Unpublished posts

Recently I have written a few posts, but I haven’t published them. Probably I would never do that. The reason why I decided not to post everything what I written is simple. I don’t want any posts on my site which are messy and/or don’t contain anything valuable. In other words, I don’t like what I have written. Anyway I try to summarize what I was wanting to express.

The first of unpublished article was about my driving exam. It was a kind of situation that I really hate. I need a driving license and the only way I can obtain that document is to take official exam. However the exam itself is testing mostly the knowledge of examiners tricks not a real driving skills. Also the form of exam is far from being fair. For example examinees wait for several hour in a tension that in every second their could be called for practice test. Each of that aspects could be easily solved. Sadly since it is the only organization allowed to make driving exams it is not interested in improving quality of their service. Despite of that, the driving exam centre have some “quality” certificates including well known ISO. Anyway, I passed the exam. The point of that article was that law and certificates is not all, sometimes a good will is also welcomed.

The second post was titled “Have a strategy”. It explains importance of having strategy in our life. It show how to organize work more effectively. Sometimes basic tools such as spreadsheet program could be enough to boost productivity. The main thesis was that being organized require only a little effort in compare to possible benefits.

The last one, unfinished, was about my science camp at ICM. I was doing there some researches about classifying articles using N-gram. It was a kind of workshop that require a lot of coding. It also showed that sometimes trivial formulas gave better results then complex methods. To sum up, it is a good idea to try to find simple solutions first, rather then dealing with special cases.

I hope that my further posts will be good enough to publish them.

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Setting up internet sharing over bluetooth

Today, I decided to set up internet sharing from workstation to my PPC. As my desktop PC and PDA have bluetooth, I wanted to use it instead of inconvenient USB cable.

Firstly, I look through Gentoo Linux documentation. I found two interesting articles, about bluetooth¹ and routing². I follow them, which mean I rebuilt kernel, emerge a few programs and play for a while with configuration. From PPC side, I simple switch to static addresses and enter them. Everything worked as expected, till I decided to restart my computer. After that, I realised that bluetooth interface (bnep) didn’t have proper IP. The reason of that mistake was that script “/etc/bluetooth/pan/dev-up” hadn’t been execute. I double-checked permissions and name of that file, but it didn’t help. Documentation³ didn’t give me any clue. After some web searching, I noticed people who have the same problem, but unfortunately, I didn’t find solution.

At that moment, I decided to use some messy scripts to do that job. However, I still wondering, why my first method doesn’t work. I hope to figure it out.

1. Gentoo Linux Bluetooth Guide [back]
2. Home Router Guide [back]
3. HOWTO PAN [back]

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Geek test

I just have taken geek test. Result surprised me. Look at it:

Eh, personally, I don’t feel like a 100% geek. I have some other interests. Really.

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A simple way to install new ttf fonts on linux

Recently, I faced with a typical office problem. I was made to create diplomas layout for my school. Although, I’m not an artistic person, I agreed to do that task.

One thing that I needed was a sophisticated font. More creative than standard “Times New Roman”. So I visited one of that sites with free fonts and found a suitable one. It looks similar to handwriting.

My troubles started when I tried to install it. According to documentation, adding new fonts to X.org is a bit complicated. I could do that, but luckily I didn’t have much time so I look up for a simpler solution. Shortly I discovered in my gentoo OS a folder .fonts. It is located in user’s home directory. I copied there .ttf files and everything ran out of box. For me it’s a nice solution for that problem.

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