KDevelop

KDevelop, an Integrated Development Enviornment for KDE, has improved a lot over the years. I am an old-school Linux programmer who prefers to use Vim for writing code (and, in fact, doing just about anything to do with files), but I am rediscovering KDevelop of late. I am not going to go into the details of the features it has that I like (and don’t like). I will, nonetheless, paste a snapshot, and get done with it. :-)

Perl’s “Search, replace, and commit back”

I showed the sed way to search for a pattern in a file, replace every occurrence of the pattern with something, and write all the changes back to the same file. I am, now, going to show you the Perl one-liner way of doing it.


$ perl -p -i -e 's/pattern/replace/g' file


Or, if you wish to backup the file first, and then make changes, here is the altered form:


# perl -p -i.bak -e 's/pattern/replace/g' file


Side-effects of plagiarism

I finished writing a 5-page course report in LyX on Logical Volume Management. It is available here for anyone interested (I’ll make it available in a few days). Reading through the report and talking to a colleague over the same topic later the day, I could not help but thinking over the dilemma some students come across often when submitting in course or project reports.

Plagiarism is rife among students when it comes to writing documentation or reports. There is plagiarism almost everywhere, in almost everything, but documentation and particularly report writing is what I am going to give my attention to. With the average number of students with good writing skills and ability to express themselves in words clearly and fluently shrinking at a fast pace, it makes sense for such students to be copying stuff to get through reports and get grades. Irrespective of the moral implications of such practice, one major side-effect of it that is overlooked is that it leaves a disturbing impression behind in the mind of the person grading reports. The grader or instructor usually has a fair idea what is what, and who is who, and therefore grades reports accordingly. I said “usually”. This isn’t a problem for students who write well, but over time, as instructors change, and new ones come in, such as with the start of a new course, things start to turn the bad side.

As instructors spend time grading students’ reports, a general pattern starts to develop. A report written beautifully, with near perfect grammatical correctness, impressive display of vocabulary and with a fluent trail of thought and discussion, is instantly tagged “plagiarised” by the person reading it. Unless they know enough about the student who has written the report to safely accept the work as genuine (as being written by the student, opposed to being copied), the report lives on with the tag. Sure, everyone gets the same marks (which are usually good, considering reports often don’t hold that much value as they should) and goes away happy. However, for the student who did invest time in putting their thoughts and words across to make the report, it backfires. Over time, the same student starts to think, every time they are about to write a report, whether it is really worth going to the trouble of investing time, and effort and writing skills into making a report when the resulting work will most likely eventually be looked upon similarly as any plagiarised work. If they have a strong conscience, they continue to do the morally just thing. More than half of the time, they don’t. The students plagiarising stand to gain nothing but better grades. The hard-working student, in this case, although gets just as good grades, stands to lose a very virtuous quality and skill.

Pity.

Height of Desperation? Nah. ;-P

ayaz says:
What? :–O
Did I give you the wrong link? Oops

Cash only….. pervert says:
MAN I JUST SAVED IT
DIDNT CHECK IT
SO WHAT EVER DIRTY TRICK IT WAS
….FAILED

ayaz says:
It was porno link to download free movies
Sad you missed it

Cash only….. pervert says:
what!!!
send it again you sonofabitch
!!!

ayaz says:
Haha

Random Musings #19

With a little more focus, I can achieve a lot more.

People wish they had one thing or another in their lives all the time. Often, I wish I had better eyes. I would be learning twice as many new things as I am right now.

But that is being ungrateful for what I have and what I have achieved.

Converting Perl scripts into Perl executable files.

There comes a time when, as a Perl programmer, you want to compile your Perl scripts into executables and distribute them. Although I am an advocate of Open Source Software, at work, I am often *required* to eventually convert the Perl scripts I have written into binaries.

For those Perl programmers who are looking for ways to do that, here are a couple of softwares:

• Perl2Exe
• PAR, Perl Archiving Toolkit
• Perl Dev Kit
• perlcc

Of the four, I’ve actually ever used Activestate’s Perl Dev Kit on Windows and ‘perlcc’ on Linux. Mind you, the former is a commerical software. The latter comes bundled with the stock Perl distribution (on Linux systems, at least).

Flaws in and Attacks against WEP

For my Wireless Mobile Communications course’s semester presentation, I presented today on WEP, its flaws, attacks that exploit those flaws, and its more secure replacements. The stuff is pretty technical, and I can bet hardly a couple of people actually understood what I was talking about. I’ve made the presentation available online here.

SlackBuilds.org: SlackBuild scripts

I mentioned checkinstall last year as a handy little tool to create Slackware packages out of source. If you want precompiled Slackware packages, you can always rush over to linuxpackages.net and find a good deal of packages precompiled for various Slackware releases.

Official Slackware packages are compiled against Slackware releases using automated bash scripts called SlackBuilds. Each package has one SlackBuild which can be used to automate the task of compiling and producing any version of that package against any release of Slackware. Note I used the words ‘compiling’ and ‘producing’. Yes. SlackBuilds not only compile the packages from source, but also create Slackware packages, which can smoothly be installed via the installpkg utility.

Today, I am going to introduce SlackBuilds.org.  SlackBuilds is a project being maintained by a small group of people, some of whom you can find on irc.freenode.net (at ##slackware channel). The goal of the SlackBuilds project is to build and maintain SlackBuild scripts for most used packages that don’t ship with official Slackware. If you want a certain package, go to SlackBuilds, download the package’s source, its SlackBuild script, and run the SlackBuild script. The script, after finishing up, produces a Slackware package compiled against your Slackware release. You can install that package quickly with installpkg. Neat. Isn’t it?

I recently compiled and installed Open Office and unrar through SlackBuilds. Not considering the time it took for the humongous Open Office to compile, everything went so smoothly. I think serious Slackware users should give SlackBuilds a good look.