Random Thoughts

I have not been a fan of Dell as of late and here is why. I have access to a Dell printer(Dell 944 All-in-One printer/scanner/copier) that came in for cheap bundled with a Dell laptop. The printer is basically made by Lexmark, but sold though Dell with minor modifications and a Dell label. This presents two problems: As a Linux user, I like printers for which Linux drivers exist, either through Dell or another party. The irritating thing about these Dell printers is that Dell only provides Windows drivers while Lexmark, the proxy maker of the printer, usually provides at least Windows and Mac drivers and often tries to provide kits for the development of Linux drivers. If one wanted to look for a Lexmark analog of a Dell printers, it is virtually impossible to do because that information does not seem to be readily available. Another way Dell makes it difficult for all non-Dell users and products is in the cartridge business. The ink cartridge can only bought from Dell and no ot

Finding the right résumé template is quite painful for those of us who prefer to do things the more difficult yet elegant way. The alternative is to use LaTeX or XML. Preparing a LaTeX résumé style sheet (HowTos here ) from scratch requires more savvy that I have, not to mention the time and effort. So, I prefer to adopt some templates from the web and modify the pieces for my taste. Unfortunately, many issues arise when one considers the many templates out there. The PDFs generated using these templates do not get properly scanned by software used by hiring companies. That could very well mean the difference between getting hired or being rejected. I noticed this issue during the many times I submitted PDFs generated by 'pdflatex'. In a related issue, converting PDFs to text using 'pdftotext -layout file.pdf' does not produce a desirable text file. For one, the text wrapping is messy, so the text might have to be terminated at about 80 characters by adjusting t

Adapting Linux as the main OS for personal computing does come with some issues since there is a lot of software out there that is simply not available for Linux systems. One would then have to rely on Windows/Mac for short periods of time, or try to run Windows applications in Linux using Wine or Codeweaver Crossover Linux , Cygwin or seek virtualization solutions using software like VMware . Before resorting to the solutions proposed above, one should consider a Linux analog of the Windows application one would like to use. A neat resource for that purpose is this website . I came across this site while trying to find a free Linux alternative to the Origin package for plotting and graphics. Time to give Scigraphica a try! UPDATE: Here is an interesting list of 50 annoying proprietary programs and their open-source alternatives .