Author Archives: louic

Some xmgrace tips

Posted on January 30, 2009 by louic

Xmgrace is a very nice piece of software to create publication quality figures. Even better is that it stores your data and graph layout options as plain text (which is especially nice in combination with subversion or scripts to edit … Continue reading →

Posted in linux, science | 55 Comments

Splitting a pdf-file under Linux

Posted on January 29, 2009 by louic

The pdftk command (pdf toolkit) can perform many operations on pdf files. One that I found useful is extracting certain pages from a pdf file. For example, to extract page 115-142 from input.pdf and save it as chapter5.pdf, the command … Continue reading →

Posted in linux | Leave a comment

Free SMTP server using gmail

Posted on January 22, 2009 by louic

How to use a free SMTP server that is accessible from anywhere, using your gmail account? This may be useful if you are at a location where there is internet, but no (known) SMTP server as is the case for … Continue reading →

Posted in internet | Leave a comment

Draw a helical wheel plot from a pdb file

Posted on October 17, 2008 by louic

Many programs are available that draw helical wheels from a given peptide primary structure (sequence), assuming a perfect alpha helix. Sometimes it may be interesting to see what the helical-wheel plot of a non-ideal helix looks like. Because I could … Continue reading →

Posted in science | 6 Comments

Setting fuse-bits on Atmel Atmega8 AVR

Posted on August 22, 2008 by louic

The second thing most people do when they start programming microcontrollers is to try and use an external crystal as a clock source. And many beginners start by setting the wrong fuse bits, so that the AVR expects an external … Continue reading →

Posted in atmega | 34 Comments

Installing avrdude on a Gentoo box

Posted on August 13, 2008 by louic

This post describes how to install avrdude on Gentoo Linux. Avrdude is software to "burn" a program on a microcontroller. I am using a MyAVR programmer board that is connected to the parallel port. I started out by following the … Continue reading →

Posted in atmega, gentoo, linux | Leave a comment

Installing DSL on an old (16Mb RAM) laptop

Posted on August 4, 2008 by louic

A couple of days ago, I removed the dust from my old laptop, and installed Linux on it. I chose to install the damn small linux (dsl) distro and encountered some (small) problems during installation, which I describe below. Since … Continue reading →

Posted in linux | 4 Comments

Useful things in (gentoo) linux

Posted on August 3, 2008 by louic

This is just a collection of some commands and tricks that I keep forgetting Search and replace in multiple files, using perl perl -p -i -e 's/search/replace/g *.txtperl -p -i -e 's/search/replace/g *.txt Change the color of a (gentoo) bash … Continue reading →

Posted in gentoo, linux | Leave a comment

Convert a LaTeX-created .pdf file to MS-Word .doc

Posted on August 2, 2008 by louic

Unfortunately, sometimes people want me to convert some beautiful LaTeX to MS-Word. I first tried to convert the .tex to .html and open the html file in MS-Word, but the result was usually a big mess. The best way I … Continue reading →

Posted in latex, linux | Leave a comment