HDD backup with rsync

Just switched from Windows 7 built-in backup to rsync (using cwrsync).

Initially, backing up 88k files, 212 GB, to an external HDD (connected via USB2), took 9h 26 mins (383 MB/min).

Running rsync again (only a few browser-related files had changed), took 2h or so.

Making PDFs compatible with IEEE style guides

I had a lot of trouble embedding the Helvetica font into my PDF. Here's how I solved it (from here); instead of WinEdt, I changed the ps2pdf settings in GhostView.

At this moment (April 2006) it is not possible to make PDFLaTeX embed these fonts (aka the Base-14 fonts) if they are used in external images. PDFLaTeX will embed these fonts only if they are used in the document itself.

It is possible however to tell PS2PDF to embed the fonts:

• Open WinEdt
• Select: Options, Execution Modes
• Select ps2pdf
• The Command Line Switches for gswin32c.exe are

  -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -r600 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 

  Add the following switches to this line:

  -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true  -dEmbedAllFonts=true 

From now on PS2PDF will embed all fonts.

Error 0x8004a029 when installing Shrewsoft VPN client on Windows 7

During install, I receive "Error 0x8004a029: Couldn't install
the network component".

Error 0x8004a029 means that the maximum number of filter devices for the system has been reached. Other similar software ( VPN clients, 3rd party firewalls, etc ) install filters. You can either attempt to remove other software that has installed a filter, or attempt to increase the following registry entry value to allow more filters to be installed.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\MaxNumFilters

gnuplot

• a useful tutorial

Plotting a file with measurement data (in the range of around 0.001)

• plot "dump.csv" notitle with lines
• set yrange [0:0.002]
• set xtics 0,500,1000

Output to .eps

• set term push

  set terminal postscript eps color lw 1 "Helvetica" 20

  set out 'a.eps'
  replot
  set term pop
  
  

Regular expressions in Notepad++

(.*) denotes an arbitrary number of characters

to select everything up to the text "foo", the regular expression is

(.*) (foo)

Sort a text file alphabetically

Run

perl -e ' while(<>) { push @lines, $_; } warn "\nSorted $. lines in ascending alphabetical order, ignoring case\n\n"; print sort { lc($a) cmp lc($b) } @lines ' unsorted > sorted_nc_asc

(thanks!)

Install Linux on Lite5200b

In this setup, the Lit5200b boot loader will load the kernel via TFTP from the host PC and mount the root file system via NFS.

Configuration of host PC

• Ubuntu 8.10
• NFS kernel modules
• tftpd

Installation of ltib

• Download mpc5200_lite5200b_20070203_ltib-rc4.iso
• Mount the iso file
• Run install script in ISO and choose install directory
• Run ltib script in the install directory. Compile problems? Check here.

Preparing boot loader

• Not all options printed in the manual are needed. Check recursively from "bootcmd"

Problems

• Mounting of the NFS file system may take ages. Make sure that in rc.conf, portmap is loaded before the file systems are mounted. When the ltib configuration changes, rc.conf is set to the defaults, so you will need to do this again.