• General

    Two good C++ books

    If you want to learn or improve your knowledge of C++, you should take a look at these two books: H. Schildt, C++: A Beginner’s Guide, Second edition, McGraw-Hill. H. Schildt, C++: The Complete Reference, Fourh edition, McGraw-Hill. Thanks to a friend of mine (mfoxdogg of #blendercoders@freenode.net) who suggested them to me!

  • General

    Sorry, comments deleted.

    I have recently made a mistake during maintainance operations of my blog. Some of the most recent comments (20) were deleted. This was unintentional, and I apologize with who made those comments.

  • openSUSE

    OpenSUSE 11.1 box arrived!

    The openSUSE team sent a very nice openSUSE 11.1 boxed version to me as a gift for some bugreporting activity I did during the release cycle. The box contains: One dual-layer DVD with the 32 and 64 bit version of OpenSUSE 11.1 and one additional CD with commercial software, both packaged in a single disk box. The openSUSE 11.1 start-up guide. Two openSUSE stickers. A very nice and powerful flashlight branded by our loved chameleon Geeko (batteries included). As an additional gift, a personalized T-Shirt with the openSUSE logo on the front part, and a recognition to contributors on the back (iContribute) was included. You can see it in the…

  • OpenFOAM

    Installing OpenFOAM 1.5.x on OpenSUSE 11.1

    I have recently installed OpenFOAM 1.5.x following the procedure I explained in this post some time ago. With OpenSUSE 11.1, paraview and paraFOAM work properly after being recompiled following these simple instructions: Install OpenSUSE 11.1, which can be downloaded from here. Install qt4-devel: as root, type zypper in libqt4-devel Download OpenFOAM 1.5 from git repository (See here) Download the third-party packages from OpenCFD site Source the bash configuration file for OpenFOAM, as usual. Edit ~/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty/ParaView3.3-cvs/CMakeLists.txt and comment out the line: MESSAGE(SEND_ERROR “Qt ${QTVERSION} not supported. Please use Qt 4.3 (you may need to clean your dirtied cache).”) Compile paraview and its reader following the instructions provided in OpenFOAM 1.5.x README…

  • openSUSE

    OpenSUSE 11.1

    OpenSUSE 11.1 was released last week featuring a whole new set of applications and improvements, spread all over the distribution. The release is available as a DVD or an installable DVD, and can be downloaded from the official website. A complete list of new features can be found here. The release comes with GNOME 2.24, KDE 4.1, OpenOffice 3.0 Novell edition, and other major updates to the main applications. One of the most discussed novelties of the 11.1 version is the new licence agreement, which does not require to be accepted at the installation time (actually it is implicitly accepted at download time, as written in the first few lines…

  • General

    Good actions…

    Christmas is getting close, and, in spite of the economic crisis, we are going to spend a lot of money buying things. It would be nice to use a little bit of that money to try to really make a difference, for many, supporting one of the numerous medical research projects that fight every day to find cures and therapies to save our life. There are many, all over the world. Just find the one you like more, and try to contribute, if possible.

  • openSUSE

    An example to follow

    When I started to use SuSE, GNOME was a second class citizen in the distribution, with very limited support and limited attention from the developers. After the creation of the openSUSE project, things changed positively in different ways, and I think the openSUSE community should consider the GNOME team and the way it grew and make the community grew around it as a model. I will sum up its history, for those that do not know it or just started to take part to the openSUSE community recently. When the openSUSE project was started, only a few developers were involved in GNOME for what concerns openSUSE, and the quality of…

  • General

    Compact fluorescent lamp bulbs

    I had to replace some lamp bulbs at home, and while buying them, I found out that the price of compact fluorescent bulbs went down quite a bit compared to some year ago. With six dollars I bough four compact fluorescent lamps producing 1600 lumens each, with a power consumption of 23 Watts, compared to the 100 Watts required by a normal incandescent lamp to produce the same light. The quality of the light is good, very similar to the light produced by incandescent lamps. If the energy saving effect is summed up to the longer life cycle of these lamps (one lamp is supposed to last for 9 years,…

  • Linux

    OpenOffice 3.0

    OpenOffice 3.0 has been released since a while, with a new set of very interesting functionalities like ODF 1.2 support, Mac Os X support, Microsoft Office 2007 OOXML import filters, new collaboration features, PDF/A support, and a lot more. OpenOffice 3.0 can be installed on openSUSE 11.0 directly from the openSUSE Build Service. You simply need to add the OpenOffice:Stable repository to your installations sources with: zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/OpenOffice.org:/STABLE/openSUSE_11.0/ OpenOffice:Stable and then open YaST -> Software -> Software management, search for “openoffice”, and update all the OpenOffice installed packages by clicking on them, and by selecting the appropriate option when conflicts appear. Extensions to the base OpenOffice 3 installation can…