Roland's blog

For a little while I couldn't figure out why a dictionary wasn't installed with OpenOffice in Gentoo. If you install a bunch of software at the same time you will miss the portage message which says:

* openoffice-bin does not provide integration with system spell
* dictionaries. Please install them manually through the Extensions
* Manager (Tools > Extensions Manager) or use the source based
* package instead.
*
* Dictionaries for english, french and spanish are provided in
* /usr/lib/openoffice/share/extension/install
* Other dictionaries can be found at Suns extension site.

So What you need to do is this. Add in /etc/make.conf (or just en if you want only the English language)
LINGUAS="en en_GB es fr"

Emerge aspell-* or myspell-*.

Emerge openoffice-bin (or openoffice if you want to compile the whole thing) and run "ooffice".
When the app loads go to the "Tools" tab and then "Extension Manager". Browse to /usr/lib/openoffice/share/extension/install and add the dictionaries.

If your config is FUBAR, just start the process from stage3 and move on. You will save a lot of time.

broadcom-sta doesn't work well with Network Manager, for which you have to emerge networkmanage (and networkmanager-*) and nm-applet, you may have to install dbus and hald for this to work.Disable mac80211 in the kernel neither like it, but enable wireless extensions and the cf80211 and the lib80211.

Don't install wicd and network manager together, the system will behave weirdly.

If you want to install gnome or gdm you may find yourself in a weird position. You have to emerge (xorg-server or xorg-x11) and (gnome or gnome-light).

There's no such thing as a gdm script in init.d, you have to install xdm and modify /etc/conf.d/xdm and DISPLAYMANAGER="gdm". Use this as a helper: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gnome-config.xml

ALSA will probably not work so you have to emege alsa-utils. You may have to configure the linux kernel, which by default has ALSA enabled.

Best filesystem is ext4 for all purposes. Choose ext2 for the kernel and ext4 for the rest of the system. It's more reliable.

If you are like most people you probably have seen that 802.11g standard routers advertise bandwidths of 54Mbps, and of course that's in bits per second. So ho many MiB (1 Mega Bytes = 1024x1024 bits) per second is that?

1 Byte = 8 Bits

54 Mbps = 54/8 = 6.75 MiByes (Mega bytes per second)

So really, you are expected to transfer a maximum of 6 MB per second over a wireless link. That's quite not true either.

The bandwidth to one node 1/3 of that if you consider noise from other neighbors or maybe bad implementation of your drivers. Who knows?

So, really when you a 54 Mbps router will help you transfer about 2 MB per second to your router.

This is very frustrating especially if you are transferring a large amount of such as streaming recorded DVRMS files to your laptop, which are multiples of gigabytes in size.

On the other hand, this sort of overestimation has been around since the days of dial up. A 92kbps dialup line could at most deliver about 8KB/s download, which meant you couldn't do anything else but load one webpage at a time.

Also, your laptop hard drive can barely process more than 4 MB/s (depending on DMA this can be as high as 6MB/s) so you really can't transfer more than your drive can read or write either. So, what's the point of having a 50Mbps bandwidth DSL/Cable connection when the bottleneck is in your link? Well, the only reasonable answer I can think of, you can have more 3 people using the link to saturate that bandwidth. That's still very restrictive.

What's interesting is that media file size has increased over time and capacity to transfer those files have increased, however the speed of transferring the data in comparison has progressed much slower. So a large file in the past (which as a few MB) takes just as long of transferring a large file today (several MB or GB).

One thing that drives me nuts about lightbox is the fact that the image has a margin of about 60px from the top of the page and then, large images go beyond the viewport, forcing one to scroll down.

Here's how you can somewhat customize this feature:

1. Open js/lightbox.js and look for var lightboxTop = arrayPageScroll[1] + (document.viewport.getHeight() / 10);

2. Comment the rest of the line as shown here: var lightboxTop = arrayPageScroll[1];// + (document.viewport.getHeight() / 10);

Voila! You can add a custom number of pixels say: "var lightboxTop = arrayPageScroll[1] + 10;" for the lightbox window to have a 10px margin from the top window.

For a long time now, I have been avoiding LaTex mainly because compiling source code to produce a simple document sounded a bit too extreme for me. However, after discovering TexMaker I am really learning this stuff.

I am using LaTex to do my homework in a Logic class I am taking. It's a slow process. You have to think and type at the same time. Maybe it will get easier over time. At least, I am not wasting a bunch of paper, hand-writing this stuff.

Funny enough I couldn't find the powerset symbol but this dude says it's available in MnSymbol package. It's like the \wp symbol but larger. While I have read that LaTex is made for mathematicians, that's hardly the case. If you use a bunch of symbols and MS Word or other font packages don't cover them, you'd better move over to LaTex, it's really, really cool the amount of symbols you get for free.

Viewers should be given the right to skip a commercial online. Otherwise, online viewers will decline once the hype is gone.

It seems today that major ventures Joost, Babelgum, Boxee, Hulu etc, want to force users to watch commercials online.
This is a major turn off for me. This is the main reason I will never choose to watch TV programs on these media.

I am sure the developers and entrepreneurs have to justify their program, but this will be their own fall. 15-60 second delays are unacceptable because the user is taken away the right to skip it.

I think most will continue to choose cable or satellite as their media of choice because of the advent of DVR. Media Center, MythTV, and others can easily turn a PC into a DVR hence giving the viewer the ability to skip the commercials.

Having viewer watch commercials, is like having search engines showing first a list of their ads, and tell customers "Please click on the link in the bottom of the screen to get your results". It just doesn't work!

So, why are these companies having people watch a commercial instead of showing some kind of an add on the side?

It's just bad marketing strategy. They do not value wasting people's time, and they won't be happy for very long either!

Books on machine learning start with some grandiose reason why machine learning is awesome, and a simple example and current application is "basket analysis". Basket analysis refers to computation done on the stuff you buy at any grocery store. This can be done without a loyalty card, but it makes it easier to see more correlated trends if you have access to particular customers purchasing trends.

To make the long story short, the reason for basket analysis follows a logic like this: "If customer A purchases product X and Y often in the same shopping trip, placing these products closer together allows for cross-selling and increase revenue."

This sounds good but you have to be careful about how you go about doing this:

If I am looking to purchase product Y (not starting with X first), and I go to where I remember seeing this product, or where it makes sense for it to be stored, and I don't find it there, I will get frustrated. So, one has to put product Y in two places. Product Y next to X can triger reminders to the casual customer, so there's value there, however, if you are making it harder for your regular customers to find what they're looking for, than that's not good.

Being vegetarian, I was quite frustrated when Kroger moved their meats near the meat substitutes because they stored beer there or for some other weird reason. That made sense for some customers, but frustrated me.

A while back I purchased a 512MB Galaxy GeForce 9600 GSO card for about 45 bucks.

Anyways, 3D acceleration never worked on this thing and the NVIDIA drivers would always fail, and the following message would show up in the dmesg:

vmap allocation for size 16781312 failed: use vmalloc=<size ..

Finally, here's how I fixed it. According to http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/190.42/README/chapter-09.html adding vmalloc=512MB to the kernel should fix it. So, temporarily, I edited /boot/grub/grub.cfg (grub v1 people should use menu.lst) and tagged vmalloc=512MB somewhere at the end.

linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic root=UUID=7b32764a-9004-42a8-98d7-4e48ec97dc06 ro   quiet splash vmalloc=512MB

This finally fixed it.

For grub2 people, edit /etc/default/grub and add vmalloc=512MB to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT . Here's mine:

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=false
GRUB_TIMEOUT="10"
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash vmalloc=512MB"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entrys
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_RECOVERY="true"

Finally do sudo update-grub

This should also work for 9600 GT.