Beagle, Evolution and Ubuntu

As a quick post, I noticed that Beagle doesn't index my Evolution mail by default. Examining my settings by using 'beagle-index-info' I realized there were no Evolution action going on whatsoever, and by when running 'apt-cache search beagle' I noticed there's actually a package called 'beagle-backend-evolution'. I installed it using

sudo apt-get install beagle-backend-evolution

and then restarted beagled with

ps -A | grep beagled

sudo kill

beagled

and lo and behold, all of a sudden my e-mail starts appearing in my desktop searches as well.

Ubuntu software installation using the command line

With the risk of sounding as an Ubuntu beginner's guide, I noticed that the procedure of obtaining software for my Ubuntu installation using the command line wasn't described as explicitly as I'd prefer anywhere, so here goes:

The tool you need is apt-get. What it does is it basically checks through your /etc/apt/sources.list file and queries all the listed repositories for new versions of your OS- and peripheral software - just like Windows Update - but with the added feature of listing and installing new packages, mostly straight out of the box.

Since there's usually lots of managing of system-level files and directories involved in installing, you'll want to run apt-get as super user, using sudo. Hence, the typical command line for e.g. installing Beagle, my favourite desktop search, would be:

sudo apt-get install beagle

And that's usually it! However, if you do come across a package that doesn't exist in any of the default repositories, you might be able to find a specific repository listed on the package's homepage or similar. Then you'd simply have to add a line in the /etc/apt/sources.list file, such as (for XGL stuff):

deb http://ubuntu.compiz.net/ dapper main aiglx

where 'deb' means the repo contains debian binaries (as opposed to source code, 'deb-src'), and 'dapper', 'main' and 'aiglx' mean which distributions you want to access. 'Dapper' and 'main' are the branches of the core Ubuntu files, whereas 'aiglx' holds stuff related to ATI and OpenGL.

So how to know which name a certain program has? Use apt-cache. Two quick examples:

apt-cache search opengl

lists any package related to 'opengl' (by name or description). Wow, that's a lot of packages. If you have a hunch about the name, just 'grep' the output as usual:

apt-cache search opengl | grep compiz

and to get a more detailed description of a certain package, do:

apt-cache show compiz-plugins

That wraps up this tiny - but hopefully useful - post on package installation in Ubuntu, using the command line.

Ubuntu desktop search

Since I was unable to find any straight and simple posts on desktop search in Ubuntu (or most other Linux dists for that matter) I decided to post a brief note on it here.

It seems that the only viable option today, at least if you're looking for a clean interface with enough of a powerful engine, is Beagle. The simplest way to obtain it is via an apt-get:

sudo apt-get install beagle

Now, before you start the indexing, you might want to enable extended attributes on your filesystems. Not doing this apparently slows the indexing down multifold, so it's highly recommended. This is documented somewhere on the Beagle site, but what ended up doing was adding 'user_xattr' to the options in /etc/fstabs, like:

/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults,user_xattr,errors=remount-ro 0 1

Notice how everything else remains unchanged from the default settings. Then, I remounted the above partition using:

mount -o remount /

CAUTION: There are reports of incidents when adding extended attributes, so proceed with caution. For me it worked perfectly though.

The final thing is to start the indexing, by launching

beagle-search

and going to 'Preferences'. Under the 'Indexing' tab you can now add whichever directories you want indexed. Notice how e.g. adding a certain directory will remove any entries further down in the hierarchy, e.g. '/' will remove '/usr', since it will be included in the search anyway.

Now Beagle starts its work, and you can monitor its progress by issuing:

beagle-index-info

and to actually search, use

beagle-search

As a side note, the daemon is called 'beagled'. If anything seems fishy with your indexing, you can always try confirming your settings and manually killing and restarting the processes:

sudo killall beagled

sudo beagled --replace

That's about it. Stay tuned for more Ubuntu action.

Enter Ubuntu

So a couple of weeks ago I finally got around to installing a decent Linux dist. After a brief survey I settled for Ubuntu, most of all since I'm sitting on a HP laptop which I'd rather avoid tearing apart just to find specific part numbers etc. Also I happened to catch a glimpse of Ubuntu successfully running XGL and Compiz, i.e. OpenGL-accelerated window management for those of you who - like me - have spent the last couple of years living either under a rock or at the local pub.

Anyhow, after lots of work I finally have my sweet, whobbly, swooping, zooming desktop up and running, complete with sleek desktop search, fully working OpenGL development facilities and everything else that I've been looking for in an alternative to MS Windows.

Everything except Houdini that is, which I am to learn before my internship at Digital Domain starts within a couple of months. Hence I'm still bound to my old XP installation, although once I'm done with Houdini I might just throw it out the window once and for all.

My goal is to post a couple of brief walkthroughs or at least sketchy notes of my Ubuntu endeavors in this forum within the nearest future.

Google Analytics

Wow. Regardless of their alleged world domination schemes and general evilness, Google went and did it again. Google Analytics is an awesome service that lets me monitor the traffic to my official webpage and extract all kinds of statistics, such as graphical region, source site, conversion rates etc, everything neatly packed and categorized. It's oh so simple (just copy-paste a scriplet into your html files), and yet has given me a complete new view of what good (if any) that my webpage actually does. So get in line and wait for that precious invitation today!

Ron Fedkiw interview at fxguide

There's a really interesting interview with Prof. Fedkiw at fxguide.com. He describes in some detail what's going on under the hood of those cool new water animations we see in the movies. It's fun to see what all this &#!?%$# math hopefully is leading up to!

Optimizing noisy 1-D functions

Who knew such a trivial thing as finding the maximum of a noisy 1-D function would prove an unsurmountable task to modern science! While some people are fusing atoms and creating anti-matter, others are screaming in frustration over non-convergent searches and galloping derivatives when trying to focus a simple lens system in a ray tracer. Stochastic sampling in all honor, but for a tremendously costly function (e.g. ray-tracing a focus area and computing its entropy) you don't want to risk wasting those precious samples in potentially all the wrong places. Yes yes, auto-focusing a ray-tracer using the same focus measures as a normal camera might not be the smartest field to invest time in, but school assignments usually aren't picky about realism. Also, I'm sure there's plenty of other applications of a smart search algorithm for noisy data. Golden Section can't reign supreme forever! Right?

My Best Friend's Band

While I'm at it, my friend Fredrik's band Veil has just released their first demo. Go to http://veil.angst.nu for some angst-ridden rock! 'Toxicate' is an awesome track, the rest I leave up to you.

New homepage!

Ack, finally it's done! I've finished the epic makeover of my school homepage, a masterpiece that's supposed to leave all the corporate people out there stunned by amazement (is that even a word?). If you're either looking for a CG/computational methods guy with Stanford experience, or just don't have anything else to do, check out http://www.stanford.edu/~bergbom/. Feel free to let me know what you think; I would very much appreciate it since the slightest detail could mean the difference between a glorious internship and... no glorious internship. Also a shout out to my man Martin who more or less knowingly provided me with lots of inspiration and... errm, code.

Aqua buttons

Just a quickie on two Photoshop tutorials to create the fancy Apple-style aqua buttons:

http://www.webdesign.org/.../aqua-style-button-with-photoshop.35.html
http://www.greycobra.com/tutorial/Mac_Style_Buttons/

SonyEricsson luxury phone mockup

[By no means new] Club Sony Ericsson posted a couple of artist's renderings of this awesome-looking Motorola Razor competitor. The artist apparently envisioned a 4 mpx camera but forgot to add a flash. Let's hope he remembers that in the next version, and also envisions some kind of invisible scratch-proofing (unless that's already added? Hard to tell...).

fashion.pfsk

Trend watching site pfsk recently launched an entire section devoted to fashion. Even the ads look good.

http://fashion.psfk.com/

Lightbox image viewing plugin for Firefox

This is a script for Greasemonkey that when clicking on images opens them as a very good-looking Mac-esque overlay instead of following the actual link. The overlay is easily dismissed by a mouse click. Check it out!

read more | digg story

Installing custom WinXP themes

Royale Vista 1.1, from Deviantart.

I recently went through the hassle of trying to install custom WinXP themes on my laptop, so I thought I'd post a tiny walkthrough in case anyone else is thinking about finally taking that step away from the blue and gray. One should be able to do this on any XP box, without prior installations or upgrades.

1. Save your current theme. Right-click desktop, click Properties and under Themes click Save as...
2. Crucial! Download UXTheme Multi Patcher. This is an apparently well-known hack that enables custom themes in general. By the time I did this the installation file was available at http://themes.belchfire.net/index.php?showtopic=8767 but in case that's changed, just go to http://www.belchfire.net and search for it.
   
3. Install UXTheme Multi Patcher. Simply unpack and run. XP's internal ZIP tool didn't like the file but WinRAR did great. Follow the brief instructions and let it reboot your computer.
4. Go to Deviantart.com. You could get your .msstyles or .theme files anywhere, but chances are high you'll end up installing some malicious *ware. Deviantart seem to know what they're doing. (For one thing they don't distribute .exe files but rather just zip/rar files. Watch out for those other cornholes!).
5. Download the theme of your choice. Once you've found a nifty theme, download the archive file and unzip it to a folder under C:\Windows\Resources\Themes. Paths are hard-coded, so make sure you get it right. The themes usually want to lie one folder directly under Themes, but in case you don't get it working, open the .theme file in a text editor and find the path under [VisualStyles]. For example, with my current Vista theme the path says 'Path=%WinDir%resources\Themes\RVista\RVista.msstyles' so I make sure the RVista folder from the zip file gets that exact location.
6. Install the theme. There's two types of files to look out for here. The .theme file which alters all your settings such as desktop background, sounds etc, and the .msstyles file that only does the visual appearance. Find either of those two in the folder you just unpacked and double-click it. This will launch the Display properties dialog again, and show a preview of what's going to happen. If you feel good about it, click Ok, and that should do it!

My notebook

All my notes from the final project in 'Introduction to Computer Vision' gathered conveniently in one place.

The unpacking of a MacBook Pro

I usually don't get all giddy about new gadgets, but this one was something else. I never saw Windows running even half as smooth on Intel as OS X does.

DJ Shadow

DJ Shadow's probably one of the most interesting musical phenomenons over the last two decades, and until very recently I've totally missed him! He does an awesome mix of hip-hop and ambience, and fits perfectly into the musical void between old school and electronica that I've been trying to fill ever since elementary school. Later's better than never though, and now I'm downloading everything Shadow I can find from the Music Store. Check him out! So far I warmly recommend "The 6 Day War", "What Does Your Soul Look Like", the tracks from the "Bombay the Hard Way" soundtrack, and the near-perfect remix of DJ Krush's "Meiso".

http://www.djshadow.com

gsl_linalg_QRPT_decomp

"The QR decomposition can be extended to the rank deficient case by introducing a column permutation P,

A P = Q R

The first r columns of Q form an orthonormal basis for the range of A for a matrix with column rank r. This decomposition can also be used to convert the linear system A x = b into the triangular system R y = Q^T b, x = P y, which can be solved by back-substitution and permutation. We denote the QR decomposition with column pivoting by QRP^T since A = Q R P^T. " - GSL Reference Manual

This might be exactly what we need for the feature selection step in the Ichimura & Tomita paper! Wild cheers.

Urban Dictionaries

For all us exchange students, rednecks and other illitterates looking to improve our big-city-vocabularies, http://www.urbandictionary.com and http://www.word-detective.com are two awesome resources. The first one will help you fine-tune your street lingo and avoid a lot of the traps that'd make you sound just like the obnoxious skinny white boy you are, whereas the second one provides the James Joyce-ish finesse that's guaranteed to impress the ladies in the cafés and bookstores downtown. Let me here you say 'Quintessential', holmes.

MS&E 120

"Probabilistic analysis", conditional expectation, etc. 'Easy is hell'.

Microsoft guy talking about Firefox extensions

"... Session Saver, Fangs, PDF Download, Download Status, Signature, Fasterfox, Web Developer, Firebug, etc."

"My favorites? Greasemonkey (lets you add all sorts of new behaviors, required for the cocomment greasemonkey script), IE Tab (lets you put IE inside Firefox), Performancing (lets you blog pages you visit), and Del.icio.us (lets you tag your pages and add them to Del.icio.us)"

Link

So what can we do with this blog thing?

The adventure starts here.

First entry ever

Glad to get that overwith.