Tabula Rasa

Wicd ROCK on the roads ! – August 27th, 2009

Been traveling in the USA for a couple of weeks now. I was prepared for bitter timetime with my Debian and wireless roaming. So I’ve mastered the use of commands ifconfig and iwlist and such. The reason is that I’ve had my share already with network-manager.

I always found gnome-network-manager resource hog, and non reliable. And when I tried it two weeks ago after one and a half years I discovered it’s developed so much I can’t recognize it anymore. It has too many options, and it’s more suitable to a network engineer than a simple user. What happened to the GNOME simplicity I don’t know, some one in Red Hat really screwed up with the development of it.

Anyways, I decided to give WICD a shot. Hearing only warm words of it I downloaded the version from Debian repos, and after a minute I was already connected and running wireless.

What makes WICD awesome ?

It’s reliable, It’s easy to use because the user interface is clear and simple. And most importantly it stays out of my way, unlike gnome-network-manager.

The latter needed to many mouse clicks and dialogs to configure, whereas wicd just needs one click.

Here’s a screenshot of the simple wicd notification:

I really like the simplicity. Just for the nostalgia I keep also on the panel the gnome-netstatus-applet…

P.S I forgot to mention, I really think this should be the default network application in Debian/Ubuntu and other gnome based distros.

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Posted in Debian, Linux

WOULD PAY FOR ANYTHING OPEN – July 14th, 2009

Hey, maybe some manufacturer read this desperate post.

I don’t like Windows, had enough from it’s crap. I use Linux. There are many people out there like me. And we would like to use devices that work. Just work with our Linux box.

Make us devices based on open source. It will save YOU costs of development. It will make us happier. I will pay. Many other too.

Here are a few examples:

I have a Nokia phone. Who know how much money they dumped on investing symbian OS. But it does not speak with my Linux. Syncing was never perfect. And I am sick of hacking. Just open the damn code, somebody will fix it for you NOKIA.

I bought an iRIVER T60. It was about 2 years ago. They box said it plays ogg vorbis files. But it doesn’t. It also has a poor alarm feature. Instead of actually playing song as alarm, it makes a quiet beep sound for 30 seconds and dies.
Stupid buggy software, which could have been fixed.

Music portable players should be chip. They should come by default with something like rockbox. This will save a few bucks on developing the software.

I will pay, and many will pay for a player, or a phone with open source software pre-installed.

So, who picks up the ball ??? I know it’s happening. I just hope it’s happening sooner than later.

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Posted in Debian

Making Octave ploting nicer – May 21st, 2009

Personally I prefer python over Octave/Matlab. But since I’m being forced to write Matlab code for one of my course, I started playing around with octave.
By default octave makes ugly ugly plots because it uses the X11 terminal. But there’s a solution, you can switch to wxt terminal. In order to do that, add in the bottom of your .bashrc the following line:
export GNUTERM=wxt

And a magic will happen:
Before:

UGLY !!!

After:

NICE !!!

That’s all folks.

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Posted in Debian, Linux, science

3D plots with matplotlib – May 17th, 2009

Today I built matplotlib from svn. The answer why I did it is in the post’s title. 3D plots are back to this wonderful tool !

So, if you build matplotlib version 0.98.6svn or later, you can enjoy this. It’s sometimes a little bit cranky. With plots of multiple points I got one big black surface, but for simple stuff it works great.

Here is an example of 3D plot of hydraulic head on a coordinate system:

import pylab as pl
from numpy import *
import mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.axes3d as axes3d

       #  x      y     head
head = ((25, 225 , 240.1178), #h1
		(75,  225,  242.3238),#h2
		(125,   225, 244.8013),#h3
		(175,   225,    247.2736),
		(225,   225,    248.8057),#h5
		(25, 175 ,  241.7646), #h6
		(75,  175,  242.0468),#h7
		(175,   175, 248.2085),  #h8
		(225,   175,    249.1382),#h9
		(25,   125,    243.1239), #h10
		(225, 125 , 249.5332), #h11
		(25,  75,  244.4780),#h12
		(75,   75, 245.1523),  #h13
		(175,   75,    248.9717),#h14
		(225,   75,    249.4562),#h15
		(25, 25 ,  245.1523), #h16
		(75,  25,  245.8214),#h17
		(125,   25, 247.1543),  #h18
		(175,   25,    248.4819),#h19
		(225,   25,    249.3144)) #h20       

x, y, z = zip(*head)
xi, yi = pl.arange(0, 250, 5), pl.arange(0, 250, 5) #create grid
head = pl.griddata(x, y, z, xi, yi) #interpolate the scattered data !
print shape(head)
print shape(xi)
print shape(yi)
f = pl.figure(1)
pl.scatter(x, y)
pl.contour(xi, yi, head)
pl.colorbar() # draw colorbar
#pl.show()

f = pl.figure(2)
ax = axes3d.Axes3D(f)
#X,Y,Z = axes3d.get_test_data(0.05)
cset = ax.contourf3D(xi,yi,head)
ax.clabel(cset, fontsize=9, inline=1)
ax.set_xlabel('X')
ax.set_ylabel('Y')
ax.set_zlabel('Hydraulic Head')

f = pl.figure(3)
ax = axes3d.Axes3D(f)
#X,Y,Z = axes3d.get_test_data(0.05)
cset = ax.contour3D(xi,yi,head)
ax.clabel(cset, fontsize=9, inline=1)
ax.set_xlabel('X')
ax.set_ylabel('Y')
ax.set_zlabel('Hydraulic Head')

pl.show()

and the output is:

Another 3D plot

old fashioned...

As usual, have fun with python !

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Posted in Python, science

Top 10 linux blog posts you should avoid reading – April 29th, 2009

As a frequent reader of Linux related news, I’ve come to the conclusion the sometimes reading posts about Linux is a complete waste of time. With time I’ve noticed that there are some repeating patterns to what I skip, so I’ve compiled this list to those who want to save some time, and a reminder to myself.

1. “The year of the Linux desktop” post type – <”YEAR”> won’t be the Linux Desktop
Two many words are typed on this subject. Really, and most of them are just concluding with the fact (usually with a sad tone) that this year will not be the year of the Linux desktop. Well, who cares ? I was introduced to Linux in 2004 – that was my Linux year. And that’s what’s important. The fact is Linux is quietly and steadily growing. If someone expect a sudden massive adoption of Linux… well keep waiting it’s not gonna happen. Mountains are built very slowly, so does Linux adoption. So don’t waste your time reading that type of posts.

2. “Are there too many Linux distros\Linux Desktop is too fragmented…”
Earlier I used the mountain building example. Here’s another example from earth’s history: Evolution. Without natural mutation forking and change, we’d all still be bacteria. So in short – diversity is good ! Imagine we just had red hat – where would be the Linux community then ? We’d still be installing from floppies without KNOPPIX and UBUNTU. BSD’s are good too, just in case.

3. Is “<insert distro here>” dead ?

Pessimists are all the place man. So Gentoo has some issues with it’s management (this is why I don’t use it), but can you expect a project with ~1000 dev’s and hundreds of users to just die ?
Debian too has lot’s of dev’s and it’s full of bureaucracy, and flame wars but it’s kicking. My point is any distro which is not managed by one man, or an elitist group (for example ARCH Linux. ), and has a foundation is not supposed to die. Organizations have their own DNA and they tend to survive and adopt them selves to new situations. This is true for distro’s like SuSE, Red Hat Ubuntu and Mandriva (the biggest commercial Linux distro’s I think of). My point: No is not dead and won’t die. It might just evolve into something else (i.e gentoo-sabayon path).

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Debian, Linux

Swine’s Flu …. – April 28th, 2009

Lately everybody’s talking about swine flu. So I must too. Just in case I get it, and die before I manage to say something about that. Here’s my two cents.

The media, is as usual making us dumb. As a friend of mine put it bluntly – “well… car accidents are politically accepted, because everybody owns a car. But deaths caused by flu just scare people.”

Well, if you ask me, I just don’t get it. How come something unpreventable such as a mutation in the genes of a flu virus cause so much panic, where as driving a car don’t.

Here’s an interactive map of the places where swine flu was found:

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

If I made a map of car accidents in the USA, or in Europe, you’d practically see no land, because it would all be covered red.

Or worse if I make a map of obesity or death caused by smoking…

Which are all preventable deaths, and kill hundreds of thousands every year. See this for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_death.

So I really don’t get it – car accidents and obesity are politically acceptable, and pig’s flue is not.

Which reminded me why Walt Disney became such a dinosaur, when they did classics like that:

The biggest epidemic of all in my opinion is stupidity and “political acceptance” of such as car accidents and other preventable deaths.

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Posted in Policy

Tabula Rasa

Wicd ROCK on the roads ! – August 27th, 2009

WOULD PAY FOR ANYTHING OPEN – July 14th, 2009

Making Octave ploting nicer – May 21st, 2009

3D plots with matplotlib – May 17th, 2009

Top 10 linux blog posts you should avoid reading – April 29th, 2009

Swine’s Flu …. – April 28th, 2009

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