OpenOffice Writer

I’ve been working on converting some word documents to nicely styled .pdf-s and Writer is a great help.

I’ve created my own paragraph styles, marked all paragraphs with a style and that really makes it easy. I’ve been struggling with table of contents, however. While setting all the options I managed to crash the program several times. It offered me a chance to send an empty error report as well. I went with doing a couple of changes, save cycle and so far all good. But I didn’t add a title page before table of contents and now I can’t figure out, how to. I can make the table of contents manually editable but I can only add a page break inside table of contents, not before it. Arghh..

Programming

I tried out the exercise of Monday’s C exam. It took me nearly three hours without any hurrying. On Friday I’ll have up to four to do the same with new file and requirements. Getting a 5 should be possible. Of course if it were the real world I would have to use dynamic arrays and memory allocation but for now static does the job. By the way if they say that road repair is from 10th to 20th then is it over on 20th or on 21st?
After that some more math and a lot of schemes and facts about computers and physics exam. And then it will finally feel like summer, without all those school responsibilities.
I’ve got several ideas of what I’d like to learn while I have more free time, so I need to figure out where to start from. For those of you who freaked out because I plan to study in summer: it is huge difference when you can pick yourself what, how much and when you learn. And if something more interesting gets in the way you can continue later without worrying about all the deadlines.
But in the end I still have to start from one of them, C and C++, Java or PHP, which I have wanted to learn for more than a year I believe but never got to do it.
And then there’s English. I need to find a way not to forget what I already know. Recently I haven’t used it as much as I used to and it will have consequences. So either English book or tv-programme or some job, which I haven’t found yet.

Obviously blond enough

I have two operating systems installed on my laptop for couple of weeks now. Windows XP Home being the one shipped with computer and Ubuntu as the other one.
I think I could say that Windows is still the main one I use. I have my mail in Thunderbird Portable and that is for Windows. That’s also where I do almost all of my documents. Title pages for physics practice lessons, tables and charts for same lessons, all come from MS Office. Sometimes I use 2000 version on my desktop computer, sometimes 2007 2-months trial on my laptop. I don’t feel quite comfortable yet with all the menus they changed, but it looks beautiful and opens slow just as you would expect. I also use CircuitMaker in Windows since I can’t quite stand this Dixi program we are supposed to use on Solaris to do our circuits. I think it’s from 97 and therefore quite ancient.
But I’ve wanted to try Linux for a while and with laptop I can be sure that if I mess anything up it won’t affect the main desktop computer that my mum also uses and that I have the recovery cd for Windows to count on.
I ended up with Ubuntu. I like the overall look, though it feels as if it takes longer to boot from Ubuntu than from Windows. Ethernet internet is working, wifi is not. I’m not sure if I have the patience to make it work. Instead of all those card games that Windows installs with Ubuntu has more games that make you use your brain. For example this game where you have to get four in a row, column or diagonally. I haven’t managed to win yet on 7×7 board just to tie once. At the moment I’m using Sound juicer to play an audio cd, as as far as I know Ubuntu can’t play mp3 automatically. My usb flash sticks also don’t work with Ubuntu and it seems to me that it might be a kernel bug, since I also found it in Launchpad system. One other peculiarity is that even though I have set it to hibernate when laptop’s lid is closed it won’t. But that is one of those not so important things. I guess I just have to get more familiar with the ways Linux works.
So you have been wondering why I’m so off-topic considering the post title? Well, while I was surfing Ubuntu forums this morning Ubuntu warned me about low battery so I plugged in the power adapter. I noticed that the battery icon in upper-right notice area remained the same but for some reason I didn’t think about it more and continued to browse. Soon the battery went completely out and I had to shut down. I was quite frustrated since I thought the adapter had broken and I really need my laptop next week. Until I noticed that the extension cord was turned off. Duh! Of course it wouldn’t charge the battery. As I turned it off last evening I should have remembered to turn it back on! So the good old truth: If you want it to work then turn it on :D.

Computer question

It’s about BIOS, but I’ll start from the beginning.

It’s been everything but ordinary morning so far. Horrible pain I’ve had for past couple of days finally shows signs of retreat. I never thought that removed tonsils could cause so much ache. So after waking my computer checked the inbox and had a letter where someone asked for a song they saw in my listening list on last.fm. I got carried away browsing last.fm, discovered three interesting blogs and finally ended up reading forum topic about BIOS signals.

So here’s the problem: sometimes when my computer resumes from hibernation I get this long system beep. I’ve been thinking for a while that I should find out what that means but I never really got to do it. But today I sort of stumbled on this thread and it suggests that my computer’s power supply is dead. Or does it? Because I’ve always considered my English good but this site confused me and now I’m not fully sure that my long beep responds to sound defined as continual in award table. Besides “dead” sounds like not working at all, but my computer works, it just gives this beep once in a while. So maybe I’m having a memory problem instead?

How do you know whether you have a power supply or memory problem? How do you repair them?

It’s weird that after all the browsing it is still so early. I expected it to be around 12 but it’s just 11 o’clock. Maybe because I woke up after seven..