Archive for the ‘GNU/Linux’ Category

Export PowerPoint to PDF

Thursday, March 10th, 2005

My adviser writes the notes for each lecture he gives in Microsoft's PowerPoint. He then exports the PowerPoint presentation to PDF using some Adobe product (Distiller?) and posts both versions to the course webpage. He was having a difficult time converting the final eight lectures of this term to PDF ...

Dinner and Linux News

Wednesday, March 9th, 2005

I must admit I am quite proud of myself, because I managed to make dinner for Ariele and I all by myself. (And without the use of a grill!) She is preparing for her candidacy exam, so I offered to make dinner so she could continue working, and (granted, she ...

NAG and GNU Fortran Compilers

Monday, March 7th, 2005

The two Fortran compilers I have used while at Caltech are the NAG and GNU g95 compilers. At some point last summer, I tried to compile my research code with g95 (I had previously only used the NAG compiler), and I noticed that the code ran about four times slower ...

Congratulations and the File Server

Thursday, March 3rd, 2005

Heather passed her candidacy exam today. Congratulations Heather! The first official Ph.D. candidate amongst our ranks. A job very well done.I was picking up some paperwork from the office on the second floor of Thomas (the mechanical engineering building on campus) today, and I walked past Vaughan on my way ...

Linux Magazine Interviews Linus Torvalds

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005

Linus Torvalds is the man who originally created Linux and has been an integral part of the maintenance of the kernel (the core component of what is known as the "GNU/Linux" or just "Linux" operating system) since its inception (which was in 1992). If you read any Linux news sites, ...

A Response to “Will Microsoft Kill Linux?”

Sunday, February 27th, 2005

If you read Slashdot, you may have noticed that an author on LinuxWorld has published a response to the article I was describing here. The author of the response does a much more thorough job debunking the claims of the original article than I did. I am glad, though, that ...