Technology
Category archives for Technology
How to us the ‘rm’ command in Linux
Posted by Greg Laden on May 20, 2012 Without Linux, Life as we Know It would be IMPOSSIBLE
Posted by Greg Laden on April 22, 2012 Here is why, how, and who:
GNU Science and otter matters
Posted by Greg Laden on April 18, 2012 Joey Bernard, who writes about science under Linux, has just started a multi (as in two?) part series on GSL, the GNU Scientific Library. It is here. Just browsing through the files of GSL is fun. You find little gems like this:
Running Netflix on Linux
Posted by Greg Laden on March 11, 2012 Do you have a Roku with which you watch Netflix? Do you watch Netflix on a Mac? If so, you are using either the Linux operating system or a closely related “*Nix” operating system. (Mac’s run on a form of OS that is the same basic system as Linux*)
2011 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners
Posted by Greg Laden on February 15, 2012 The following is a subset of the LinuxQuestionsDotOrg’s Members’ Choice Awards:
myMac 01
Posted by Greg Laden on February 6, 2012 I am a Mac. Oh, wait, no, different commercial. Let me start again. I have a Mac. I call it myMac and I’ve only had it for a few hours. Those of you who know me know I could not possibly own a Mac, so you may assume I stole it or something. Fine, think…
How To Use Linux
Posted by Greg Laden on December 24, 2011 This is a rewrite and amalgamation, into one post, of a series of earlier posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions, slowly and easily. At some level all operating systems are the same, but in some ways that…
The birth and history of Unix
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2011 …A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric to create an interactive time-sharing system called Multics, which stood for “Multiplexed Information and Computing Service.” Time-sharing, a technique…
Are you a Mac user? You can still use emacs
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2011 Check out this “How I Work” video by Ryan McGeary:
LaTeX Tutorial
Posted by Greg Laden on December 10, 2011 This is a very good LaTex Tutorial, marred only by the fact that it is running in some odd operating system that I am not familiar with: The rest of the tutorials are HERE, nicely organized. Hat Tip Got Emacs
Programmers suck; Programs suck; Programming languages suck.
Posted by Greg Laden on December 9, 2011 Some interesting news from the world of computer programming. A company that provides products to improve code studied a bunch of programs and evaluated how badly they were written. Cobol programs had the lowest rate of bad code, while Java the highest. Part of this is because Cobol programs are all old and have been…
Linux Readers’ Choice Awards
Posted by Greg Laden on December 7, 2011 The Linux Journal reader’s choice awards have been announced. You’ll recall that I suggested to you some time ago that you contribute your vote. Now, you can find out if you won!
Browser Wars: Chrome will pass/has passed Firefox, Safari Up among Sb.com users
Posted by Greg Laden on December 6, 2011 Chrome Passes Firefox, Google May Pull Out Support: I stopped using Firefox around the 20th time it made me do something I shouldn’t have had to do because it sucked as a browser. Firefox used to be my hero, now I regard it as somewhat dangerous, and I only use Google Chrome. My productivity has…
Google gmail and ads and “Importance Signals”
Posted by Greg Laden on November 11, 2011 (‘John ‘McCarthy)
Posted by Greg Laden on October 25, 2011 (‘born ’1927) (‘championed ‘ai) (‘created ‘lisp) (‘thought-up ‘space-elevator) (‘won ‘turing-award) (‘died ‘oct-23-2011)
Column Editing in Emacs (cua mode)
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2011 This is very nice: hat tip: Got Emacs?
Land Of Lisp Book Giveaway
Posted by Greg Laden on October 23, 2011 You will recall that I recently reviewed the book Land of Lisp. It turns out I’ve got two copies of it, and would like to give one away. To you. As a bounty.
A List Of Lisp and Emacs Books
Posted by Greg Laden on September 26, 2011 Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time! is a book about lisp programming. If you are into programming for fun, artificial intelligence, role playing games, or an emacs user, you should take a look at this book. I’ve got some info on this book as well as a few…
Why do I even bother with the Internet any more????
Posted by Greg Laden on September 24, 2011 I very rarely read a story on the WCCO web site. That’s my local news station. I don’t scroll down below the headlines, and that by the way means that I don’t see any of the wonderful ads that are down there. I often don’t respond to facebook conversations with anything more than a sentence,…
Emulating The Terminal Emulators For Fun (with emacs color-theme)
Posted by Greg Laden on September 23, 2011 I have a small laptop that I carry to the coffee shop for writing. It is a bit shaky in the hardware department, very small, and has no functioning wireless. The hard drive is encrypted. These attributes together make it the perfect laptop to carry around between, say, the gym, the coffee shop, the grocery…
… Because the lack of State will always be ensured … The Land Of Lisp
Posted by Greg Laden on September 5, 2011 How come nobody told me about this!!!!
Google Apps Off Line
Posted by Greg Laden on August 31, 2011 I don’t use Google Apps much to process documents or data for two reasons: 1) If it is not a text file on my hard drive, I am suspicious of it and 2) I spend enough time with no internet access (not much, but easily 5% of my on line time) that I don’t want…
Editing PDF’s
Posted by Greg Laden on August 29, 2011 Linux probably has a lot more FOSS tools for editing PDF’s than other platforms. ImageMagick will do basic manipulation from the command line. But for a GUI interactive kind of editing, you should look at PDFedit sudo apt-get install pdfedit You can do what I’m pretty sure is one of the most often required tasks:…
How to record Skype Calls
Posted by Greg Laden on August 28, 2011 I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks like it works.
How to tunnel through the Intertubes
Posted by Greg Laden on August 28, 2011 … using ssh …
Happy Birthday Linux!
Posted by Greg Laden on August 25, 2011 I remember one day when Richard Stallman, a nobody, was featured on a local news story. Since I was living in Cambridge, some local news stories were about work being done by Harvard or MIT researchers, and in this case, Stallman was an MIT Hacker who had just started to talk about this strange idea:…
Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards
Posted by Greg Laden on August 22, 2011 The deadline is approaching for you to submit your preferences for the Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards. For purposes of discussion, here are (most of my) choices:
I Hope the Future of Gnome is Not Unity
Posted by Greg Laden on August 22, 2011 I agree with Shawn Powers that Unity has offended all that is good in this world by aggressively grabbing so much of my screen real estate much like Hitler grabbed the Rhineland. Well, OK, S.P. is not so Godwinesque in his language, but still…. Unity = Microsoft-like marketing oriented philosophy in a FOSS world. I…
Google Inc IS a different kind of thing
Posted by Greg Laden on July 31, 2011 In the old days, canals, roads, train tracks, etc. were almost all privately owned in many countries. Some airports too, but not many. Now, most of these elements of our infrastructure are publicly owned or so regulated that they may as well be. Same with utilities. I wrote a while ago about how Amazon Dot…
emacs for writers: org mode
Posted by Greg Laden on July 22, 2011 After a little messing around with interesting emacs goodies, we might as well get right on to the good stuff. emacs uses a concept called “modes.” You’ll learn about that if you use emacs. For now, what you need to know is that there are “major modes” and “minor modes” and we’re only interested in…
, which is now available for the 
