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The presentation slides for my research paper on 802.1X is now available in PDF.

Well, most of the times I’m not too fussy about what applications I use, as long as I can get my work done and don’t lose my sanity in the process. Here’s a list of apps that I use regularly. The blog title is overly dramatic to catch attention.

Must Haves

1. Email Client: Mutt is preferred, Squirrelmail or Evolution occasionally (over IMAP).

2. Web Browser: Mozilla Firefox is a must. w3m in “emergencies”.

3. Text Editor: Vim. My text editor must be Vim, otherwise I go crazy. I’m actually less productive and slower using other text editors, like when I have to write blog entries in WP directly.

4. Alarm/Reminder: KAlarm and/or Evolution. Sometimes my Sony Ericsson T610 when I’m away.

5. GNU Tools and Perl.

Convenient To Haves

1. Entertainment: it had changed quite a bit over time, but currently I’m happy with Rhythmbox and Totem (xine backend). GNOME Mahjongg is a must to relieve stress (best times: 3:08 to 3:34).

2. Personal Finance: Moneydance, I’m not too good with money, this kind of apps keep me sane.

3. GKrellM. I’m a control freak. Monitor everything.

4. Terminal: GNOME Terminal. Most people don’t appreciate good terminals until they are forced to use crappy ones. GNOME Terminal (2.7.3) is actually very good, and it comes with GNOME. OpenSSH. PuTTY to “call” home when I’m on another planet.

5. Word ProcessorTypesetting System: LyX. LyX and Latex rule. Proper and structured writing enforced. Pybliographer bibliography database manager helps from time to time.

6. GIMP. ‘Nuff said.

7. GNOME desktop environment.

8. Instant Messaging: Gaim. One size fits all.

Of course, there are other applications that I require on my own machine that are not necessarily needed when I’m away from my computer, such as: postfix, fetchmail, procmail, courier-imap, cron, at, apache, mysql, ntpd, and samba.

What applications do you use on a regular basis that you “can’t live without”?

I just finished writing a research paper on 802.1X authentication as part of the assessments in one of the subjects I’m taking this semester. I will do a presentation on this topic to the class and the faculty this Saturday. The abstract of the paper is given below.

The paper is available in PDF format.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think I just found a possible LyX bug; when using a bibtex file which filename has a dot in it (other than the “.bib” extension), e.g. “802.1x.bib“, somehow LyX (or BibTeX?) got confused and LyX wouldn’t show me any entries in the Insert Citation dialog. So to workaround it for the time being, don’t use any dots in the filename other than the .bib extension. I don’t have time to report this yet (I have a paper to write!), but will do later.

On a related note, I just added some new ebuilds for Pybliographer (and the accompanying python-bibtex) to Gentoo bugzilla.

I needed a Wiki for my school assignments so that my group mates and I can work on the same thing together quickly and we all can see the most up-to-date result always and immediately. Saves us the hassle of emailing bloody MS Word attachments back and forth. Actually it’s more of a shared whiteboard for brainstorming rather than the end result paper for submission, so we still need to “convert” and clean up the result to a word processor somehow, I reckon that’s the easy part.

Anyway, I have always liked MediaWiki, however, it was a bitch to install at the time, so I decided to use PhpWiki for linux.or.id Wiki. So I took a quick look at the MediaWiki website to see how it has changed since then, and it turned out that installing just got much easier, so I gave it a try. It definitely is easy to install, configure, and use now. Feature-wise it kicks PhpWiki’s ass. In case you don’t know, MediaWiki is the engine behind Wikipedia, the number one open online encyclopedia.

Next up: converting the linux.or.id wiki from PhpWiki to MediaWiki. I could swear I’ve seen a guide on how to do this, but I couldn’t find it now. (If you have the link please post in the comments section. Thanks.)