Random useful thoughts

I have started using Julia as my language of choice for mathematical programming. It is very nice, faster than Python, open source unlike Matlab, and an intuitive syntax so that migrating is simple. There are precompiled packages that can be downloaded from the website, but for whatever reason I had problems with them. One particular example was when performing a Cholesky decomposition of a matrix. As the matrix size increased the result became less and less similar to the Matlab decomposition of the same matrix and then crashed above a certain size. After googling for quite a while I found it was similar to issues other people had with the linear algebra subroutines. I found that downloading the source from github and compiling on my computer fixed the problem. Hence this is what I would recommend. This is how to install from a clean install of Linux Mint 17.1, but it should be effectively the same as for any Ubuntu based Linux distribution. Firstly install git sudo apt-get insta...

So I decided to upgrade my desktop to Windows 10 from 7 whilst it's free. Before the upgrade it had a dual boot with Linux Mint 17, which I had set up with the following partitions: 8Gb swap,  60Gb Linux,  60Gb Linux /home, 50Gb Windows,  322Gb shared partition. I downloaded the Windows 10 installer and started the update. The download is about 3Gb which was fine, but the first problem hit just after. The installer got stuck on "checking for updates", which after googling seems like a common problem. To fix it you have to restart windows update service by opening cmd in admin mode typing net stop wuauserv​ net start wuauserv​ I had to repeat this a few times before it finished.  The next problem was that the partition didn't have enough free space, which was a surprise as I only use Windows for games and those are on the shared partition. It turns out that although Windows 7 requires 20Gb to install, a normal install uses ~45Gb after all the updates. A...