Elegance in Computer Science

Converting Pictures and merging pdf files

abdullah — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:42:31 +0000

I was working on a problem in graph theory sometime back and I had to work with images in png format generated by pigale. Instead of manually converting png into pdf files by printing. I decided to use shell scripts to do the same. There is a program called sam2p to convert a png file [...]

My Latex Guide

abdullah — Sat, 22 May 2010 12:38:31 +0000

I have been pretty busy for the past couple of months forming the ideas for my thesis and then creating presentations and the like using latex. More specifically, I created a presentation, and am in the process of creating a report for my thesis. Most of the content is available online here. In the process, [...]

Installing and Running jpf source code (on the command line)

abdullah — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:47:07 +0000

In this post we shall investigate how to obtain and install the jpf source code. Obtaining the Source code In order to obtain the jpf source code we must follow the steps listed below:- The source code of Java Path Finder is currently maintained as mercurial repositories. As I already mentioned here, for debian-based distributions, [...]

Installing and Running jpf binaries (on the command line)

abdullah — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 01:45:29 +0000

In the previous post, I introduced the Java PathFinder and gave a brief overview about it and mentioned the various methods available to obtain the software on your system. In this post, I will illustrate one simple but complete cycle, right from getting the software, to installing it and then finally using it to verify [...]

Java Path Finder

abdullah — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 05:46:10 +0000

The Java Path Finder is an open source project developed by the people at Nasa Ames research center dedicated to verification of software. The focus is on formal methods and other related automated/semi-automated verification techniques. I have been learning about this topic and related topics like logic and automata theory during my Masters in Chennai [...]

Merging pdf files

abdullah — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 13:03:00 +0000

In the previous post I discussed how to write some basic shell scripts that allow you to do many of the repetitive tasks automatically instead of typing the commands into the terminal manually. Well, one of the tasks that I very often find myself doing is merging multiple pdf files into a single pdf file. [...]

Automating repetitive tasks using Linux Shell programming

abdullah — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:42:00 +0000

So, here is the scenario. Suppose you have a .wav file on your system and you want to convert it to .mp3. How do you do that? In case, you are not already familiar with ffmpeg, well, you can always learn about it here. It can be used for many purposes but the main way [...]

Running vnc on any linux system

abdullah — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:06:00 +0000

Virtual Network Computing is used to connect to a remote host. It was invented at AT&T bell labs. It is a pretty useful thing to have if you want to connect from a remote computer. For example, you could log-in using vnc to manage your office files or your files on your college server. It [...]

Booting from a USB device

abdullah — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:52:00 +0000

There are various reasons for which you might want to consider booting from a usb. The recent trend in using net-books has made this very necessary as most net books do not contain an in-built CD-ROM. Hence, the only options one has, is, to either buy an external CD-ROM with an external USB interface and [...]

How to use Gparted to create a bootable partition on USB

abdullah — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:28:00 +0000

For a very long time I have been blogging only about lisp and a variant of it, emacs lisp. My last post on linux was about six months ago. The reason for the long hiatus was not because I did not have anything to say about tools on linux. In fact, I had plenty of [...]