Samat Says Samat Jain's personal weblog

Columbia University’s Medical Center, like many university campuses, has many WiFi access points. To meet HIPAA privacy regulations all their wireless networks require use of VPNs or sophisticated encryption protocols.

Connecting to their athens wireless network, which uses IEEE-802.1x authentication, is a little non-obvious with Linux, but is possible given your wireless card supports WPA and works with wpa_supplicant.

To save the many weeks I spent fiddling, the magic wpa_supplicant.conf stanza that works for me:

Replace foo with your Columbia University UNI and bar with your password.

Gentium, called the “typeface for the nations,” is a nice serif font. It does not look particularly great on-screen, but on paper, it is absolutely beautiful.

The Gentium samples page includes some pictures, as well as a a PDF containing a history of Gentium. Again, they don’t do the font justice on-screen: print the PDF and just stare at how beautiful it is.

One of it’s nice properties is that it’s approximately the same size as Times New Roman, point for point. That is, a document typeset in Times New Roman and one typeset in Gentium will be the same length when printed. Because of this, Gentium is a great alternative to Times New Roman, because even with similar sizing, Gentium’s glyphs appear bigger, and are much easier to read.

Did I mention it is Unicode? No, it doesn’t have the entire Unicode character set… but no doubt it one day will.

I’m using Computer Organization and Design, 3rd ed (David Patterson and John Hennessy) for an electrical engineering course (that I have to take to graduate) in computer systems architecture. Assigned as homework, from the For More Practice section, is problem 2.28:

I’ve been on a hating fest lately, so I’ve decided to document my peeves about the eInstruction CPSrf remotes, commonly known as “clickers.”

Bioinformatics-related schoolwork.

I need to put some of my computer science projects here.

Chemical Instrumentation (CHEM471)

One of the assignments for this class required us to make spreadsheets for manually calculating (that is, relying on as few built-in functions as possible) statistics for our experimental values. The below spreadsheets are in Gnumeric format.

My standard deviation worksheet calculates the standard deviation as well as signal-to-noise ratios for a set of values. Simply enter the values in the “Values” column. This spreadsheet is superfluous when using Gnumeric, because Gnumeric uses a correct standard deviation algorithm. Microsoft Excel, on the other hand, appears to use some other standard deviation algorithm that produces numbers that are not the same as manually-calculated values. The numbers it produces are the same until the 7th place or so, which is probably fine for most financial or engineering applications, but with experimental values, can make all the difference.

My linear regression worksheet does a linear regression on a set of abscissa and ordinate values. It gets standard deviation in the slope, y-intercept, and interpolated values as well. It does not get r-values/correlation coefficients, however, but it’s something I’ll add on a rainy day.

Here I post papers and projects that I’ve done as schoolwork that seemed as if they’d be good to share, or would be useful to me.