Instructional

The Idiot Proof Guide for Windows-host, *-guest setup. (Ubuntu in my case, and should work for any host) Make sure you’re working with a VDI, not a VDMK (if not, File>Virtual Media Manager right-click, Copy) Drop into a command line (on windows, press Win+R, type ‘cmd’) and navigate to the Virtualbox directory (won’t need to do this on *nix) Execute VBoxManage _path_to_your.vdi_ --resize _new_size_in_MB_ Download UBCD and mount it as a DVD to your VM ...

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

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

Pre-built packages not releasing 64 bit versions? No Problem. Debian/Ubuntu based: dpkg -i --force-architecture whatever.deb RH/Fedora based: rpm -i --ignorearch whatever.rpm

So as part of my IAESTE placement with PC Engines, I’m investigating the possibility of them making a new board based around the AMD Fusion series of APU’s (CPU+(something else, usually GPU) on single die) and for that board to work with the Open Source Coreboot BIOS. This is my story. Disclaimer I am not a hardware guy, and have never done any pre-OS x86 hardware programming. This will bore the pants of anyone who is an x86 expert, but hopefully some will find it useful and will contribute to the Coreboot project. ...

As part of my placement in Zurich, I’ve been doing some BIOS level development around the Coreboot project, working with Flashrom and other tools, but with a particular AMD Fusion (MSI E350IA-E45) Mobo, there was no sensible way to flash the BIOS or to add a ‘vestigial’ BIOS. So, the solution arrived at was to ‘acquire’ a Galep-5 Universal Programmer (Not a cheap piece of kit, but apparently that’s the kind of stuff they have lying around in Zurich). Anyway, long story short, went to the Galep website, downloaded the .run file, installed, all perfect and happy days. Except it was in German. (Even though it says its ‘English only’) ...

Unity Sucks, and I don’t like it. I prefer a combination of Avant Window Navigator, tilda, and Gnome-Do, to go from this ** to this ** Now, I haven’t kept track of all of the changes I’ve made to my configuration files, so YMMV, but gnome-do and Avant have remarkably good GUI configuration tools, so customise to your hearts content! Get rid of Unity sudo apt-get remove unity unity-asset-pool unity-place-applications unity-place-applications ...

Had an issue with Fedora 15 not liking my harddrives that used to be RAIDed. Noting for future reference. “Disk contains BIOS metadata, but is not part of any recognized BIOS RAID sets." Solution: dmraid -r -E /dev/???? Stolen from Kezhong

More a note for myself than anyone else. Stolen shamelessly from Marc Fletcher. In Settings, alt+e,alt+q, alt+q.

As part of any major project, it occasionally happens that you assume something is a ‘solved problem’ when its really not. In my case it was solving small linear systems, of the form Ax=B, where A is an nxn matrix, B is a n vector. This is a problem that’s been solved in libraries such as LAPACK, LINPACK, BLAS, etc etc. The issue appears when you’re trying to do this stuff within a specific hardware environment (CUDA), and you cannot call host functions from the device, and the cuBLAS libraries cater only to large matrices processed in parallel ...