I am a natural optimist. A hopeless optimist. I spend hours battling against myself with carefully constructed cynicism, but things still get past my guard. And one day, back in 1997, I made the mistake of putting my money where my mouth is. Let me tell you were it all started...
http://dcook.org/gobet/
(About a bet I made with John Tromp, in 1997, that a computer could beat him at the game of go before the year 2011; the above URL is to publicize this bet and also has places where you can vote with your opinion and leave comments. If you enjoy it please do link to it, blog about it, tell your friends, etc.)
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Linux partition advice
When I first partioned my disk I put /boot on the first partition and gave it 96M, following some advice found online I assume. This is not enough. I suggest giving it 256M. It is still a fraction of your hard disk. And because /boot is special it is impossible, or at least complex, to move some files to other partitions and link to them.
About a week ago ubuntu upgrade started complaining about a kernel upgrade problem. I ignored it for a few days assuming it would sort itself out. But it kept happening. Then when I viewed details of the upgrade I noticed (just briefly before it vanished off-screen) it was saying not enough diskspace on /boot.
Not again! When I tried to upgrade from Ubuntu 7 to Ubuntu 8 lack of space on /boot caused problems then too.
Poking around I also found I still had linux-generic packages installed, even though I'd switched to the linux-server kernel (see 6Gb on 32-bit linux). I deleted all packages that had the word "generic" in their name. After a reboot I still had one "generic" file left in /boot which I then just deleted. There was also a *.bak file for my current kernel. Datestamp was for a week ago, so I deleted that too.
It doesn't look like I've broken anything, and I'm now down to using 40M on /boot with 48M free (and I still have Ubuntu 7's linux-server kernel in there, which I think is now pointless, so I could reduce it even more).
Therefore, you can get away with a mere 96M /boot partition, it just requires more time and effort.
Conversely, I think a /boot partition above a certain size (1G?) causes problem at boot time, which is the whole reason for have a separate /boot partition. But I'm no expert, and that may be old-fashioned advice, and every BIOS on every motherboard made in the last 10 years may in fact be fine.
I dunno, and am too busy with more interesting stuff to study up on it, which is why I'll go for a 256M partition on my next computer.
About a week ago ubuntu upgrade started complaining about a kernel upgrade problem. I ignored it for a few days assuming it would sort itself out. But it kept happening. Then when I viewed details of the upgrade I noticed (just briefly before it vanished off-screen) it was saying not enough diskspace on /boot.
Not again! When I tried to upgrade from Ubuntu 7 to Ubuntu 8 lack of space on /boot caused problems then too.
Poking around I also found I still had linux-generic packages installed, even though I'd switched to the linux-server kernel (see 6Gb on 32-bit linux). I deleted all packages that had the word "generic" in their name. After a reboot I still had one "generic" file left in /boot which I then just deleted. There was also a *.bak file for my current kernel. Datestamp was for a week ago, so I deleted that too.
It doesn't look like I've broken anything, and I'm now down to using 40M on /boot with 48M free (and I still have Ubuntu 7's linux-server kernel in there, which I think is now pointless, so I could reduce it even more).
Therefore, you can get away with a mere 96M /boot partition, it just requires more time and effort.
Conversely, I think a /boot partition above a certain size (1G?) causes problem at boot time, which is the whole reason for have a separate /boot partition. But I'm no expert, and that may be old-fashioned advice, and every BIOS on every motherboard made in the last 10 years may in fact be fine.
I dunno, and am too busy with more interesting stuff to study up on it, which is why I'll go for a 256M partition on my next computer.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Japanese NLP mailing list
A new mailing list for discussing Japanese NLP (natural language processing) in English has been set up, by Jim Breen (of JMDict fame):
http://groups.google.com/group/nlp-japanese?hl=en
There is a lot of software for processing Japanese text which is only documented in Japanese, and even then only minimally documented. So the new list is an ideal place (for those of us more comfortable in English than Japanese) for asking about how to use chasen, cabocha, namazu, etc. Or to describe what you are trying to do and get program and data suggestions. Hopefully people will also post about new software and data releases, related conferences, new academic papers, and so on.
Also, if the above interests you then you will also want to know about this Ubuntu repository for all kinds of NLP software:
http://cl.aist-nara.ac.jp/~eric-n/ubuntu-nlp/dists/hardy/japanese/
Much of the Japanese stuff is UTF-8 ready (as opposed to the EUC-JP that academic Japanese software still likes to default to).
http://groups.google.com/group/nlp-japanese?hl=en
There is a lot of software for processing Japanese text which is only documented in Japanese, and even then only minimally documented. So the new list is an ideal place (for those of us more comfortable in English than Japanese) for asking about how to use chasen, cabocha, namazu, etc. Or to describe what you are trying to do and get program and data suggestions. Hopefully people will also post about new software and data releases, related conferences, new academic papers, and so on.
Also, if the above interests you then you will also want to know about this Ubuntu repository for all kinds of NLP software:
http://cl.aist-nara.ac.jp/~eric-n/ubuntu-nlp/dists/hardy/japanese/
Much of the Japanese stuff is UTF-8 ready (as opposed to the EUC-JP that academic Japanese software still likes to default to).
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Adobe PDF reader and Japanese fonts
Another casualty of my recent enforced ubuntu upgrade was Japanese fonts in pdf files. Adobe acroread has also moved from version 8 to version 9. When you meet Japanese in a PDF file it tells you the URL to go to to get asian font pack. Unfortunately that page only has asian fonts for acroread 8 and earlier!
The link should be:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=10&platform=unix
(I'm mentioning this as it took a bit of work to discover it.)
Scroll down to the add-ons section, and it seems each language is now its own file, and the files are much bigger. (I don't know the difference between a "Font Pack" and a "Font Packs"; the files I are identical so I chose the latter.)
Unzip the bz2 file with "tar xjf FontPack910_jpn_i486-linux.tar.bz2"
Then move into the JPNKIT directory and type "./INSTALL"
The install process asks:
"Enter the location where you installed the Adobe Reader? /opt"
I didn't install it, Ubuntu did. However it seems Ubuntu is putting it in /opt!
Strange for a package-based distro to put anything there, but I accepted the /opt default and it worked. (This was different in Ubuntu 7, as I remember having to try lots of paths until I guessed the one it was after.)
Incidentally I have already got medibuntu.org as an extra repository, but there is no acroread-fonts or similar package. Perhaps there is some legal issue (though I thought medibuntu.org's raison d'etre was packages with legal issues).
The link should be:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=10&platform=unix
(I'm mentioning this as it took a bit of work to discover it.)
Scroll down to the add-ons section, and it seems each language is now its own file, and the files are much bigger. (I don't know the difference between a "Font Pack" and a "Font Packs"; the files I are identical so I chose the latter.)
Unzip the bz2 file with "tar xjf FontPack910_jpn_i486-linux.tar.bz2"
Then move into the JPNKIT directory and type "./INSTALL"
The install process asks:
"Enter the location where you installed the Adobe Reader? /opt"
I didn't install it, Ubuntu did. However it seems Ubuntu is putting it in /opt!
Strange for a package-based distro to put anything there, but I accepted the /opt default and it worked. (This was different in Ubuntu 7, as I remember having to try lots of paths until I guessed the one it was after.)
Incidentally I have already got medibuntu.org as an extra repository, but there is no acroread-fonts or similar package. Perhaps there is some legal issue (though I thought medibuntu.org's raison d'etre was packages with legal issues).
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