SemiAntics

This is my new Lenovo X100e.

I recently acquired a new “netbook.” You probably shouldn’t call it a netbook as it seems that the maximum size for a netbook should be the 10″ screen. However, it’s 11.6″ diagonal, so it’s very close to being a netbook. I promptly installed Ubuntu GNU/Linux on it. Here’s a quick description of the process.

First, you need a thumbdrive to install it. It doesn’t come with a CD drive. This is actually a simple process provided you have a good thumb drive, and it’s probably much wiser than burning a CD that you will throw away once you’re done. Note on the thumbdrive: it needs to be at least 1 gig, and it is best to have one without the U3 system. The U3 system is very confusing, and frankly it’s a pain in the butt. It takes room off your thumb drive that could be used for storage, and it makes the file system not work like you’d expect. It’s also very difficult to get rid of the U3 system once you have such a thumb drive. So if you’ve not bought one yet, make sure it doesn’t have U3 on it!

With the thumb drive, you can create a startup disk. I did this using my Thinkpad T60 with Ubuntu (it’s extremely easy once you’ve got a well-configured drive). I followed the instructions on the Ubuntu page for netbook installation. They also have instructions for creating this disk using Windows and Mac.

Next, you have to reboot with the thumb drive inserted and make it boot from the thumb drive. I did this by pressing enter at the splash screen and following directions. It was very easy.

Installing from then on is standard Ubuntu, so I won’t cover it. Everything worked smoothly. I should note that I had the computer plugged in to the wall instead of using battery power. This is key, so make sure you do that.

Once you have it installed you need to update the system. Keep the power plugged in. A ton of drivers don’t work right until you update, including wireless. I suggest you update using an ethernet connection instead of trying to get wireless to work. While this is going on, don’t mess with any thing. Just update and then reboot when it’s done. Leave it plugged in!

On reboot, you’ll need to fix the one issue that I’ve had so far. Basically, because the driver for the Radeon HD3200 chipset has a bug in it. I followed the directions here to fix it. I’ll include the fix anyway:

This is a known problem with AMD RS780 chipset (Radeon HD3200) and kernel modsetting (KMS), which is enabled by default in Lucid. To disable KMS, you should do the following in a terminal:

Modify the grub configuration (Grub is the bootloader for your computer, installed when you install Ubuntu)

sudo vim /etc/default/grub

Modify line 10 to say

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="radeon.modeset=0"

You just fill in the part between the quote marks. Save, exit, and then run

sudo update-grub

Then reboot and you should be ready to go.

Dell used to be a decent company. What happened? Grace got a Dell Photo 924 printer as a present a few years ago. It’s a rebranded Lexmark X615 (I have heard, but obviously nobody is confirming this!) It doesn’t have drivers for GNU/Linux (or Mac). It’s described as an expensive paperweight by some people, and accurately too. To get to the point, the power adapter went bad on it, so I thought I would get a new one and sell it so that we could have one that works on GNU/Linux. To my surprise, the new adapter from Dell is $50. They even recommended that I buy a new printer rather than get a new adapter! What a horrible waste! I asked them what I was supposed to do with the old printer. They said I could recycle it (send it back to Dell for free and they would re-manufacture it and sell it again). So Dell gets paid twice for the same printer. Nice.

It turns out that Lexmark sells the adapter for $20 and you can even find it online for about $8 used (plus shipping). That’s more along the lines of what I expected. I will never buy another Dell product (my first laptop was a Dell, and that is back when they had good customer support). I recommend that everyone avoid buying Dell products. It’s just not worth it.

Today I sat down and pondered what gifts to get my wife. I realize that one of two things is going on.

1. We already have plenty of stuff, and I shouldn’t give her anything.
2. I’m lazy, and a bad husband for not being creative enough to give her something she will truly enjoy.

It’s probably a combination of both. I look around at the way we live, and I see no reason to panic over the recession we’re in. We’ve got it so good, and by most people’s standards we are struggling to get by!

So, one of the things I plan to do this season is just give to a couple of organizations I’ve been meaning to support, but haven’t yet supported. Here are a few that could use some help if you’ve got a few extra dollars. I may add more as I think of them.

Skype is only one of many services that offer voice over the internet – essentially, it is just “free” telephone if you have a fast connection. Telecommunications are probably all going to be moving to some sort of high speed digital connection in the future, but hopefully it will be a more graceful solution than Skype.

Skype is two things – it is a protocol and it is software. A protocol describes a task; it is a set of rules governing communication between electronic devices in this case. Software can implement a protocol. For example, the browser you are using knows exactly how to display this webpage because of the HTML standard. While HTML is not a communications protocol, the concept is similar, and it serves as a good example. More complicated examples are readily available – in fact, this is how a lot of things are done in the computing field.

Alternatives

Wikipedia has a list of alternatives for voice over IP. You should look for something that is well-developed, runs on your operating system, and something that is implementing an open protocol and is Free Software. Another thing that may be important is having encryption available.

Why not Skype?

Skype is its own protocol, and it is not published publicly. Nobody can implement it, comment on it or change it. Skype is not Free Software; you cannot change it, examine it for errors and security holes, or use it except with their permission and on their terms. It is bad software.

You can’t trust your communications to Skype, even if it is convenient and popular.

Last reason: be cool – use something else that other people haven’t heard of so you can tell them about it!

Disclaimer

I have never used any VoIP software. I have just read enough to know I don’t want to use Skype.

If you use LaTeX to create professional documents, and if you use GNU/Linux with Gnome, you are in the minority. I can’t possibly overrate this setup, and I encourage you to invest some time in it – it will be worth the gains to you, especially if you are a researcher and write papers a lot. I used LaTeX for my English papers in my college composition class. LaTeX is useful for writing books as well, in fact it is the de facto standard for publishing anything you want to look really awesome, especially math books and papers.

So, how do you set it up and begin using LaTeX? First things first. You have to learn about LaTeX. There are a bunch of tutorials, but a very nice one is by Andy Roberts -  Getting to Grips with LaTeX.

Next, you’ll want to get some sort of editor for LaTeX. For KDE (which is not Gnome, obviously) you would simply use Texmaker. The problem with installing this on Gnome is that you get a ton of new libraries for QT and it’s a lot of stuff to install for one program. There is an easier way – use Vim. Well, most people aren’t going to do that! How about using Gedit? It’s got a nice extension for LaTeX (and a lot of other nice extensions too). There is a nice website set up for this plugin to Gedit, and installing is a breeze. You’ll also need the rubber package which includes the TeX libraries and all.

The Gedit plugin is in beta, so not everything works just perfectly. Hey, if you like it, donate to the people who are writing it – Free Software doesn’t have to be gratis. You might encourage them to finish your favorite missing feature sooner.

What are headings?

Headings are important elements of documents, emails, books, websites and a plethora of other types of written work. Why are they so important? When people read, they tend to search for the important words, or the things that jump out at them first. It is a matter of efficiency; you want to read the important stuff first and skip the unimportant things. With resumes and websites, for example, you want to make sure you help your audience focus on the important stuff quickly. If you don’t make a conscious effort to make your work easy to navigate, people will get frustrated and move on.

Headings are semantic separators; they separate sections of documents into visually distinct regions of text and they give meaning to the text they contain by the descriptive text in the heading. There is a lot more to this than meets they eye. Your brain makes distinctions that you might not be conscious of at first glance. For instance, you might not notice the logical order of headings, but you will notice if something doesn’t make sense the way it is ordered. For instance, consider the following example.

A paragraph about dogs

Here is a description of some dogs that are awesome for pets. You should pick a dog for a pet since they are great for pets! You can pick one from the following list:

Great Dogs For Pets

• Doberman
• Dalmatian
• Mutt

Now, you probably notice the line “Great Dogs For Pets” first, but logically, you should first notice the heading that says “A paragraph about dogs” since this conveys more meaning about the content below it. We instinctively look at the boldest, biggest things first, and you should certainly cater to that instinct. We also generally scan from left to right and top to bottom, so that whole example just screams “contradiction”!

Using Headings in Documents

I’m going to assume you have a word processor of some sort. Hopefully it’s one that is Free Software such as Open Office. You should notice a menu of styles in your word processor. Open Office Writer has a drop down menu in the top left of the screen that usually says “default”. If you click on it, you will see all kinds of options for styling the the document.

By default, the default headings are styled so that they either decrease in size or stay the same as the order gets larger, and they sometimes alternate between italic and non-italic font style. That variety helps you pick out where you are in the document.

Of course, if you want to make it absolutely impossible to get confused, you can number your headings. For example, “1.0 Dogs, 1.1 What dogs are good pets?, 2.0 Cats, …” You get the point I hope.

Accessibility

From the point of view of meeting the accessibility needs of visually impaired people, headings are more important. People who use screen readers need to have headings to convey the meaning and structure of the website. You might want to check out this page at WebAIM which talks about the accessibility implications of misusing headings.

Conclusion

• Do use and nest headings in a logical order to convey the structure of your document.
• Don’t use markup with regular text to ‘visually’ create headings.

It’s funny that it’s taken me this long to think about using an LDAP server for all my VCU email addresses. Everyone has an address that is available online anyway, so VCU let’s you use the LDAP server to quickly look up addresses.

There is a page dedicated to setting up an LDAP server in Thunderbird at the VCU Technology Services website, so I won’t repeat it here.

LDAP can be used for many things I suppose, but it seems most useful for email addresses and phone numbers.

For my own future reference, there is an LDAP server at NCSU as well.

First we tried Flickr, then we tried Picasa. Actually, Grace did. We decided that, much like the way they created Google Mail, Google Maps, and Google Calendar, Google actually did a much nicer job with their photo site than Flickr did. It is a lot easier to use, to upload photos, and you get more space than Flickr offers.

We didn’t try any others, so please tell us if there is an even better place. (We’ll probably keep them at Google for a while though).

Here is a link to our photo gallery.

I deleted my account. I didn’t do it to hide from you. I did it for a couple of reasons:

1. Facebook isn’t exactly great when it comes to respecting your privacy. Suppose you want to delete your account; you can’t delete your account, you can only deactivate it.
2. Facebook used to be simple; it was a nice way to stay connected with your friends. Now it’s bloated bigtime.
3. If you keep up with facebook it can take up a lot of time.
4. Linkedin is better for my needs now; granted, it’s still pretentious as heck, but it’s useful and more mature

So, go join LinkedIn to catch up with me again!

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 17 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Through your network you can:

• Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended
• Be found for business opportunities
• Search for great jobs
• Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
• Post and distribute job listings
• Find high-quality passive candidates
• Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know

LinkedIn is free to join. They also offer paid accounts that give you more tools for finding and reaching the right people, whether or not they are in your network.

Richard Stallman, (founder of the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation) will be speaking at VCU on March 27th of this year.

Mr. Stallman will speak on the topic of “Free Software in Ethics and in Practice”, and about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide.

This seminar will is the result of many hours of work on my part, and the donations and help of the VCU community, faculty, students and staff. It is primarily sponsored by the VCU School of Engineering’s Computer Science Department, the VCU Honors College, the Student Advisory Board to the Computer Science Department, as well as the ACM chapter at VCU. Additionally there is a private company who has offered a significant donation, but I am not sure if I should post their name here.

Event Details

When: March 27th, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Where: Room 1164, Temple Building, VCU Monroe Park Campus
Directions: Please follow the VCU directions to the Main Street Parking Deck.