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I’m cleaning out some bookmarks so I thought I would post links for NCAR, an oft-used set of tools in Civil and Environmental Engineering, here.

“The NCAR Command Language (NCL) is a programming language designed specifically for the access, analysis, and visualization of data. NCL can be run in interactive mode, where each line is interpreted as it is entered at your workstation, or it can be run in batch mode as an interpreter of complete scripts.”

Installing NCAR Graphics
Installing NCAR Command Line Interface

The university has an unsustainable model for satisfying the Matlab demand. Currently when licenses run out departments are tapped for contributions and the number of licenses is raised as a result. I’ve seen this cycle accelerate this year perhaps due to the greenlighting of installs of Matlab on undergraduate personal machines as being within the existing license agreement by Software Sales.

I’ve found that departmental-level standalone licensing works well for faculty members (especially those with laptops) and their graduate students. And accomodating undergrads is easy if you have the space for them: Mathworks has a heavily discounted ‘classroom’ license that can be deployed in a lab environment if it is to be used in combination with a course.

Until the university gets its ducks in a row its worthwhile to know how to check the status of a license. This is particularly useful on a departmental level because once you know who is usinga given license you can just knock on their door and see if they’re willing to give it up.

UNIX/Mac:

$MATLAB/etc/lmstat -a (where $MATLAB is the root MATLAB directory)

The Mathworks Knowledgebase Article along with Windows instructions

[addendum]

The arguments for a departmental Matlab license server are as follows:

1. The university pool is not a sustainable model.
2. Access control exists on a smaller scale and thus makes for a sustainable and accountable model.
3. The turnaround time to check for hung processes or dormant users is unacceptable.

I usually wind up forgetting to check one of these items when inspecting a machine’s Windows startup process.

“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\RunServicesOnce

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\RunServices

(Login Prompt Loads)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\RunOnce

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Run

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Run

(StartUp Folder Loads)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\RunOnce”

Read more in the Microsoft KB

That IBM Thinkpad T42p I was working on wouldn’t pair with a Logitech 900MX Bluetooth mouse. Once we determined that the bluetooth device had to be activated via the keyboard (duh) it still wouldn’t pair up. The Bluetooth wizard would find the device and and say it was installed but after closing the window and reopening it the device would no longer be listed. The only hint came after inspecting the devices properties after an initial connect. Under the services menu we were unable to check off the keyboard and mouse drivers receiving a “Bluetooth Service Error” message. This pointed me to the system service list and I discovered that it would only work give the following settings for the “Bluetooth Support Service”. In the “Log On” Tab have the service log in as the “Local System account” (first option). Restart the service or reboot the machine and you should be able to create a persistent pair.

Now I wonder if this is necessary for bluetooth devices other than Logitech…

I’m not as strong as I should be when building an RPM package for deployment so I rely heavily on an, ehem, GUI utility to get the job done. Krpmbuilder has been my tool of choice for this purpose. It presents a series of dialog boxes to walk you through the process; it couldn’t be easier. So imagine my dismay when the darn thing wouldn’t compile on Fedora Core 3, particularly with the 3.4 series of GNU compilers (in this case g++). Fortunately I was able to find the problem in the code. It seems 3.4 is much more strict about syntax than earlier versions. To compile you need to first add “QSpacerItem*” to the beginning of each of the following lines in the respective files:

src/settings/path.cpp on line 55
src/filespage.cpp on lines 112, 114, 116, 158
src/finishpage.cpp on lines 79, 87
src/projectpage.cpp on line 155

On the Thinkpad T41 and later you may think IBM neglected installing a Bluetooth device if you performed a clean installation of the OS. In fact its much more likely that the Bluetooth device is disabled by default. Via a hotkey combination you can turn the device back on. In the case of the T42p it was Fn+F5 (I believe this might also toggle WiFi, Fn+F9 might be bluetooth only after reading up on it); it may differ slightly on other models, but the principle is the same.

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