Back from vacatons

Hello everyone.

I'm definitively back from my vacations and work is starting to pile up. I'll restart my posting in the next few days.

Bye

Happy Birthday to me!

Hello Everyone...

Yes, it's true, today is my 27th anniversary. It's summer, it's very hot, and I haven't had the patience to write to this blog. Actually, I haven't had the patience to write anything in the last few days.

Darwin, my new netbook, is doing fine with Gentoo. There was one or two little twists I had to make, but I can say that the standard procedure for installing Gentoo produced a stable and reliable Linux system that takes advantage for the several features of this beutifull piece of hardware. The main drawback is the time it takes to compile everything up (It took about one week to have everything working. With these machines, it is almost mandatory to install a precompiled version of openoffice (openoffice-bin).

I'm also preparing my new homepage, and started to compose the "Prelude" project, which may become available, latter in the year.

I'm off to dinner now. ;)

Gentoo on ASUS EEEPC 1000HE

Hello Everyone!

Today (actually, yesterday) I've made it: I've finally installed Gentoo on my new ASUS EEEPC. It wasn't all that hard, and the little machine really surprised me with it's ability to handle processor-intensive tasks like compiling the kernel. Nevertheless, there was some trial-and-error and I hope to give you a more detailed description of the thing I've tried.

Just to start with (I'm somewhat sleepy) the best way for you to install gentoo is booting eeebuntu from a usb stick. Just boot the eeepc with windows, download the eeebuntu iso file and fedora's live usb creator for windows. The process of making a bootable USB stick is very straight forward using this technique.

After creating the bootable system in a stick, shutdown windows, re-insert the usb pendrive in any of the available usb ports and turn the computer on again. When you start to see Asus eeepc splash image, press the Esc key until a menu appears from where you can choose to boot from the usb device. Eeebuntu will then give you a fully-featured gnome environment from where you can start installing gentoo.

Just one more thing. Being a gentoo user for the last 3 years, I've never grew costumed with *buntu's fashion of omitting the root account. Unfortunately, you need to have root privileges in order to install gentoo, so, you have to do this: from a terminal window:

$ sudo passwd

And introduce a password for the root account. Atfer doing this, you can switch to root by using the su command.

Asus EEE PC 1000HE

It's been a while since my last post. During these months, I've been doing some tutoring, research and a lot of possible-Phd-scholarship-related paperwork. During this time, I've noticed the lack of a piece of hardware that would allow me to do part of my work wherever I may be.

As you know, I'm doing research in computational chemistry, so some of you may think I would enjoy having something powerful on my bag. But let us consider my work: most of my calculations are done using some density functional level of theory (B3LYP, X3LYP, M06...). For these calculations, GAMESS usually takes something between one afternoon and ten days. So, am I going to do ab initio calculations with my laptop? I don't think so. My laptop is intented for text processing, some programming (just writting source code) and doing some statistical treatments (ussing R, or Octave). I enjoy doing some musical composition (using MIDI) and musical algorithms (using MIDI, python or Chuck). Neither of thises thing actually need a great processor, there fore I've decided to go for the Asus EEE PC 1000HE.

The Asus EEE PC 1000HE has been subject to some wonderfull reviews. It is mostly known for its well designed keyboard and its long standing battery, but its merits extend to its camera, built quality, mate (non-glossy) display and so on, and so on... My first impression was that this was a very stable, solid and quite usable netbook. I also noticed that the netbook is very light... ok, most netbooks are somewhat lighter, nevertheless this small guy is lighter than the paper notebooks (including one of mine molekines) I ussualy carry with me.

Upon turning it on, I've soon discovered that this piece of hadware is completelly useless untill you install some state of the art open soure software. During next week I intent to mount a gentoo system on it. I'll keep Windows XP, because it may come usefull for some activities, but Microsoft Works and the whole panoplia of demos have to be substituted for Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and similars.

All-in-all, I still thing this is quite a netbook.

(In)Sequence

Good morning!

Here is the video clip for (In)Sequence.

Late developments

I spent the last two weeks of April preparing my first paper on the stereoselectivity of some aza-Diels-Alder reaction. Because of that, I haven't found the time to update my blog. The article cammed up okay, and it's now submitted. I'll post a link to it when it is approved. ;)

So now I'm back to do research and teaching, with some time available for my other projects (music, this blog, etc...). When I managed to get the paper done, I updated my Gentoo installation and found that KDEn'live is now available only by marking some packages ~x86 in the package.keywords file. So I updated Gentoo and installed KDEn'live, which now substitutes Lives and Cinelerra, as it is much more stable and user-friendly than the latter.

Last week I posted on YouTube the video of (In)sequence. It's not the video I would have wanted for this music, but it was the best available work in KDEn'live. Since than, I've been preparing the other two tracks from "Music for the Cell Phone" and making a general revision on my website, filipe-teixeira.com.

I'm Also preparing some tutorials on GAMESS, and translating my introductory course in Analytical Chemistry.

GAMESS mailing list

I've been following this very interesting discussion about GAMESS, quantum chemistry and software development.

Anything that I would have to say about this would be somewhat redundant and dumb when compared to the optinions of these fine gentlemen. Anyhow, this would be a good oportunity to learn something.