Monthly Archives: June 2010

Testing if a Point is Inside a Polygon in Python

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Taro

Finally got around to find this out by Googling.  It’s a useful function so I reproduce it here for copy & paste: def inside_polygon(x, y, points): “”" Return True if a coordinate (x, y) is inside a polygon defined by … Continue reading →

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Installing STSCI_PYTHON on Debian Squeeze

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Taro

The version I use is 2.10. First, install IRAF, tables, and stsdas following this article. $ sudo aptitude install python-tk python-numpy python-pmw python-urwid $ sudo aptitude install libreadline6-dev python-matplotlib ipython $ wget http://stsdas.stsci.edu/download/stsci_python_2.10/stsci_python_2.10.tar.gz $ tar -xvzf stsci_python_2.10.tar.gz $ cd stsci_python_2.10 … Continue reading →

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Installing IRAF on Debian Squeeze

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Taro

IRAF doesn’t have a standard installation procedure using make tools, so it is no fun to install in any system.  One solution is to go for Scisoft, but I don’t necessarily want to install a whole bunch of software that … Continue reading →

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Installing Evernote for Windows on Debian Squeeze

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Taro

No Linux version!  Lame! First, install Wine as usual. Then download version 3.1 of Evernote for Windows (no, version 3.5 does not install due to its .Net requirement), and run the installer: $ wine Evernote_3.1.0.1225.exe That’s it.

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Installing KeePass on Debian Squeeze

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Taro

$ sudo aptitude install keepassx This is my favorite username & password manager.

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PDF Viewing on Debian Squeeze

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Taro

I find Okular to be a superb PDF reader.  Yes, you can even annotate directly onto PDF documents! $ sudo apt-get install okular poppler-data The last module is necessary to view Japanese PDF documents.

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Installing Skype on Debian Squeeze

Posted on June 12, 2010 by Taro

To install Skype under /usr/local on Squeeze (AMD64), do: $ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk … download Skype source (static version) … $ bunzip2 -c skype_static-2.1.0.81.tar.bz2 | tar xvf – $ sudo mv skype_static-2.1.0.81 /usr/local $ cd /usr/local/bin $ sudo … Continue reading →

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Installing Kindle for PC on Debian Squeeze

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Taro

I sometimes want to run Kindle for PC on Wine.  Amazon is so lame that they don’t even bother making a native Linux version of this software! Here is the procedure.  Move to a temporary directory and do: $ sudo … Continue reading →

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High-performance Computing Tips

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Taro

A nice thing about my current institution is that it has access to high-performance computing (HPC) facility.  I get to use so-called supercomputers.  This is a cheat sheet for myself. Reserving your job: Show the information about a job with … Continue reading →

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Securely Erasing Hard Disk

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Taro

Like when you need to sell your old computer, sometimes you wish to wipe clean a hard disk drive in a secure manner (i.e., not just removing reference to data). Here, /dev/sdb is the disk to be erased. Takes a … Continue reading →

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