Mac at Work (was FreeBSD on Dell C400, and other stuff)

My beard and mustache have never before been this long.

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Microstation/J is working on VMWare Fusion. See screenshot below:

rdesktop is pretty cool. Check out an rdp session between a machine running Ubuntu remoting to a windows box. rdesktop is using both monitors for the remote windows desktop. Pics below:

I have discovered xmonad , a tiling window manager that works well with GNOME. The drawback to WMs like ion and awesome is that they don't play nice with the GNOME panel. However, xmonad works very well with it. I have added a few things to my configuration to make things work the way I like. For example, the deskbar applet window is made floating. Gimp windows are floating and assigned to workspace 5. The modifier key is the windows key. Here is my config after the screenshot. Just save it in $HOME/.xmonad as xmonad.hs. import XMonad import XMonad.Actions.CopyWindow import XMonad.Hooks.ManageDocks import XMonad.Hooks.EwmhDesktops import qualified XMonad.StackSet as W import XMonad.Util.EZConfig myFocusFollowsMouse :: Bool myFocusFollowsMouse = False main = xmonad $ defaultConfig { focusFollowsMouse = myFocusFollowsMouse , manageHook = newManageHook manageHook defaultConfig , logHook ...

Building on my last post, I am still talking about writing up engineering calculations with LaTeX. Since then, I have discovered XFig. It is like a mini CAD program that allows you insert LaTeX text into your figures which is then processed when the document is compiled. The basic procedure is explained on XFig's site. I use xfig to generate diagrams with custom LaTeX macros instead of numbers. This way, if the value changes, the changes are written out automatically by the spreadsheet and the figure is updated when the document is recompiled. Lovely. As an example, I have created the following figure below: Notice the LaTeX code in math mode in the figure. The macros are defined in the .tex file on the second and third lines. They begin with \newcommand: You can see the resulting values have been inserted into the figure in the final PDF document.

I often have to write up engineering calculations for my work. Often I use LaTeX because of its excellent handling of equations, references, and custom variables. My strategy is to do the calculations in Excel, then create custom variables in a variables.tex file that contain all the values from my spreadsheet that will appear in the write up. I do this because if there is an error in my calculation, I can just change the value in one place and it will be corrected everywhere in the document where it appears. Unfortunately, I sometimes have to deal with 50 or 100 values. Manually changing those even in only one place can quickly become time consuming, so I wrote the following Excel macro to automatically write the variables.tex file for me when I save the spreadsheet. Private Sub Workbook_BeforeSave(ByVal SaveAsUI As Boolean, Cancel As Boolean) Const texFileName As String = "variables.tex" Dim FileNum As Integer Dim curLabel As String Dim curValue As String FileN...

Before upgrading to Hardy Heron, I had successfully set up VMWare player to use the windows partition as its virtual disk. This saves disk space. The problem in Hardy seems to be that it treats IDE drive as SCSI and therefore confuses windows when it is booted in VMWare. The solution to this is to install the vmware SCSI drivers while booted into Windows natively. You can then follow the other guides out there.

With the release of Ubuntu 8.04, I am enjoying improvments made to GNOME 2.22. Among my favorites can be found the international clock with weather. Also, I have started using Tracker search with the deskbar. After I turned on indexing in the GNOME preferences, I rebuilt the tracker index. I also assigned Alt-space as the keyboard shortcut for deskbar. Now I can enjoy most of the functionality found in OS X's spotlight feature in Ubuntu. It is so nice to be able to quickly launch apps, open files, or start e-mails with a quick Alt-space. I also make good use of the Negative plugin for Compiz instead of looking for dark gnome themes. My current favorite is the Mac4Lin theme and the negative plugin. GNOME continues to impress me. Evolution is making good progress. I have successfully connected it to my corporate exchange account and global address book. Things are looking up.

I think I have finally found the best way to use Evolution with Gmail IMAP on a laptop. I installed a local dovecot server that only listens on localhost and setup offlineimap to sync my local dovecot imap server with gmail's server. I then connect evolution to my local server and have offlineimap run as often as I want to sync. Now I have offline messages and evolution is very fast. Using offlineimap to store the messages in a folder did not work so well because evolution did not recognize the inbox folder as the actual inbox. In ubuntu, this process is pretty trivial. The following command will install offlineimap and dovecot: sudo apt-get install offlineimap dovecot Dovecot config I then changed two lines in dovecot. Since I am running a local server, I don't need ssl, and I don't want to listen on external interfaces so I edited /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf as follows: protocols = imap listen = localhost offlineimap config Configuring offline imap is pretty easy. He...

Following a tip I found on on blog.paulbetts.org , I was able to get my Dell D800 with nVidia Quadro FX Go1000 to hibernate and resume correctly. The tip is reproduced below: In the Device section: Section "Device" ... Driver "nvidia" ... Option "NvAGP" "1" ... EndSection Then I included in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist the following line: blacklist intel_agp. HIBERNATE_MODE=platform After a reboot, hibernation now works like it should.

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I recently got a Dell latitude d800 laptop that is for my own use. I am excited to be returning to FreeBSD after quite a while away. It seems like everytime I set it up, I am always looking for the colors I like, so I am going to post them here. export CLICOLOR=YES export LSCOLORS="DxGxFxdxCxDxDxhbadExEx"

I was having difficulty getting festival to work in the latest Ubuntu. I found quite a few places that said to add the following three lines to my $HOME/.festivalrc file: (Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay $FILE") (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command) (Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'snd) Those lines did not work for me, but when I changed aplay to paplay in the first line, it started working.