Viraj's Weblog

We had our first exam in Chemistry and I got a 100%. Hell I never did this good when I went to school in the past heh. Honestly I seem to take school more seriously now than I did back then. Hopefully I can keep up the steam.

I had originally planned on putting class notes up on my wiki, but I realized that after I take notes I rarely ever look at them again heh. I've found the best way to remember or understand something is doing alot of problems at the back of the chapters over and over again.

Well this will work for the problem-solving classes at least, but not much for memorization. For that I try to look for patterns and such. Like for the chem exam we have this cation/anion table that we are supposed to memorize, and the teacher says "there's no way to figure them out." But actually all you need to do is memorize a few key items from the table, not the whole thing, and you can calculate the rest (ion charge, number of each atom) from the periodic table which is given to you during a test. Also doing alot of problems you learn to recognize them alot faster, and are able to know which ones don't look right.

It's all about familiarity and practice. I know some people who have photographic memories. Not me, I have to do ALOT of practice to remember something.

So a Windows PC my mom was using got hosed and it seemed nontrivial to fix it. I said what the hell and installed Ubuntu Linux. I just showed her how to login and start a browser (that's all she normally does). I think something like this is the best way to determine usability of a distribution.

The issues that came up so far is java, flash, and real audio not working. Of course no distro I've ever used actually includes this stuff. Is it really just licensing issues? Luckily Ubuntu has a wiki page describing how to install these. It was relatively simple, but could've been simpler.

The other problem is sound simply doesn't work. I found that out when Real Player wouldn't start and the process would just hang. I did an strace and saw it was trying to write to /dev/dsp and hanging. I didn't have a chance to look into this much, so whatever, no sound for now.

I think it's kinda lame that for someone to use Linux they still need Linux expertise to install plugins, setup apt repositories, and other crap that only a long-time Linux user can grasp. And forget about setting up a printer. It's almost like all distros are kept elite for the job security of Linux sysadmins. I would really like to see a day when a computer illiterate can use Linux without relying on a friend that knows Linux.

In general the system seems to be working and I haven't got too many complaints. We'll see how long that lasts, and when the Windows withdrawal symptoms set in.