Launch of personal website

Today my personal website is accessible through the link bellow. Currently the site does not contain extensive information, but as time pass more information will be added.

http://www-und.ida.liu.se/~freas157/

Reset MySQL root password

More than one time I found myself to have forgotten the root password of my MySQL database server, each time I found myself wondering how to reset the password. If you have a MySQL 5.0 installation on Leopard, then this tutorial is for you.

First open your terminal in order to turn off your database, find the current MySQL processes:
ps -ef | grep mysql

find the pid numbers and execute for each open output entry by replacing ‘pid’ with the displayed pid number, this will close the process:
sudo kill -9 'pid'

Now you need to start the server again, but this time in safe mode. This is accomplished by skipping the access tables (you probably need to enter your system root password in order to start MySQL):
sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql mysql

Finally reset the root password by changing ‘YOUR_PASSWORD’ to the password you desire:
UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD(’YOUR_PASSWORD’) WHERE Host=’localhost’ AND User=’root’;

Now exit safe mode by executing issuing the following in the terminal:
exit;

Now finally you can happily log on to your database with your new root password by issuing:
mysql -u root -p mysql

When you want to close MySQL execute the following and enter your new root password:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -h localhost -u root -p shutdown

Why I prefer Firefox

This is a never ending debate throughout internet. The recurrent question is which “What is the best browser?”. Everyone has their own favorite, either if it is Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Camino, Opera, Chrome or Konqueror people can be pretty militant about their opinions. I am not to say what browser are better than the other, there are other people who do this better than me. Some of the features that are looked at when comparing the performance and benchmarks are time to render a page, script speed (JS etc.), security, memory efficiency etc. Meanwhile all of these tests are done there is one obvious question that comes to mind “What is the purpose for a regular surfer to have the most resource efficient browser on a high-performance top modern computer?” the answer is: there are no reasons. In my opinion just use the browser (of the most up-to-date version) which you are most comfortable with!

In light of this can comfortable state that I prefer Firefox over any other browser that I have come across, other browsers just don’t cut it. Take a look at these statistics over the most commonly used browsers that are used on the W3Schools.com and through out the internet. As you can clearly see Firefox dominates the alternatives. So why is this?

Personally, I believe it is a matter of simplicity mixed with familiarity. For example, why are people reluctant to use other operating systems rather than Windows? You got it: The reason is familiarity, most certainly it cannot be the factor of simplicity. People are afraid of change. Now steering back to the issue of internet browsers, we can see the similar patterns here, many people are using Internet Explorer on Windows or Safari on OS X just simply because they are there, they are default options of the systems.

Today I choose Firefox on all systems due to the following reasons:

• Its tab system
• Its bookmarking system
• Its adblock system
• Its great many optional plugins
• Its automatic search of previous URL’s in the address bar
• Its keyboard shortcuts
• Its frequent updates

However as with all things there is a negative side:

• It is not as fast as Safari (on my machine)
• It does not render images as clearly as I wish
• Consumes (a lot of) memory when many tabs are open

Basically the choice of your favorite internet browser is as subjective as your preferred taco ingredients!

Happy surfing!

LinkedIN

View my work profile at the web network LinkedIn

Modify firefox default google search

If you are as me, an addict to use firefox command+k (mac, and for windows: ctrl+k) shortcut in order to use google search. It can be rather annoying to be abroad and the search engine is automatically defining specific search queries on the local country. Since I am in Bosnia, all my search queries are defined to google.ba which is not desirable for me in any sense.

A quick workaround for this problem is to (on a mac) to open the firefox application by selecting “Show Package Contents” and find your way to /Contents/MacOS/seachplugins and open the xml file google.xml with your choice of texteditor. Now you only need to modify the entry

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">

to define the google search engine that you want. Since I want to have the Swedish version of the google search engine I enter .se instead of .com;

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.se/search">

Note: This fix is for osx, but should be similar for windows and linux. If you like to add your own custom search engine (on osx) I want to advice you to put the engine on your local user, “/user/Library/ApplicationSupport/Firefox/searchplugins”

Srebrenica

Today fourteen years passed since the genocide of Srebrenica occurred. This day, 11 of July 2009, another 530 victims were buried on the hills of Srebrenica as thousands before them. Today approximately 8000 Bosnians have been put to rest, it is not certain exactly how many people that were killed by the Bosnian Serb army at the grounds of Srebrenica. More people are expected to be found in more mass graves.

Remember this day as a day that must never repeat itself. Let the people that loss parents, children, brothers and sisters reconcile with their past and continue their efforts to achieve awareness of one of the most despicable war crime of the modern European history.

Back in Bosnia.

It is a nice feeling to once again be back in Bosnia, this time for a non-specific duration. As I returned to my home with taxi there were no noticeable changes on the landscape, but how much can actually change in one and a half months? For an individual: quite much, but for the population: not so much.

Yesterday me and my wife attended the graduation ceremony for her students at the International University of Sarajevo (IUS), in the hotel “Hotel Hollywood”. The ceremony was rather long, it was a collaborate graduation ceremony of three graduate and undergraduate programs here in Bosnia. Due to the fact that the official language of education is English, the community language is Bosnian, and that the majority of the students and teachers at IUS are Turkish. All speeches were in English and thereafter translated into Bosnian and Turkish! But all in all, the ceremony was nice and the students seemed happy to finally be able to put this chapter of their life behind themselves. Now it is up to them to embark on a new journey to decide the tail of the following chapter. Good luck to you all!

The last days…

The few last days in my hometown have been enjoyable, doing what I like, spending time with family and eating pleasurable food.

During my visit in Sweden I did manage to finish the things I set out to do, that is to defend my master thesis, oppose another thesis, visit my brother in his home town and of course to see my family and some of my friends.

During these last days (as the geek I am) I have continued to improve my knowledge of HTML, PHP and MySQL on a new project of mine: an interactive student database handler. Rather good eh? Currently the user interaction is minimal, meaning that the user can insert entries into the database, clear the database and also to extract all the entries, visualization of the entered information is updated as the table is updated. Lets see what the final result will look like…

My first post!

Hi and welcome to my first blog and also my first post!

Over time I intend to write about a great variation of subjects including; hobbies, projects, work, trips etc. Lets see what this blog will be biased at, only time can tell!

A short introduction of myself is that I am a Swede living in Bosnia, and since one year married to my lovely wife. Very recently I finished my master thesis project at the department of biomedical engineering at Linköping university in Sweden, hence I am looking for job! My main interest areas are computational neuroscience and machine learning techniques, also I have a special affection toward image processing.

At present time I am in Sweden but am returning to Sarajevo and my wife in few days!

Feel free to drop by from time to time and leave a comment!