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5
Jan 12

My Guide To My Own Favourite Ubuntu Setup

This is my own self-indulgant reminder for how to do the things I like. I’ll keep adding to this as I think of them.

Basic Setup

Install Ubuntu Latest (currently 11.10), With the third party libraries and a home partition leaving at least 20GB for ‘/’.

Then Update everything, during which time you can plod along to download the relevant packages for Chrome Beta, Dropbox, etc

Once the update is done (I’d restart in most cases), additional packages I like to add are;

vim  vim-latexsuite vim-vimoutliner vim-scripts vim-addon-manager synaptic gnome-do gnome-shell python-setuptools python3-setuptools python-distutils-extra python3-distutils-extra ipython terminator guake evolution openssh-server evolution-plugins-experimental libreoffice-evolution htop gnome-schedule nload perl-doc etherape zenmap gnuplot graphviz dot2tex latexmk. Continue reading →

career / Off-Topic — No Comments
31
Dec 11

Ringing in the New Year by seeing out the old

2011 has been a great year for me;

  • Graduated with a 1st MEng in Electronics & Software Engineering @QUB,
  • Got Job offer to a major financial house, which I turned down,
  • Got Job offer to a C|EH company in England, which I turned down,
  • Got DELNI Funded PhD offer (x4) from CSIT/ECIT, which I turned down,
  • Got selected to be one of the two UK projects within a Joint UK/FR Defence PhD Programme, which I accepted,
  • Saw fantastic growth in QUESTS and the Hacker^H^H^H^H^H^HMakerspace, including the beginning of a Major project, which we got EEECS Funding for and are also hoping to get QAF funding for QUESTS in general,
  • We are on track to get a actual space for the Makerspace circa Summer 2012,
  • Had the fantastic experience of living and working in Zurich for the summer with IAESTE / Pc Engines Gmbh, which gave me the opportunity to visit all over Europe, which was great for my confidence and self-belief, and also gave me a great many new friends all over the world,
  • Started (re-)learning French,
  • Came second in the UK Nationals of the IET’s Present Around the World Competition in Liverpool for my talk on Privacy in the Modern world (I keep meaning to screen-cast this but keep forgetting…)
  • Had a great time making an interesting site with Matt Campbell, Alastair McKinley, and the Sisk Brothers (was live for a few days over the summer, and we didn’t want to pay for it so let it die; may go back to it this year!)
  • Was asked to speak at the QUB EEECS RS Colloquium, representing Digital Communications within QUB/ECIT.
  • Travelled over 6,000 Miles, visiting at least 12 cities in 7 countries.
  • Lost a phone and a bike,
  • Went on 12 ‘dates’, 5 of which were worth while, 3 of which I’m still in touch with,
  • Taught at least 5 first years that C++ isn’t magic, it’s just poorly taught,
  • Sat on 5 committees, only one of which made me feel productive,
  • Had a pretty awesome time.

Going forward, I’m not going to make a load of promises I won’t keep. Thanks to all my friends, family, colleagues, competitors, enemies, bureaucrats, pencil-pushers, and random-folk who made my year what it was.

I plan on only two things;  KISS, and…

Instructional — No Comments
8
Dec 11

Guide to Persistent Reverse SSH Shells and Port Forwards

Idiot proof setup for persistent reverse shells / port forwards (same thing) under a Ubuntu VM remote and my Dreamhost server, but should apply to nearly* all *nix’s

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Instructional — No Comments
8
Dec 11

Guide to Expanding Oracle Virtualbox Drives

The Idiot Proof Guide for Windows-host, *-guest setup. (Ubuntu in my case, and should work for any host)

Continue reading →

Instructional — No Comments
26
Oct 11

Unicode Characters in Mendeley Bibliography Breaking Latex?

I use Mendeley for my reference and citation management.

I use TexClipse for (most) of my \LaTeX editing, ViM otherwise.

I use Xelatex / pdflatex for project building.

These don’t always work so well together.  Continue reading →

Uncategorized — No Comments
23
Oct 11

Stuff I’ve found interesting in the past month – 2011/10/23

Instructional — No Comments
19
Oct 11

Mendeley Repeated Citations in BibTeX Library

Problem: Had two citations with slightly different information appearing in library.bib, causing bibtex to shit itself, but only one citation appeared in the desktop / web interfaces
Cause: ‘Deleted’ Library items still appear in library.bib, so old (custom) version of citation still persisted after being ‘removed’
Solution: Empty trash

Commentary / Off-Topic — No Comments
17
Oct 11

Today’s Accomplishments: The 2.0 Generation

As I was walking back from our kitchen in the office, I realised that that ‘lift coffee cup, walk to kitchen, make coffee cup, return to desk’ was the most inefficient part of my working day; I can even justify writing this post as vaguely productive as I’m waiting for a download to complete…
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Instructional — No Comments
5
Oct 11

Vim Latex Suite Install on Ubuntu

Ubuntu doesn’t manage vim’s addons, so installing the vim-latexsuite package doesn’t actually put all the relevant hooks into your vim installation. To do that, (after installing the package) execute;
sudo vim-addons -w install latex-suite

Off-Topic — No Comments
29
Sep 11

Through The Drinking Glass

Inspired by the drinking game ‘Kings’

Co-Authors:W.P.L. Cully, and L. Martin

Requirements:
1 standard deck of cards
1 jug/tankard/chalice/large vessel
1 top hat (or suitably ‘posh’ headgear)
at least 4 people
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