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
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
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
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
Sometimes I need to annotate a pdf file, either to take notes or to fill it out as a form since I have ugly handwriting; for the latter, I’m referring to the case where the pdf file does not have form fields you can type in with Adobe Reader. This post describes some programs for read more
When you want to know what ports/services are opened on your computer, type the following in the command line: netstat -tunelp | less
I’m currently using Emacs 24 (pre-release) installed from this repository on Ubuntu 11.04. An error (crash: segmentation fault) that arose after moving from Emacs 23 to Emacs 24 is as follow (could stem from the pre-release repository; might not be the case if I compile from source). I launch emacs via Synapse. I start the read more
I recently signed up for a free 50gb account at Box.net. At the time of this writing, Box.net does not have an application to sync files from a Linux machine to their servers. I followed this guide and this post to mount the service to a local directory. I did: sudo apt-get install davfs2 emacs read more
I automatically mount disk drives using /etc/fstab. However, when I boot a system with a disk removed, the system will give a mount error, giving me the option to skip (S) or manually (M) mount the disk. This doesn’t work well for headless servers. To skip the mount errors during boot, this suggests using the read more
