Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Happy Birthday Perl!

Yes, on this day in 1987 Larry Wall released Perl 1.0 on the comp.sources.misc newsgroup. So, that means 20 years of easing the text-processing headaches of countless programmers around the world!

I've been using Perl for some time now and it never ceases to amaze me with its ability to handle text manipulation tasks that would take ages to code in Java even with all its libraries, forget about C! Though, then Java would take ages to run, unlike C.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Shifting lab PCs

Moving from the first to the second year of M.Tech. means you get a chance to upgrade PCs. My old PC, named nogzone, was a Compaq D380m, with a ViewSonic E70 monitor. This monitor is the biggest and heaviest amongst all 17" monitors in the department, the main reason I took it.

Nogzone Mk I, had the following specs:
Intel P4 1.6GHz
256MB RAM
NVIDIA Riva TNT 2 (NV5M64) with 64MB of RAM
Maxtor HDD 4D040H2 (40 GB capacity)
BTC (Some Chinese company) F563E CD-ROM

That's all that I could extract from /proc! It has been running Ubuntu Dapper Drake since I first got it.

Fortunately, it's run rather well as long as I've had it. The graphics card even made for passable gaming when I tried it. Now it's time to move on to Nogzone Mk II. More on this later.

It's been fun having Nogzone Mk I around, and if only it had more memory, I wouldn't have given it up. Installation and configuration does take ages! Now, I've realized that data transfer taken an equivalent amount of time, especially when you're as haphazard as I am.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu

This goes out to all those unlucky people who still haven't managed to enable 3D acceleration on their Nvidia graphics cards. This is a link to the Ubuntu HOWTO on installing Nvidia drivers. It worked like a charm on the Riva TNT 2 on my KReSIT PC.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Installing Mediawiki

Finally, my first proper post on this blog! Well, I was installing MediaWiki 1.7.1 the other day and was reminded just what a breeze it is!

The steps are:
  1. Ensure PHP, MySQL, and other pre-requisites are installed.
  2. Then decompress the source into a directory, which is either in webroot or is symbolically linked there (my personal favourite).
  3. If you're finicky, you'd like to create the MySQL user and database before installing, otherwise just leave it to MediaWiki.
  4. Open the form for configuration and installation, fill in the required details, and you're up and running! Oh, you can accomplish step 3 here by just specifying the username and database name you want to create along with the MySQL root account's password.
You can find the complete installation manual here. This document provides some useful tips for configuring the Wiki.