New Breeze

It has been a while since I last wrote in this blog. I was not able to write for a while because I have to finish my PICE paper and awith it brought new sense of personal morphing.. I also recently acquired a new hobby which is collecting pencils as well as tinkering with computer programs such as ELMER, Euler, Model Builder and Vensim. It was quite fun collecting pencils although I have realized that how lucky I was since I can spare money collecting various pencils while many cannot even afford to buy quality pens ( I also collect those shoddy ones and I´m also willing to exchange quality pens for rare and imported pens even though they are actually shoddy). A student of mine is actually into this hobby and I´m looking forward for some exchanges with her.

I´m still learning the ropes of ELMER as well as Euler, Model Builder and Vensim. Since it is an integgral part of my thesis vensim is what I´m mastering now. I can´t believe that it made me more conscious of the causal relationship than writing it on paper. ELMER will be next because it is very useful in fluid mechanics.

My ubuntu experience 3.1

I am presently writing this in my favorite Arabic restaurant. The food is great, the ambiance is very Arabic as though I am writing inside a bar in Lebanon and looking at the other tables beautiful Arabic and Iranian women free of their head gears while I savor my food with Rai music as a background – Anyway before I get lost I will have to relate my traumatic experience using UBUNTU 9.10.

I have no idea that in the initial release of the Karmic Koala there is one crucial bug that hit me big time - the WiFi is not working properly. Since I have a paper to submit that moment I am already mad at myself for being inside a helpless situation (Dr. Terante is already sharpening his knife to slit my throat). Thankfully my sioti came to the rescue and directed me to a cafe where they allow LAN cable to be connected to your laptop (I wonder how Dr. Terante look like that time and his expression of relief). I was able to do some updates that fix this problem but there is still more. The word ¨hang¨ is not part of the Linux vocabulary but it is now. This is the only distro that I´ve experienced this. My OpenOffice.org crashes from time to time before this update was made and I caused considerable delays in my paper.

I still don´t know how many bugs still lurks in my laptop but on the plus side my WinE is already working quite well. I have already installed STRAN which was timely since I am already teaching matrix analysis of structures. ProgeCAD is nearly trouble free and does not crash. Caesar 3 and EPANET are still running flawlessly. VENSIM is also trouble free, which enable me to run my model. But before I celebrate at my small victory against Windows there are still some issue regarding the HEC suite (It still doesn´t work) and the Linux version of HEC-HMS has graphics problem (the window size is not optimal I can´t click buttons below) and the WinE website is still clueless on the problem (they are also clueless about the HEC programs either).

So far my story here can´t exactly be described as a walk in the park but it opened my eyes on some opportunities. I have decided to learn programming so I can contribute to the development of UBUNTU and WinE. Oh by the way, the WiFi in this Arabic restaurant sucks (maybe Hezbollah is tapping into it I can´t say for sure) at least the food is great thereby preventing me from getting pissed. I have to close now before I forgot that I´m in Manila not Beirut.

ubuntu experience 3.0