Disabling GDM in Ubuntu
There are various reasons for installing a full Ubuntu desktop, but wanting to run the system in text-only mode by default. Perhaps your machine is a server, and you want as much RAM available as possible for its server activities. Maybe it’s an LTSP server, which needs all the nice GUI stuff for its clients, [...]
May 16, 2010
Posted in: Linux/Ubuntu 
3 Comments
Writing CSV files with headers in Matlab
The Matlab csvwrite function has the limitation that it can only write numeric data to a CSV file. This is all well and good until you want a set of column headers in the first line of your file, so other people know what’s in it. I’ve seen a few workarounds for this, mostly revolving [...]
April 11, 2010
Posted in: Matlab 2 Comments
A wireless, headless Linux box
If you’re using wireless networking in Ubuntu (or, presumably, most flavours of Linux), you may have noticed that your network doesn’t connect until you’ve logged in and the NetworkManager’s applet has done its thing. This doesn’t happen for wired networks, where you get a connection as soon as the machine has booted. This is all [...]
March 11, 2010
Posted in: Linux/Ubuntu No Comments
Your backup strategy
Yes, there’s approximately 8,390,000 articles on this subject already, but it seems that people still don’t get it. In the vain hope of 8,390,001 articles doing the job instead, here goes: BACK. UP. YOUR. FRICKIN’. DATA. If you don’t, you’ve got no-one to blame but yourself when it all goes Pete Tong and you lose [...]
February 4, 2010
Posted in: Computing No Comments
R, the acf function and statistical significance
The R language provides us with a useful method to calculate the autocorrelation function (ACF) of a time series. An example of an environmental time series with a seasonal cycle is shown below, with the resulting plot: corr
January 20, 2010
Posted in: R One Comment
