🏷️ i-tech

Does anyone else have their recently updated chrome pop-up a javascript dialogue to set time out (s), whenever it starts up for the first time? I thought it was a linux-related problem (amidst all my zillion other linux problems) but now this pop-up javascript dialogue has started appearing on my windows terminals as well... Wonder what it is...

I just need a computing platform to perform many operations (~2000) on a small dataset in a reasonable amount of time without dragging my system to a standstill every time. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, it is. The options I have are dismal.

- Get a computing account at UB's center for computational research. This is easier said than done. There is so much bureaucratic red-tape and craziness involved in just getting a puny account that it makes sense at this point to accept that I will never be able to use their resources.

- Buy a laptop that will run linux and then R on top of it efficiently utilizing all the processing cores and the memory. This is a difficult proposition because R doesn't utilize all cores natively. It's a pain to figure out how to set up linux to utilize all cores with R and make the processing efficient - with my minimal level of expertise. So I am stuck with a spiked up CPU load and system freezes every time I run an analyses. Should I be spending close to $1.5k for such misery. In the end, maybe I will have to.

- Get a mac. NO. Their hardware is appalling. They get away with such mediocrity because of their sheep fanboy base that is blind to the fact that their hard-drives and memory fail with the frequency of a rainstorm in an Amazon forest. I like well-functioning software but if I have to be queuing up at some service center (however fanciful its name) for repairs or replacements every few months, I don't think I will ever wander close to such a product.

I wish things were not this complicated.

Shoo!

Love Love Loving it!

The matching Chrome Android theme:


This is probably the first time a theme has instantly appealed to me so much. I am digging that green/grey/microchip design. Would be even more smashing if it were peachblow/grey/microchip...

What I really want is this. The design screams "Education!!" - like no other tablet can.


Plus of course, I want to able to toss the laptop on my desk in moments of frustration and not have to repent later. And how cool is that 180 deg swivel camera?!

So instead of this conversation:

Me: Mum, it's snowing here!
M: Really?
Me: Yeah! Look! *Twist Twist*
{Major twisting, silent cords tangling and..}
Me: Damn! Sorry. Unfortunately I cracked my LCD screen with the power plug. Let's talk later.

I could have this one:

Me: Mum, it's snowing here!
M: Really?
Me: Yeah! Look! *Swivel Swivel*
M: That is lovely! Are you wearing a sweater? I hope you are wearing a muffler. Did you have some tea? Are you eating well ... or anything at all? I can clearly see your bones sticking out.
Looks like you have a cold...
Me: Wait. How can you see all that when you are looking at the snow?
M: Don't change the subject.
Me: Damn! Sorry. The connection is awful. Let's talk later.

Ever since my discussion with @paul, I have been thinking about the whole data-security issue at RPCI. The monitor and input-devices only desks make so much sense, really. In organizations that deal with secure and sensitive data, there is really no place for personal workstation-processors. Additionally, having personal processors for everyone adds to operating and maintenance costs unnecessarily.

We not only get new computers, but also new monitors and new keyboards and new mice every 3-4 years or so. WHY on earth do we need to buy everything again and again and renew stuff that could easily be avoided for at least a decade? All that really needs to be renewed is the computing power for newer resource-hungry software. Can't this easily be done at a mainframe-common server level? After all, it will be a one-time investment for many employees - not a many-time investment for all the employees over and over. RPCI really needs to rethink it's IT strategy and look at this absolute waste of resources it's incurring all the time.

I recently read a lot about Drupal. The usefulness of a modular, dynamic Drupal-like system in a mainframe office would be immense. Content that employees would need to work with could be served dynamically on their monitors, depending on who has the verified credentials and pre-assigned rights/clearance (determined by who logs in at that terminal). And of course, when your work is done, you can't store stuff in your USBs or local storage - where they might easily get stolen or lost. As an added advantage, not having processors and hard-drives at every desk would also save energy and operating costs.

Health data is protected data. It's time we treated it in the same way as other professional organizations such as government secret services treat their files in their offices.

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PS: This is an article on how we went from a centralized big computer to many small computers. I think that it makes sense, especially where data security is concerned, to move back to the centralized serving, more powerful computing model. Personal computers have no place in a work environment.

PPS: I am not doing justice to the magnitude of advantages of such a system. A few immediate and key advantages could be:
- Cost saving (in many ways; avoiding not only repeated costs for buying unnecessary peripherals, but also maintenance costs and energy costs)
- Energy saving
- Tougher and more efficiently administered data security
- Tidier offices and more deskspace

"Are you quite sure that you feel what you ought to do?"
-- Pride and Prejudice, 1797

I am not. But I am determined to stick with Fedora 13. Only, it is so frustrating that I seem to be struggling with the simplest of things.

The minimal installation was so minimal, it forgot to ask me for a login and password preference and then when it finished, it wanted me to use a non-existent login and password to login to the OS. Needless to say, I had to start with the bloated "Graphic desktop" installation all over again and though, I was presented with customization choices, I couldn't really customize anything because I had no idea what any of the packages actually did! And anyway.. why is it that I need a login every time I power it on?! I can't seem to get past this. I hate having to log in to my own computer. I want the boot up to be faster.

I keep trying to install chrome and it says chrome installation had "finished" but I can't see it anywhere. And I hate that trackpad mouse tap behaviour only loads when the operating system loads completely. Before this happens you need to click that annoying trackpad button.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy, but I just thought this might be easier than the other zillion times I have tried.

Arrrrrggh.

But I am not giving up. I am starting on a book called "Introducing Fedora: Desktop Linux" today. 400+ pages later, if I am still struggling, maybe I will revisit Austen's predictable tome.

I spent quite a chunk of time reading about it. I am hooked. I have to wonder about the people who actually designed all of this - they must have some of the most logical and organized minds around. It took my puny brain quite a while to understand how content management in Drupal actually works.

But it was tough to figure it out initially. Maybe this is how computer scientists must feel when they are asked to understand and write about a cell-culture or mouse knock-out experiment.

It always annoys me when articles I want to read on the web, specifically the ones that link out from aldaily.com are almost always embedded in webpages that additionally have unnecessary and distracting elements such as menus, ads etc.

Chrome came to my rescue. I simply right click over the content I want to read, click inspect element, find the element that houses the article (usually it is under some div id), right click on the appropriate div > copy as html > paste that entire thing on a text editor, say, notepad > save as html. Open the new html file in a browser. Et Voilà - just content, no fluff!

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PS: I know you could just click-drag-copy the text you want to read, but I find this cumbersome for really long articles.

Massive thanks to @paul for helping me finally make the switch to Fedora on my laptop! So far, it's been running without a hitch. I have found some linux alternatives for my most heavily used programs. However, I am still missing some. I am hoping that all these missing alternatives don't break the switch... Any suggestions that you might have are more than welcome.

Web browsing
Chrome ---> Chrome

Media
VLC --> VLC --> Amarok (? I am not sure if it supports all the various formats FLAC, APE, Ogg, WMV etc like foobar2000 though. Any alternatives?)

Documents
LaTeX ---> LaTeX
PDFXChange Viewer with Wine --> ??????? I am completely stumped here.
MS Word --> MS Word using VMbox? (haven't installed this yet). Openoffice completely messes up formats between its odt format and the doc format so I'd rather not use it and spent time fixing ridiculous formatting conflicts.
Virtual PDF printer driver with a very small footprint that I use to print things to PDF. Again, not sure about alternatives.
Distraction-free black full-screen writing environment. Do you know of any fedora alternatives?

Analysis
R --> R
TinnR --> ???? I use this extensively for writing R code and push the code from TinnR to R for running. It highlights syntax and helps me keep track of coding rules. Any linux alternatives that will integrate with R and has colour coding?

Art
myPaint --> myPaint
Irfanview --> ????
Fotographix --> ????

I would love some suggestions for PDF annotation, highlighting and commenting. I used PDF XChange viewer for this with Wine but I can't find an equivalent piece of native software for Linux. PDFs form the backbone of what I read and use day in and day out and this could just be the deciding factor for me for staying on with the Fedora system or switching back to Ubuntu. Any input you can give me would be awesome! I really don't want to go back to Ubuntu - now that I have seen all the charms of Fedora.