LISP never introduced until very late in school and that too in the form of ONE slide (yes true) one slide. So what is it in LISP that deserves so little concern. Looking at MIT OCW lectures it seems to be THE language of choice. So whats lisp infact? LISP (LISt Processing) is a language where the primary data structure is list and modus operandi is list operations. Step 1:  Installation Installation of lisp on aptitude based package manager (like Debian/ Ubuntu) can be achieved by the following command.  $ sudo apt-get  install clisp Alongside this its recommended to install the HTML version of the book  Common Lisp the language, 2nd Edition by Guy L. Steele Jr. $ sudo apt-get install cltl The book is installed in the /usr/share/doc/cltl/clm/index.html. Step 2: Testing LISP functionality Soon after installation clisp can be tested for functionality. The following sequence of commands test the lisp environment.  To start clisp $ clisp Try out the lisp-...

Why hibernating Linux might be a great idea? What supports the idea? There are basically two reasons that support this idea. One Linux has traditionally lived up to the billing as premium server class operating system.  Secondly it might strange but Windows has performed much better on Laptop using hibernate option than desktops. The former is a direct evidence support the convention while latter is circumstantial evidence. Since Windows is performing better in spite of it’s not so glorious record otherwise. So Linux can be expected to perform better than Windows because of its better history. The conjecture that server’s better performance can be attributed to the lesser frequent restarts needs to be further investigated but for now we could assume it to be true. Therefore its important to start setting up the hibernate option in the Operating System (be it Windows or Linux on laptop or a desktop). Its very good for the battery life too. Steps for initiating hibernate inUbuntu L...

The availability of huge number of Linux distributions is amazing. The primordial soup developed by  Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson named UNIX had in it genesis the most amazing OS Multics. The primordial soup gave birth to a phenomenon which resulted in evolution of one beautiful species after another. The rise of Lisa led to Mac. Even the great evil empire acknowledged its superiority by first trying to develop Xenix and when it failed in its attempt to usurp started slowly building in features into its own Windows. A mutation took place in 1991 when Linux Travolds gave birth to Linux. This led to the never ending stream of species. Each and every species had its strengths and weaknesses but every species showed the brilliance and resilience that was present in its initial genes. The Linux of today cannot be compared directly to the MULTICS or even the first UNIX but the design is same providing solid and unbeatable performance. Not only is Linux and FreeBSD holding on to the se...

Latex is another brilliant Linux / Unix specialty hidden behind the geek facade.  Interesting introduction here {warning PDF file} talks in detail about why and how document processing improves with increase in document complexity. In the words of the author "It is very hard to write unstructured and disorganized documents" . I like the approach but feel that this might attract power users but for newbies its more of the same old school of Linux is for geeks. The purpose is not to criticize the authors. He / she did a great job and deserves credit for this article as well. Now the primary question is how and where to start, following tutorials almost always leads to temporary use. Even students writing thesis in latex only a few would later use it for submitting assignments or other work. The problem is two fold one the students or users are not introduced to latex in a friendly manner rather they use it as if trying to live up to the 'lofty standards' setup by ad...

Proxy setting for office LAN / WLAN and home LAN / WLAN are often different. Firefox provides an easy method of changing proxies without having to do anything. The file proxy.pac provides an easy method of automatically changing proxy setting in Firefox from one network to another. There are elaborate methods of changing proxy settings given here . However the easiest method is described below. Step 1: Edit the file proxy.pac (preferably save it at a convenient location) and add the following line. function FindProxyForURL ( url , host )   {   return "PROXY proxy.example.com:8080; DIRECT" ;   } Where proxy.example.com  is simply the address of proxy and could be replaced by the IP Address of the proxy server. 8080 is the port address for http in most networks but could be different in some networks. Step 2: Go to Firefox Menu--> Tools --> Options --> Network Tab --> Click Setting Button --> Check the automatic proxy configuration url and ...

Getting Started Level 0 Every Linux newbie hears about power of grep sooner or later. But no sooner does newbie try to use the grep command the experiment ends badly. The reason grep almost never yields anything productive is because of a couple of issues. The basic problem is lack of knowledge of regular expressions and secondly knowledge of switches of grep. This realization should not deter a new user from using grep. A very nice detailed tutorial of regular expression (regex) is available here . The migrating user having used dir and similar commands in DOS and using windows search box almost never expects (nor can fathom) the power provided by grep. Firstly grep means "global regular expression print". Now this means that knowledge of regex is required to be able to use grep effectively . Now what should a newbie do? Wait till user's regex knowledge improves? NO NOT AT ALL. That would scare away the user and never to use grep. Here is the first simple command that ...