Installing Ubuntu 13.04 on my Dell Precision M65

Posted on May 4, 2013 by

A few days ago I bought a larger and faster disk for my Dell Precision M65 notebook. If it wasn’t for the new disk, I would have never tried the latest Ubuntu (13.04, aka “Raring Ringtail”), because 12.04 worked fine for me. Feature-wise I haven’t noticed a lot of new stuff, so if you’re happy with the previous version, stick with it, it’s an LTS which has support until 2017, while 13.04 is only supported until early 2014. Anyway, here’s my first impression.

Continue reading →

Posted in linux | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Quick Tip #5: Navigating in Source Trees

Posted on April 14, 2013 by

I often move around in checked out Subversion or Git source trees on a Bash command line. Directory structures tend to get quite deep (especially in Java projects), so one problem keeps coming up frequently: Changing back to the base directory of the source tree. Typing "cd .." ten times is tedious. Some people use their "..", or "...", or even "...." aliases for that, but there’s a more elegant way.

Continue reading →

Posted in shell | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Getting Started With Kerberos

Posted on March 27, 2013 by

Recently, I have been playing with Kerberos, a popular Single Sign On system (SSO) that is used in many large organizations. My first contact with Kerberos has been at university in a network security course, but that only covered the cryptographic part, not the more practical issues like setting up an implementation and using it.

Continue reading →

Posted in linux | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Undoing Things With Git

Posted on February 24, 2013 by

Sometimes bad things happen in a software project and you have to revert a change that has already been committed. There are several ways to do this with Git, including Git’s slightly scary ability of changing history. I’ll show you the techniques I found most useful.

Continue reading →

Posted in tools | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Bourne Shell Parameter Expansion

Posted on January 20, 2013 by

Classic Bourne Shell has a handy feature that many people don’t seem to know: Parameter Expansion. Stephen Bourne describes it in An Introduction to the UNIX Shell, which is part of the original Unix V7 manuals from 1978. Among other things, parameter expansion provides a notation for making sure that variables are set and to assign default values. This is best explained by example.

Continue reading →

Posted in shell | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Matplotlib: Plotting Bar Diagrams

Posted on December 30, 2012 by

A while ago we plotted time series data with Matplotlib. This worked nicely, but with the data at hand, a bar diagram would have looked much better. In this article I’ll give you a template for using bar diagrams with time series data. This builds on the work we did last time, so please read my previous article for some background information if you haven’t already.

Continue reading →

Posted in python | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Upgrading my Eee PC to Ubuntu 12.10

Posted on November 23, 2012 by

I did it again. Upgrade Ubuntu right after a release despite all the problems I had in the past. But this time, after almost four weeks of working with Ubuntu 12.10 on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE, I’m confident that things are looking up again.

Continue reading →

Posted in linux | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Review: Computing for Data Analysis

Posted on October 27, 2012 by

My first contact with the R programming language has been in the Statistics One course I took in September. But since the things we did there with R only scratched the surface, I joined Coursera’s Computing for Data Analysis course for learning a bit more about it. The course was taught by Roger Peng from Johns Hopkins University, one of the authors from the Simply Statistics Blog. Here’s my take on the course.

Continue reading →

Posted in misc | Tagged | 4 Comments