Author: mattions

Atheist coming out!

June 6, 2010 / / 0 Comments

When I read this column I was kind of shaken.
In 2010 we still need to justify that people don’t believe.

Religion is just a business model. People believe in something that it doesn’t exist and then they are charged to do that. It’s brilliant if you run it. I’ve read this somewhere. I don’t remember who said that. I just agree.

Beware of ℵ0 (aleph zero)

June 4, 2010 / / 0 Comments

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Volevo segnalare la rubrica di matematica tenuta da Maurizio Codogno sul post.

Oggi la storia è su ℵ0 e l’albergo di Hilbert. Se l’argomento vi incuriosisce c’è sempre Wikipedia per approfondire.

Se la trattazione matematica non vi suscita grandi emozioni allora pensatelo in maniera letteraria, attraverso il capolavoro di Leopardi.

L’infinito

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle
E questa siepe che da tanta parte
De’ll ultimo orrizonte il guarde esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete,
Io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando; e mi sovvien l’eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e’l suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
E’l naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.

Lucid Lynx is pretty slick

May 10, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I’ve just upgraded to Lucid Lynx. Pretty slick!


The upgrade worked out quite well and I was really surprised. My system usually runs a lot of beta/alpha softwares. One way to avoid any problem is to do a clean install. If you have all your data in your home and you have partitioned in a convenient way you can do it in a light heart way.

Unless you had to install tons of scientific softwares in /usr/local for some kind of reason.

It took me one day to get everything up to date, from to add the new slick indicator applet  to the panel, to check out the new stuff. (I gave a go to GNOME shell, but didn’t really get into it too much yet!)

gnome shell

If you just installed Lynx and don’t know what to do, check out this post.

How to set up a good partition scheme in Linux

May 9, 2010 / / 2 Comments

It’s always a good idea to have at least two partitions, one for your O.S. and one for your data. There are a lot of programs which you can use to part your harddrive  (e.g.: [ gparted | qparted ]).

I’m pretty happy with my current schema, which I developed long time ago, when my harddrive was only 40 Gb. I wrote about this in this old post, which I’m translating from Italian to English.

This is a schema for an old laptop of 40 Gb, but you can extend the concept.

Harddisk: 40 Gb

/ 10 Gb (root, where you will install the operative system)

swap 1Gb (should be the same amount of RAM you’ve got if you want to suspend)

/home 29 Gb

The main idea is to create a 10Gb for your O.S., the swap for the RAM and then everything left should go as space for the home.

This is pretty good way to part your disk because:

  1. Your data are detached from the O.S., so you can clean your partition very quickly and put a shiny new one in no time.
  2. 10 Gb is maybe too many for the O.S., but I tend to install a huge amount of stuff and sometimes when writing big file you need space in tmp.

So far it works for me.

With my new (3 years old…) laptop I have this figures:

 

18.4 Gb for the root (/)

4 Gb for the swap

87.7 Gb for the /home