10 Tips...for new PhD students..

1. Small incremental goals (milestones)...

2. Take breaks...

3. Collaborate, work in a group...

4. Write, take notes, comments, blog, tweet...

5. Don't over rely on your supervisor...

6. Measure your progress...

7. Know yourself...

8. Use tools to manage bibliography...

9. Peer-review your work

10. Listen to senior PhD students :P

Compiling C++ code after Ubuntu 12.10 upgrade...

Recently upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10 quantal and almost immediately found out that Omnet++ is not compiling any more :)

It turns out the issue is with the new gcc 4.7 compiler.

After Googling the issue, I stumbled on this post that help me fix it. The problem is with abspath.cc file that throws an error

 add the following lines to fix the issue:

#ifdef _WIN32
#include
#include
#else
#include
#endif

Thanks Georgi for posting it. It worked like a charm.

Hope it helps you as well.

R + Omnet++ = Love++

I have blogged previously about the R Framework.

Now I found this great R packages that allows to import omnetpp results files (*.sca, *.vec) into R.

The package supports loading the contents of OMNeT++ result files into R, organizing the data and creating various plots from them.

 I found the tutorial very helpful.

Enjoy!

Update 28/11/2012: Came across some very helpful tips for using the package here

Finally a way to add a PDF comment within Latex - Thank you PDFCOMMENTS

For awhile now I have been looking for ways to add PDF comments within latex.

Some suggested to use: \marginpar{}

I did't like it...

This morning I stumled upon this discussion page: How to annotate PDF files generated by pdflatex?

Note, I also discovered that PDFLatex has \pdfannot command. However I couldn't figure out or find an example to make it work. If you have please let me know :)

Altough \pdfcomments package offeres some cool features I encounter a few problems with it, while using TexMaker on Ubuntu.

1. Embedded TexMaker view doesn't allow to view annotations. It displays an icon but nothing happens when you click on it.
1. I use external viewer for it, however not without problems: Ubuntu default viewer - Evince   - is known to have problem displaying with PDFannotiations. I switched to Okular to view the comments.
2. \pdfmarkupcomment doesn't work - not even with Okular :(

Have fun. Comment on your experience with it.

Omnet++ vs Ubuntu 11.10 and the winner is....

Hey everyone,

Did you encounter any problems running Omnet++ simulation after an update to Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) ?

Well if you are getting this error message:

 Error during startup: No user interface (Cmdenv, Tkenv, etc.) 

Then you will be happy to know there is a solution! Yes, all the credit goes to Omnet++ team, specially Horning Rudolf for posting the solution here.

It is very simple:

In Makefile.inc.in find the following lines (towards the end): 
CMDENV_LIBS = -u _cmdenv_lib -loppcmdenv$D -loppenvir$D 
TKENV_LIBS = -u _tkenv_lib -lopptkenv$D -loppenvir$D -lopplayout$D 
and replace them with:
CMDENV_LIBS = -u _cmdenv_lib -Wl,--no-as-needed -loppcmdenv$D -loppenvir$D 
TKENV_LIBS = -u _tkenv_lib -Wl,--no-as-needed -lopptkenv$D -loppenvir$D
-lopplayout$D 
then
./configure
make clean
make 
This should work with all omnet 4.x version. Spread the info for other users
suffering from the issue. 

That's it. Enjoy and spread the word.

you R - so beautiful to me :)

Need to do statistical analysis of your data, plot a graph, etc:

http://www.r-project.org/

[Update 3/12/2012]: I am using RStudio  and it's a great tool!

Binary to Decimal conversation

I've been fiddling with bits and needed to convert a set of large  binary string to decimal. In my first attempt, I applied Excel formula BIN2DEC  - worked great, but for some reason it didn't with more than 12 bits. I am not sure whether there is some sort of limitation or perhaps I missed something, but I've started to look for other ways to do the same thing.

I've found answer on this  post, in particular in one the comments that suggested to use dc - an arbitrary precision calculator:

Here is how you would convert binary to decimal it in linux:

echo "2 i BINARY BITS p" | dc

example:

echo "2 i 11000000111001 p" | dc

and decimal to binary

echo "2 o DECIMAL NUMBER p" | dc

example

echo "2 o 12345 p" | dc

That's it! Thanks to Vocho Amerillo