Academia

Connecting to the Columbia Medical Center's Athens WiFi network with Linux

Samat Jain — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 05:46:09 +0000

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:

network={ ssid="athens" key_mgmt=WPA-EAP eap=TTLS pairwise=TKIP group=TKIP phase2="auth=PAP" identity="foo" password="bar" priority=2 }

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

Topic:

Gentium, my new Times New Roman replacement

Samat Jain — Thu, 04 May 2006 04:02:55 +0000

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.

Topic:

Academia

Computer Organization and Design For More Practice Problem 2.28

Samat Jain — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 08:37:10 +0000

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:

Topic:

Programming

Academia

eInstruction "clicker" remotes

Samat Jain — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 02:57:00 +0000

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.”

Topic:

Academia