Mimic Compiz Zoom in Windows 7

The most thing that i miss once i log into windows is the compiz zoom using the winkey and the mouse wheel feature on linux , i tried to search for alternative but with no luck each time till i read an article recently on lifehacker which shows that the new built in magnifier in windows 7 has a mode to magnify the whole screen rather than certain part (aka docked mode) , that was great news except the shortcut keys are Winkey +/- and can't be changed !!.

After some searching i found a program called autohotkey that could serve me in solving this issue , any way if you aren't into technical details you can grab the compiled version and start using it immediately.

Download

Otherwise , here is the complete source code of the script

; Created By :
;     Ahmed Kotb on 27/5/2011
; licensed under :
;     Creative commons Attribution 3.0
;     http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/
; version :
;     1.0

; A small script that enables you to zoom in/out using the winkey
; and mouse wheel instead of winkey +/- on windows7 magnifier program

#NoEnv
SendMode Input
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%

;zoom in
#WheelUp::send #{sc4E}
;zoom out
#WheelDown::send #{sc4A}

You may need to alter the default zoom value instead of 100%  to a more usable amount , iam fine with 25%

Hope you find it useful.

Missing Icons in Gnome System Menu

since i have installed ubuntu 10.04 ,  i have noticed that the icons in the system menu is missing ,  like this

actually i didn't bother .. but today i had some time to kill so i searched about that issue and found that it is a known bug since karmic and the solution is not that hard

here are the steps :

1. Press Alt+F2 ... type gconf-editor and press run
2. navigate to : /apps/desktop/gnome/interface
3. and make sure that the menus_have_icons is marked

here is the gconf-editor screen

and you will have your icons back :)

i also noticed that this option brings icon to many menus in Ubuntu not just the system menu
here is the bug page: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-panel/+bug/442973
hope that was useful

missing unix2dos and dos2unix in ubuntu 10.04

unix2dos and dos2unix were handy tools used to convert files' endings from/to windows and Linux.
after i installed ubuntu 10.04 then installed the tofrodos package as usual i was surprised that the two programs doesn't exist , after some searching i discovered that the programs were just given different names
so:
the unix2dos become todos
and the dos2unix become fromdos
you can adopt to this new names or give them aliases if you wish...
hope that was useful.

Fix matlab gui in linux

This term I had to do some work on matlab so I installed the linux version but I found something very irritating in the guide gui builder , the gui wasnt stable at all and every time I move a button or any control all the window flickers like this …

at first I thought compiz was the reason for this but it turns out that disabling compiz has no great effect.

after a lot of searching I found that the reason of the problem was Java !! … matlab didnt find the jre location therefore couldn't render the gui well,

so a the executing this simple command in your terminal solves the problem

export MATLAB_JAVA=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/

note : you have to replace the path on the previous command with the correct path of the jre