de téléphones, j’ai songé après tout à me procurer un numéro de téléphone pour recevoir des appels également en Voip sur mon ordinateur. La qualité du service de diamondcard.us m’a semblé bonne et peut-être même meilleure que celle de Skype concernant la fluidité de transfert [...]
Configuring Ekiga for PC-To-Phone calls
Eventhough you can run Skype on Linux system as described in my last post, I think some more flexible and open options worth to be set.
Ekiga is one of them and is available out of the box in Ubuntu.
Installing Skype under Hardy 64 bits
When installing Ubuntu on my laptop, I made the choice to run it in 64 bits mode having in mind that it might lead to various problems. One of them, is to get Skype running. Since this product is proprietary, no package can be created for 64 bits. You still can get it work by [...]
Getting wireless driver to work on MBP 4.1 and 64 bits
Unfortunately, it seems that the wireless device used in the Macbook Pro 4.1 has no linux driver yet. Ndiswrapper has to be used instead. After uncompressing the rar file named broadcomxpinstaller.exe, simply use the file bcmwl5.inf for a 64 bits installation even if broadcominstaller64.exe is also provided. I updated the Ubuntu wiki to precise it. [...]
Pour le libre accès aux connaissances
Je ne sais trop combien de fois je suis tombé sur une page d’ieeeXplore, ACM portal, SpringerLink, ScienceDirect (et j’en passe) ces dernières années en cherchant de l’information sur Google pour mes projets. Toujours le même scénario: je trouve LE texte qui semblerait m’aider énormément, le recherche dans google et tombe sur une de ces [...]
Worm Is Green
Une découverte intéressante (encore d’Islande !):
http://www.last.fm/music/Worm+Is+Green
et de bonnes sonorités dans The Robot Has Got the Blues et Undercover. Une voix féminine non intruisive dans certaines des pièces. Ça me rappelle par moments du Múm sans ses mélodies “jouets”.
D’autres pièces sont toutefois beaucoup plus sombres mais toujours captivantes: j’ai une impression de Tom [...]
Le mot-clé “restrict”
Il y a quelques minutes encore, étudiant le code contenu dans color_yuv2rgb.c dans xawtv, je ne connaissais pas ce mot-clé du langage C (défini dans la norme C99). Je suis alors tombé sur ce site qui ma fait sourire. L’auteur a rédigé le “contrat” du mot-clé “restrict” pour vulgariser son utilité:
“THE RESTRICT CONTRACT
I, [insert [...]
