Upgrade

I got upgrade hardin (my laptop)’s memory at least, bringing it to 1Gb, at last. However I had two 256 Mb modules installed, that means I had to buy two 512 Mb ones. Oh well, I’ll just try to sell those ones. Everything seems snappier now, and even Firefox seems not to clog the CPU when loading pages (I need to experiment more, since I have no clue why that should have changed).

June 17, 2006

Busy busy busy!

I haven’t been writing a lot here mostly because of the rather hectic work schedule I’m having. We’re nearing the completion phase of a paper that includes quite a bit of my work (and also a lot of other people’s contributions), and I’m also swamped with PhD classes (two weeks to go). Also, one of my bosses has assigned me another project which I’ve yet to tackle, and I got to help my colleague with a poster as well.

June 16, 2006

Books

As the terrace in my house has been finally completed after almost a year, I’m writing from there. While I’m relaxing, I’ll write about two items I recently obtained through archonia.com. This time there wasn’t a misunderstanding like with the Tony Taka book I ordered (which the description didn’t claim it was an H book while instead it was), I’m quite satisfied by what I got.

June 8, 2006

The gods themselves

Things aren’t going in well in Heaven’s Inferno. Not only people have been leaving, but also I’ve been subject to an intense crossfire, more from the leading committee than anyone else. I correct myself, only parts of the leading committee, who seem hell bent in making things unfair for everyone (and flaming with ridicolous arguments). All of this just to get some items, people bitch and moan all the time about those, which is really lame, and childish.

June 8, 2006

Classes and meetings

This week has been absolutely exhausting. I’ve been having PhD classes (statistics, effective writing, and more statistics) almost every day (save tomorrow) and also heaps of work piled up. I’ve got new data to work on, and also I’ve been assigned to do something else along with my current bioinformatics work. I also need to get in touch with the Partek software representative to let him know what I think of their genomics software.

June 3, 2006

The problem with binary only drivers

Today I’ve been trying to set up suspend to RAM and suspend to disk (also known as hibernate) on my laptop using Kubuntu 6.06 LTS. Both tries failed miserably, sadly. The machine would suspend and also wake up, but I’d get only a garbled screen. This means that the video driver failed to wake up properly: this is the well known fglrx driver, the binary only driver that ATI made for Linux.

June 2, 2006

Kubuntu 6.06 LTS / Dynamis-Xarcabard

Finally, the new version of Kubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) is out! Not that I noticed many differences since I kept it constantly dist-upgraded since I put the beta on the desktop and the RC on the laptop. I really like it so far (save minor nags with 3D acceleration that I solved by issuing a couple of shell commands). Also, KDE 3.5.3 packages are already available from 3rd-party repositories. I will be upgrading them soon.

May 28, 2006

dist-upgrade fun, DNS, drama

Yesterday I updated my laptop to Kubuntu Dapper RC. Overall the (long) process was quite smooth save a couple of problems (the use of NetworkManager for exaple, that caused me headaches to make wireless work) including the fact that the ATI drivers were looking in the wrong location (/usr/X11/lib/modules/dri instead of /usr/lib/dri) so 3D acceleration wasn’t working. It seems smooth so far, though I think the idea of NetworkManager needs polishing, as some services that are started before it connects will fail (such as autofs).

May 25, 2006

Biological software and HIG

Today I obtained a trial license of a data analysis program. I plan on using it for the next two weeks to see if it could improve the analysis workflow in our laboratory. I noticed this software uses the Tk widget set to achieve cross-platform capability (in fact, it can run on Linux, which is a big plus for me). However, in my opinion, Tk widgets look rather ugly. I wonder why the company didn’t consider using Trolltech’s Qt widgets.

May 20, 2006

Xolotl Xtrapolator

I’ve been spending a bit of my time last week to do several FFXI-related events. The most important are related to Assault, as me and my group (Eithin, Mercredi, Sechs and Billyism) managed to win all the level 1 Assaults, and therefore we got promoted to Private First Class (PFC), which sounds a little better than the lame Private Second Class. Here are also some random images from the new areas: