After my recent experience with broken su and sudo commands in a failed system upgrade, I realized that although disabling the root account has many advantages, one of the disadvantage is that I can’t login as root in the terminal when I’m physically in front of the system. This is a major issue if su, read more
I’m debating the idea (hype) of flipping the classroom for one of my classes next Fall where students watch lecture videos at home (or elsewhere) so I could spend class time doing more hands-on activities like discussing the art of data analysis and how to solve problems with statistics. I think Khan Academy, Udacity, and read more
Yes, many radio shows are available as podcasts. However, some are not. If a radio show is also broadcasted via a live stream online, then we could record it with streamripper. I did so as follow: sudo apt-get install streamripper ## install ## record for 60 seconds streamripper http://kpcclive1.publicradio.org:80/ -s -l 60 -a “Prarie – read more
Recently, my computer kept freezing whenever I started conkeror (with 100+ buffers loading from a previous session). Folks over at #conkeror on freenode suggested that the problem might be due to faulty ram. They suggested testing my ram with Memtest86+. It is installed by default on Ubuntu. If you have multiple sticks of ram, test read more
Read this interesting post where the author sets up a wordpress blog with nginx on an Amazon EC2 instance. Author claims he could handle 10 million hits a day. I should explore nginx some day.
In the past, I’ve described how one could build multiarch (64 bit and 32 bit) versions of R on a 64 bit Ubuntu machine. The method based on this thread no longer works as of R 2.13 or 2.14 I believe. I received advice from someone on #R over on freenode (forgot who) a few read more
This post explains what happens when su, sudo, and their variants are executed.
I recently had the need to encrypt zip files. Ubuntu’s default archive manager, File Roller, has a password option. However, I was not able to find documentation on what is its encryption algorithm. To be on the safe side, I opted for PeaZip per this post. It works natively with KDE, but I’m using Gnome. read more
This post is a good introduction to bash scripting/programming.
I just installed Linux Mint on my Asus T101MT. As with all my computers, I prefer to have the caps lock key as a control key. Of these methods, only the xkb command works. To have the key remapped every session, I followed these instructions and created the file ~/.config/autostart/nocaps.desktop: [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=nocaps Comment=Remap read more
