Fuzzy Logic

In my research I work with the Physics simulation software GEANT4.  It’s an incredibly detailed and realistic package, but it’s an absolute beast to get working.  A while ago one of my coworkers found this site and it makes it incredibly easy.  It went down a while ago, but you can find it at http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~skirkwoo/GEANT4-Kubuntu.html now.  I believe the old link is up as well, but the newer link is Dr. Kirkwood’s official site.  It’s a really great install and very valuable because it works on 8.04 (Hardy Heron), which is a Long-Term Service release.  The guide is for Kubuntu, but it works great on Ubuntu as well.

A quick note about using newer version of Ubuntu: From 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a g77 package. g77 is not used for GEANT4 specifically, but with CERN’s ROOT, which is an amazing statistical analysis package. You won’t NEED this for GEANT4, but it allows you to do some cool stuff.  Anyhow, instead of g77, Intrepid (8.10) comes with ‘gfortran’ which is not the same code, it seems.  Now, there are two ways on handling it.  I, personally, advise sticking to 8.04 and the g77 it comes with.  However, you can use a newer version of Ubuntu (or its variants) and either use Hardy packages or install from source.  Either way, it’s nice to have ROOT installed for statistical analysis.

As a side note, I’m hoping to (eventually) post a complete walkthrough of the process I go through when compiling CLHEP, GEANT4, and ROOT on a 8.04 machine.  It’ll probably be a while before I manage to get it written up, but it sure would be nice…

As anyone who has ever listened to Security Now knows, backing up your data is incredibly important.  It’s that one thing that seems completely unneccessary almost all of the time, especially if you never delete anything.  Whenever your hard drive dies, however, you need a good solution to recover your data.  Linux users love using rsync to sync to an external server but there doesn’t seem to have a great way to backup with a GUI to a local drive.  When I found the program Flyback, I thought I had found my solution.  However, I found it had a tendency to lock up at times for me.  It also hadn’t been updated when I wanted to switch.  Evidently someone forked it into a program called “Warpback”, but I haven’t seen any real work on that front.

After a bit of searching, though, I’ve found a nice updated program called Back in Time.  I really like a lot of the features it supports.  It’s written in python and uses rsync and diff to do its magic.  One of the nice features of Back in Time is that it only updates files that have been updated since the last backup.  This doesn’t seem like that huge of a thing, but it does it well.  The only problem I’ve found is that the it won’t accept symlinks that link to outside of its directories–you’ll have to manually include that directory to be included.  Other than that, it’s great!  Check it out.

Okay, so I have to plug this even though it’s on Digg and whatnot.  Auto-NDISWrapper has hit the 0.1 stage and it looks like it could be quite awesome.  I don’t have the available hardware to test this (mainly because my wifi card has a native driver) but this could quite honestly change the game for Linux.  One of the main problems with Linux is the fact that some hardware doesn’t support Linux.  More specifically, a lot of wireless cards don’t work natively with Linux.  This leaves people having to use a wrapper of some sort (like ndiswrapper) to run their wifi cards.  A wrapper basically emulates the API of Windows to allow linux to use Windows drivers.  The problem with this is that it was always pretty tough to get working in a way that you could depend on.  I know that when I first attempted to install Linux on a computer and get it working with my wifi I was unable due to the lack of native drivers and I couldn’t manage to get ndiswrapper to work.  If this program hoenstly works and starts getting included in the package managers for the main distros this could change things for the better.

I really like Adobe AIR as a platform, mainly because I generally like the idea of having a platform that can run the same apps on any of the big three Operating Systems (Windows, Mac, Linux).  Unfortunately, after installing the Adobe Air alpha for Linux I was having a problem with an error every time I started up Filezilla.  This would popup on every startup:

"Can't open /usr/share/mime-info/air.keys" (error 2: no such file or directory)"
"Can't open /usr/share/mime-info/air.mime" (error 2: no such file or directory)"

Obviously, this wasn’t the worst thing that could possibly happen to me… but it was rather aggravating!  To solve this problem I went scrounging through the depths of the interblags and finally managed to fix it.  Lots of help comes from the Dusty Pixels blog, but I figured I would compile what worked for me here.

(more…)

All of the usual suspects are up in arms over the fact that Best Buy is (and has been) selling Ubuntu Linux for $20 on their website (and instore at most of my local stores).  They even sell an installation service for it for $130 through their Geek Squad service.  A lot of people seemed to be completely outraged by the fact that Best Buy would dare to charge for Open-Source Software.  Hell, Ubuntu is free for download and you can even have Canonical send you a free copy.  So why would anyone ever possibly buy a copy of Ubuntu in the store and why shouldn’t people be outraged that Best Buy is selling it?  I think it’s great that Best Buy is doing this for a few main reasons: This program helps grant legitimacy to Ubuntu in the eyes of the average user.  The partnership with Geek Squad for installation is also good, and you can’t discount the fact that even if a user doesn’t buy it, they very well may be intrigued by this weird software called ‘eww – bun- two.’

(more…)