Connecting to USC Secure Wireless on Linux

Tested on: Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Linux Mint 17.1 USC (Univ. of Southern California) updated its wireless service to have an encrypted and faster connection available to USC faculty, staff, and students with name 'USC Secure Wireless'. Unfortunately for students like me, USC did not document how to use Linux computers with this...

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A simple approach to reference and PDF management

Managing references and citations is essential for academic publishing and reproducible research. However, managing large volume of references and citations over years is no easy task! A number of softwares have been developed specially for the task and been discussed many times. In this post I will briefly describe my own approach, which...

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Moving remote Git repository

It is surprising that most of the search results related to moving Git repository is targeted towards moving repositories to github.com and alike. I was trying to move my git repository from, say, server1.edu to server2.edu. These servers are Linux servers and are accessible via SSH. However, using the common set of instructions i.e. git clone --bare followed by git push --mirror kept throwing me following error: $ git push...

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Matlab's cryptic error messages

Sometimes MATLAB's error messages can be very cryptic and misleading. Following are examples of error messages which I encountered while trying to solve \(\mathbf{A}x=b\) in least square sense using MATLAB's lsqr function. %% Error 1 Error using iterapp (line 60) user supplied function ==> @(x,transp_flag)transform_X(x,transp_flag, ...) failed with the following error: Not enough input arguments. Error in lsqr (line...

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LaTeX to word document

Tested on: Linux Mint 13 (Ubuntu 12.04), Microsoft Office 2010, LibreOffice 3 It is common to typeset scientific documents in  \(\LaTeX\). However, few people may like to still read and edit the document in word processors like Microsoft word (.doc or .docx)or LibreOffice (.odt). Here are quick (& dirty) steps to produce reasonably looking "office" documents from .tex files. The idea is to exploit HTML output as intermediate...

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Parent directories in tar archives

Tested on: Linux Mint 13 Maya (based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) It is common to see full directory tree or . (dot) in tar archives. Sometimes, it may be unnecessary hassle to remove all parent directories after extracting or to look for the extracted file which merged with other files in extracted directory. In some situations, it may be desirable to create a tar archive with top directory (with informative name). There has been...

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