The thing is that I don’t want to post Computer Science related content into facebook and I don’t want to post into my (professional) linkedin profile all kinds of rubbish. I found out that it is easy to selectively syndicate content depending on the tags that I will add to my post.

So I added two tags, an import_facebook for posts that I want to be imported into my facebook profile and an import_linkedin tag for posts that I want to be imported into my linedin profile.

Then I installed the “WordPress” application for linkedin and I set as a feed url of my blog the following: http://kyriakos.anastasakis.net/tag/import_linkedin

I also installed RSS Graffiti for facebook and I set as a url of my feed the following: http://kyriakos.anastasakis.net/tag/import_facebook/feed

From now on any WordPress post I tag as “import_facebook” will be imported into my facebook profile, while every WordPress post I tag as “import_linkedin” will be imported into my linkedin profile. Before installing the WordPress and the RSS Grafiti apps on your linkedin and facebook profiled respectively, you need to have at least one post tagged “import_facebook” and a post tagged as “import_linkedin” for the applications to pick up the links properly.

1. sudo ifconfig to get a list of all the network interfaces. There you can see the name of the networking interface that you need to reset. In my case I wanted to reset interface “eth3″. So I did:
2.sudo dhclient -r eth3 to ipconfig /release
3.sudo dhclient eht3 to ipconfig /renew

That’s it! Got a new IP and I can access the internet!

• Bad Apples – Their 10 worst inventions
• The 7 sins – Microsoft’s worst inventions ever

The noise level of the CPU Fan of my Sony Vaio VGN-SZ71E laptop was driving me crazy for the past few days. When the laptop was on, you could hear the fan operating even in the room next door. The fan was also producing vibrations, which I could feel when I had my arms on the keyboard palmrest! It’s needless to say you can’t work properly (i.e. concentrate on your work) under these circumstances.

I tried removing the chassis to see if I can replace the fan, but in order to have access to the CPU fan on this laptop model you need to disassemble pretty much everything! Luckily there is a workaround.

I had installed the Sony VAIO Power Management utilities, which allow me to manage the CPU Fan speed (Control Panel -> Power Options->VAIO Power Managent -> CPU Fan Control ). I set it to level  “1-quiet” and I have to say it is much better now.  Probably this has some impact on the performance, but this comes second to the peace of mind when working

My first experiences (I’ve only been playing with it for 10 minutes):

1) Doesn’t import my huge firefox visited sites history. If during the installation I ask it to import the history it just doesn’t proceed, without any error. The third time I tried to import my firefox settings I unticked the “import history” and it worked.

2) It seems to take longer to initially load up a page (I guess because it spawns a new process each time a new tab is opened and because of the javascript VM).  But once the page is there, it works really well. I tried it on a couple of “heavy” sites (lots of scrolling text, flash player, animated gifs). Firefox would use 100% of the cpu, but chrome seems to work just fine.

3) The feature, which shows the 9 most visited pages when you open up a new tab seems cool initially. However, it raises privacy issues. I don’t want my employer to see that amongst my most visited site is bbc and a betting website  The problem is that so far I couldn’t find an option to change the behaviour of the browser when it opens up a new tab.

4) It does eat up quite a lot of memory (I have 2 instances of chrome running, with 5 tabs of “standard” sites, such as facebook and my blog based on wordpress, on each instance and the browser eats up more than 100MB of RAM). However, when I close a tab the memory it eats up seems to decrease substantially, so it probably doesn’t have any memory leaks. And I really like the “stats for nerds” feature!

5) The tabs are part of the window and there are no big buttons and statusbar. This allows for more website content to be visible at a time and reduces the need to scroll up and down all the time.

One think is for sure. I like it so far! I still need to use it more and see how it behaves, especially from a performance point of view…   It doesn’t have a spell check (yet) or any fancy plugins, but it seems to be what a browser should be… Stable and transparent! I don’t know how secure it is though… guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Update:

• I just came across my first problem… Facebook has a “read more” link, which expands long text in facebook posts. Chrome doesn’t seem to work with it
• Guess my point no. 2 above was not correct. Just tried it on: www.goalnews.gr and the flash player utilises 50% of the CPU, so I guess it was pure luck it had better performance on the other heavy on javascript/flash sites I tried it. In fact firefox’s CPU usuage didn’t peak over 20% on the same site!
• It seems that it doesn’t work well with Kaspersky antivirus. When I disabled it Chrome’s performance was greatly improved.
• Flash perfomance seems to be an issue. I have a youtube (music) video playing on another tab and the current tab becomes momentarily unresponsive from time to time.

“In the 21st century you can’t invade another country, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it”

Yeah… right!

So, the experience of a CS undergraduate in Birmingham=Pub drinking/eating/socialising…whatever… I don’t mind the message the image is trying to put across (even though I should probably mind)! However, I think the moment you visit the website this image strikes you as contradicting the site’s look and feel. What do I mean? In general the page is what you would expect to see in a CS department’s page… nerdy stuff! On the top there is the brain with the monitor to emphasise the strong AI background of the department. The image for the research is full of post-it notes. The image with the undergraduates in the pub… well it just doesn’t fit!

The list of artists which you may see on an artist page as being “similar” is based exactly on our user’s listening habits. If a lot of users listen to Artist X, but also Artist Y and Z – Y and Z artists will become similar to X.

With a few added constants and other functions thrown into the equation to help make it more accurate, you’ll find that’s how Similar Artists are made.

The screencap follows:

Here’s how it works! I created a VBScript that goes through a directory (and subdirectories) of .class files and creates a dos batch file. The dos batch file can now be used to run and actually decompile all the .class files!

The VBscript can be found under this link: Decompile_vbs.

You need to edit it and change the paths to the .class and source directories.

When you execute this file, it will create a dos batch file like this one: Example_decompile.bat.  Please note this batch file will be generated under the directory where jad.exe exists! You can now run this batch file, which will actually decompile the .class files.