Natural Blogarithms

I wish I’d thought of that.

Thanks to a post in LifeHacker, I have set up a few bookmarks in Firefox that will open in the sidebar. I recently discovered the trick of opening links in the sidebar but I did not think to use mobile apps such as the new iphone app in Google Reader.

Some other mobile web apps that I am likely to use include:

• Digg: http://digg.com/iphone
• Facebook: http://iphone.facebook.com
• Twitter: http://m.twitter.com
• Facebook Chat: http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php
• Remember the Milk: http://m.rememberthemilk.com
• Wikipedia: http://wikipedia.comoki.com/

If you want more suggestions to things to stick in your sidebar, go straight to apple for some ideas: http://www.apple.com/webapps/index_top.html

The “how to” comes from Mozilla Links

And it’s pretty simple:

1. Open the Bookmarks Manager (Bookmarks/Organize Bookmarks…)
2. In Firefox 2, in the File menu, select New bookmark… In Firefox 3, press Organize in the toolbar and select New bookmark…
3. Enter a name, http://www.google.com/reader/i/ for location, and ensure to check Load this bookmark in the sidebar.
4. Press Save Changes and now you can select the bookmark to load Google Reader in the sidebar.

Try it out. It’s handy.

written by SplineGuy

A friend of mine saw me running a distribution of Linux from within Vista and asked that I post how I set it up so here it goes:

1. Download and install Virtual Box (see www.vitualbox.org)
2. Download your favorite distribution of Linux. Download an install disk image (*.iso file). Here are a couple suggestions
   • http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora
   • http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download

Be sure to note where you save the *.iso file.

1. Launch Virtual Box:
   
2. Create a new Virtual Machine, by clicking Machine .. New (or just New on the toolbar). Then click “Next >”
   
3. Give your Virtual Machine a name and then select the operation system you intend to install. Then click Next…
   
4. Now, select the amount of memory (RAM) to dedicate to this machine when it is running. You don’t want to use all of your available memory since your system will still be running. I have 2 GB on my laptop so I dedicate anywhere from 512 - 1024 MB of RAM. Then, click next.
   
5. Next, VirtualBox will create a virtual hard disk so you can set up how much hard disk space your virtual machine will have available. Click New to set up a new virtual hard disk, go through the steps to set one up. I used the settings below:
   Dynamically Expanding Image.
   20 GB
   Click Next.
   
6. Now you can click finish to finalize the setting up of the Virtual Machine. Click Finish.

Installing Linux

1. In VirtualBox, right-click on the machine you just created and select Settings. Click on CD/DVD-ROM in left hand window of the Setting dialogue box. Select Mount CD/DVD Drive and click ISO Image File. Browse for the ISE image you downloaded. Then click OK.
   
2. Now, click Start and go through the Setup procedure for the Linux distribution.
   

Good Luck!

written by SplineGuy

Both Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel became heavily used tools in my bioinformatics research.  Scripting came in handy on occasion to automate tasks but my lask of “skills” in that arena left me relying heavily these applications.  Within the last two months, I couldn’t count how many tables and queries I’ve created (point-and-click style) in Access, how many times I used VLOOKUP and MATCH in Excel.  I’ve just recently discovered the many, many joys of Pivot Tables (amazing!).  Oh and by the way, I’m flat in love with Excel 2007.

Here were a couple of new tips I stumbled across today:

Convert one column into two
Suppose you have a list of full names in a column, and you’d like to separate the first names from the last names. In Excel 2003, select the column and click Data*Text to Columns. In Excel 2007, click the Data tab, and select the Text to Columns button. In both versions, choose Delimited (unless all the entries are the same length, in which case you can select Fixed width), click Next, and check Space (or whichever option applies; see the screen below). You can leave “Treat consecutive delimiters as one” checked. Click Next again to view data-formatting options, and then Finish.

Select Space (or whatever separates the items in the column you wish to split) to create two columns where there once was one.

At this point, you may want to change the order of the columns. To do so, simply select the column header, right-click the selection, and choose Cut. Now click the header of the blank column you want to place the cut cells in, right-click, and select Insert Cut Cells.

Paste formatting with one keystroke
If you’d like several disconnected cells to share a format, such as bold text and a background color, it can be a hassle to select each cell one at a time, open its cell-format dialog box, and make the changes you want. Instead, reformat one of the cells, and then select all of the others by pressing Ctrl, and clicking them one by one. Once they’re all highlighted, press F4 to apply the formatting to all of them at once.

http://www.cnet.com/8301-13880_1-9836865-68.html?part=rss

written by SplineGuy

I finally finished getting my laptop setup to dual boot with Fedora Core Linux and Windows XP.

I had a few major issues but was finally able to find the correct solution to my problem.

Problems:

1. After setting up separate partition with Partition Magic and then install Fedora Core 8, the Windows system would not boot saying “autochk autocheck not found” and going straight to the dreaded blue screen of death. I discovered that Partition Magic (or the Fedora install) marked the NTFS partition as hidden. I had to use a utility called BootIT NG, creating a bootable CD and using this utility (without installing to) to switch from a hidden NTFS partition to not hidden.
Problem 1 Solved.

2. This one took a lot longer. I have Dell Latitude D420 with a Broadcom 1390 WLAN MiniCard. These drivers were never offered for Linux so the necessary drivers had to be reverse engineered (not by me, of course, but they are out there). There are apparently two options which as a Linux-noob, I couldn’t tell more than that. I tried a number of forums and went step by step through the provided procedure. I did at least 3 fresh installs of the entire operating system, after I felt I had mucked up the system beyond fixing. Finally, the one the worked was here:

http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras

I’m going to quote most of it here for future reference, but I give them full credit for something that works. And definitely use the NetworkManager hint below. I used the b43 drivers below and everything worked.

Doing the Work

1. Open a terminal .
2. Install the bcm43xx-fwcutter and b43-fwcutter packages:

su -c 'yum install bcm43xx-fwcutter b43-fwcutter’

3. Download the correct firmware for your device from here or select the correct firmware from the following links:For b43, download and untar Version 4 firmware:

   • http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
     

   For b43legacy and bcm43xx, download Version 3 firmware:

   • http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
4. Extract the firmware:For b43:

   su -c 'b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware /path/to/kmod/wl_apsta.o'

   For b43legacy:

   su - c 'b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware /path/to/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o'

   For bcm43xx:

   su -c 'bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware /path/to/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o’

5. Optional: Enable NetworkManager for managing this device (very recommended!)
6. Alias the correct module to your wlan0 device:For b43:
   

   echo "alias wlan0 b43" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

   For b43legacy:

   echo "alias wlan0 b43legacy" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

7. Now, reload the driver:For b43:

   su -l -c 'rmmod b43 && modprobe b43'

   For b43legacy:

   su -l -c 'rmmod b43legacy && modprobe b43legacy'

8. If the reload fails, just reboot.

Problem 2 Solved: WOOOHOOOO!!!!

written by SplineGuy

In responding to a comment on the last entry, I answered the questions of what equipment and software I am using to create our online course materials:

For our College Algebra course, we cover the last six chapters from an Intermediate Algebra textbook. There will be a lecture for each section of each of the chapters. It looks like every full section lecture will be about 20 - 30 minutes in length. I am shooting a screen (or slide) one at a time which comes to about 10 slides or so per section. This post was one of those slides. Each of those slides ranges from 2 - 5 minutes in length. I think that comes to a total of about 27 lectures about 30 minutes each. I will probably have the students order a DVD with hi-res versions of the video, but post compressed versions on the web, maybe even as podcasts available through an RSS feed.

In terms of software, I am doing everything the hard way since I am on a PC. I hear this would probably be easier with a Mac. Nevertheless, I am mostly using free software. For the screen capture, I use CamStudio. I piece all the slides together using Windows Movie Maker. The software I use for writing on the screen is the software that was included with my tablet. My first choice would have been to use a tablet PC but the cost was prohibitive. Instead, I went with the WACOM Intuos3 tablet. We purchased the 9×12 tablet which works well, but is probably larger than needed. The Corel Painter Essentials software was included with the tablet and it worked quite well for the screen casting.

I hope this answers your questions. I got most of my ideas from a podcast I watched in iTunes by the name of “Is All About Math“.

written by SplineGuy

I have tried to do a little research into the compatibility of Maple 11 with Microsoft Vista. A student of mine report that he attempted to run his new copy of Maple 11 on his new Vista machine and was unsuccessful. I could not find a statement on the Maplesoft website confirming or denying. I did see a MaplePrimes forum post that seemed to imply that it was not compatible but nothing official.

Does anyone know? I surely expect them to be working on this but finding no information was frustrating.

written by SplineGuy

A while back, I started using the site, del.icio.us, for my bookmarks. My primary reason for doing so was so that I would have access to my bookmarks from any of the multiple computers that I use. Way down on the list of reasons to use the delicious bookmarks were for the “social networking” aspect of letting others see what I link to. But if you are interested you can see my links here: http://del.icio.us/splineguy.

But now, I have a new toy!! Google Browser Sync. I love this thing. It is an extension to the firefox browser available from Google Lab which allows you sync your firefox browser across different computers.  It actually allows you to syncronize your cookies, bookmarks, history and even saved passwords.  It is configurable so that you can choose exactly which data is syncronized.  Personally, I had no desire to syncronize anything except my bookmarks.  There is also an option for encryption and there is a 4 digit PIN that must be chosen so that you can verify the identity of your other browsers.  I am pretty sure that you do need a Google Account to be able to use this tool.

powered by performancing firefox

written by SplineGuy