Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

:-P

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

High saturation & cropped edition

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

Yuxuan.fishy.Wang posted a photo:

@Liuyuan Garden (留园), Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. 27th Aug., 2010

哦不是说恐龙过生日了，是说收到了某人的纯手工恐龙作为生日礼物！

罗马假日：

头被吃了。。。

感谢心灵手巧的那谁！

随机附送福大爷舔啊舔啊舔啊视频一具：

如果你实在看不到，就看这个吧。。。

SC2 is coming! 然后我辛辛苦苦下下来后发现，这玩意又是一个不支持case-sensitive分区的东西。

为什么要说“又”呢？目前已知的不支持case-sensitive分区的程序包括：

• 据说Adobe的若干CS系列东西不支持（不过我都没用过，我用过的Lightroom，Reader啥的倒是都支持）；
• 微软的Remote Desktop Client，其实这个可以用，只是会生成一个无比傻逼的“/users/fishy/library”目录而已（我用CoRD替代）；
• Steam Mac版在安装的时候会直接拒绝安装到case-sensitive分区上；
• 我实在想不起来还有啥了。。。

所以你看，基本上对生活影响不大的。所以作为一个程序员，我自从被case-insensitive分区搞过一次后，就在06年硬盘坏掉换硬盘的时候，顺便改用case-sensitive分区了。

但是还是Blizzard面子比较大，因为SC2，我决定换回case-insensitive了！于是我就上网订了个500G的硬盘回来换上，然后开始装系统倒数据。

在Mac下想要换硬盘倒数据，有这么几种方法：

1. 原来的数据备份，然后安装的时候选从Time Machine备份恢复；
2. 原来的盘接上安装的时候直接用disk utility的restore功能全盘复制；
3. 装一个新系统，装好后接上原来的盘用Migration Assistance。

因为以前我有过从Time Machine备份恢复的成功经历，于是这次首选的是这个方案。结果悲剧发生了，恢复到一半的时候，安装程序崩了。。。

于是接下来尝试restore的方案，结果虽然我先创建了case-insensitive分区然后从之前的case-sensitive分区恢复，最后恢复的结果还是case-sensitive的。。。于是又是失败。

最后只好选择重新安装然后用Migration Assistance。装完系统后装更新，然后用Migration Assistance。第二天早上起来看这个东西到底给我转移了哪些文件：

• ~(用户目录)下，所有的.开头的配置文件全部转移过来了，然后Documents和Downloads被转移过来了，甚至连Boxer创建的DOS Games目录也转移过来了，但是其它所有的目录都没有转移，包括Apple自己的Movies、Music和Pictures这样的目录。这实在是个很无厘头的结果，我想不通为啥他连DOS Games这样的目录都转，却不转那些他推荐用来保存音乐照片的目录。
• /(系统目录)下，基本上啥都转过来了，VMWare Fusion不需要重装可以直接用(之前10.5升10.6的时候还需要重新安装一次的)，我装在/Library下面的POPFile也直接可以工作，甚至连/etc/hosts文件也保留了。但是MacPorts挂了需要重新来(可以参考官方的升级Snow Leopard指南)，然后重装MacPorts的时候发现，Xcode装到/usr/bin下面的东西全没了。考虑到我只有Xcode往/usr/bin下面写了东西，应该是/usr/bin没有被转移。但是/usr/local/bin是安全的。

于是我又挂着老硬盘rsync了半天，最后终于搞定。搞定后顺便也装了个Steam，不过啥游戏都没从那上面买。。。

最近看世界杯看得天昏地暗，我都差点忘了这个事情了。。。

• 月满轩尼诗: 5/10. 在电影博物馆等着看Alice in Wonderland的时候为了混时间看的。前面还行，不过最后半小时左右实在是烂了点。
• Alice in Wonderland: 6/10. 电影博物馆看的IMAX 3D，Cheshire Cat很帅，别的没了。。。
• The Men Who Stare at Goats: 8/10. 很冷，另外好多kuso的星战台词。
• Stay Alive: 6/10. 发现bug一具：号称网游但是居然还能pause...另外据说编剧把那个贵族的国籍搞错了。
• The Bridges of Madison County: 7/10. 老牛仔演示：玩摄影的文艺青年是如何泡人妻的。
• Clash of the Titans: 6/10. 电影院看的3D版，不过唯一3D的是字幕。最后的海怪打得也太快了。
• 柔道龙虎榜: 7/10. 充满了很冷很有趣的细节，以及向黑泽明致敬的怀旧调调。
• Patent Absurdity: 7/10. 访谈类纪录片，结尾的贝五很好。软件专利就是人类社会进步最大的阻力。
• Iron Man 2: 7/10. 很好很娱乐，延续了第一部花瓶酱油打得好的传统。
• How to Train Your Dragon: 8/10. 实际上是how to train your cat。
• Chloe: 7/10. 这个故事很有趣，不过一说就剧透了。
• 嵐を呼ぶ アッパレ！戦国大合戦 (蜡笔小新 呼风唤雨！战国大合战): 7/10. 很好玩，这是我第一次看蜡笔小新。。。
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: 6/10. 搞笑+狗血，又见史上最丑的Bond Girl...
• 志明与春娇: 8/10. 笑点满塞，台词精彩。肥彭真是品质保证。在电影院看的粤语版。
• Toy Story: 7/10. 放到现在只能打3星半，但是放到95年就是4星半了。
• Invictus: 7/10. 我年初的时候还在想为啥没人找Morgen Freeman演曼德拉，然后就听说这个片子了。。。看完电影后翻了下wikipedia，发现史实契合度还是挺高的。另外电影里面再现的All Blacks Haka战舞也很不错。

另外刚刚还看了Toy Story 2，恶搞了好多电影。。。等着看Toy Story 3了。

今天骂德花女的时候翻了下Wikipedia，发现荷兰这个国家的名字很有意思。除了我之前就知道的Holland和the Netherlands有区别外，the Kingdom of the Netherlands也是不同的：

• the Netherlands(Nederland)是荷兰在欧洲的部分，也就是跟比利时和德国接壤的那个国家。
• Holland这个词准确的说其实只是the Netherlands中的两个省(最早是一个省，后来拆成了南北两个)，但是也被广泛用于指代整个the Netherlands。
• the Kingdom of the Netherlands(Koninkrijk der Nederlanden)是荷兰的正式国名，除了欧洲部分的the Netherlands外还包含了加勒比海的两个国家。加勒比的那两个国家的公民拿的是荷兰王国护照(与荷兰本土的护照没有区别)，属于欧盟公民，但是那两块区域不属于欧盟。在联合国和欧盟，the Kingdom of the Netherlands也都是作为一个整体成员的。

这是一家香港影院的北京分店，据说是北京唯一一个放粤语原声电影的地方。今天(昨天)跑去看了粤语版的志明与春娇。

位置是在东直门附近，但是具体位置不是那么明确。Google Maps上能搜到两个，地址写的都是香河园路1号，但是一个标在了机场高速旁边另一个标在了香河园路旁边，因此我当然信了路边的那个。于是出地铁后打了个车过去，到了地方下车开始找人问路，然后往会走，走回到离东直门更近的那一头发现了一个巨大的小区，叫做香河园路1号院。然后围着这个小区转了一圈，到了机场高速边上，又问了一次路，告诉我电影院在马路对面。。。马路对面根本就跟这条路不挨也，后来才知道原来那个叫做“香河园路1号院北区”。。。就是Google Maps上标的另一个。好吧，我第一次知道了门牌号还能这么标的，北京你又赢了。

由于13号线地铁开得实在太慢，加上找地方找了半天，到的时候迟到了一点没看到开头，是从他们讲那个停车场惊魂故事开始的。。。另外最后的演员表第一条就是说那个停车场里只有声音没有露脸的演员就是肥彭自己了，所以还好我去的还没有太晚，不然就完全看不到了。

电影很不错，笑点满塞，比如春娇的手机铃声、扮日本人韩国人等。肥彭就是品质保证。不过这个虽然是粤语版但也还是删减过的，看了一下对照跟内地国语版也还是一样的，该没有的镜头一个都没有。当然，生在兲朝本来对这个也不用期待的。。。

这个电影院很小，一共就没几个厅每个厅也不大。人也很少，我买票的时候看了一眼也就坐了一半人左右。卖票的地方还摆了无数海报和电影相关的书籍和杂志，感觉不像是个电影院，更像是小区里面的一个大一点的放电影的咖啡馆。。。

从影院出来能看到不错的夜景：

最后，影院大概的坐标是39.949063N, 116.430806E。悲剧的GPS track在此。

全手工缝制。靠在上面我就靠谱了！

btw, 新的汉口火车站修得还挺好看的，那个大天花板很有沧桑感：

Buddie5第三个，2010年6月14日。本人贡献出来了第二次伴郞名额。

一大早来到了著名的白玫瑰酒店接新娘。在等待新娘梳妆打扮的时候，大家就在酒店大堂拍照玩。

新郎和伴郞一号：

新郎和伴郞二号，我觉得我那个领带很像泊车的小弟。。。

春风得意的新郎：

跟一群妹妹一起就更加春风得意了：

作为伴郞，拍照少了很多，不过下面这张也不是我拍的：

然后大家就坐上车开往汉口上海路天主堂：

不过新人人品大爆发，一路没有堵车，我们比预定时间早了半小时到达教堂，教堂还没准备好。。。于是大家只好继续在教堂门口拍照：

Buddie5近几年难得聚这么齐，于是赶紧合影一张：

新郎新娘摆pose亲嘴儿：

然后抢镜头的出现了！美女带着小美女出现，抢了新郎新娘的镜头：

小美女表情多变：

然后进入教堂准备行礼。教堂里面剪影一张，那个地方隐藏了一个唱诗班：

然后是神父的布道和祝福。下面这个视频只有祝福：

礼成！新郎新娘摆pose接受众人围观：

然后大家来到酒店，八一路湖锦。我在门口收了半小时红包，结果一个都没收到，真是悲剧。

上桌子后看到伟大的红酒瓶子：

然后跟着新人去敬酒，结果几个大叔灌完新郎灌伴郞，我和max都被灌了点白酒。

最后再来一张小萝莉照片：

下午大家各自回家醒酒，晚上相聚在武胜路边上的一家小饭馆吃虾：

当然做好的虾子不是这样的，不过吃的太忙了，没空拍照。

这家店还养了只猫，生了个小奶猫：

后来大猫也出现了——是被一只狗给吓到了树上：

这家店的虾子真的很好吃，不过也很贵就是了，坐标可以看照片的geotag。

更多婚礼照片可以看婚礼的GPS track和flickr set。再次恭喜Eddy！

我终于开始屯蓝光了。。。感谢Eddy同学辛苦从米国帮我扛回来。当然辛苦主要不是因为这套碟，而是给某人带的E-PL1。

盒子：

里面的5个小盒子：

Matrix，左边那张Digital Copy不知道到底是啥，貌似我的MBP光驱也能读，读出来的容量是1.7G左右，按说也不可能是四部电影的copy...请忽略我的脚：

Matrix Reloaded，同样请忽略我的脚，另外这个没有Digital Copy了：

Matrix Revolutions：

Animatrix:

还有两张号称一共35小时的花絮碟，这个是DVD的，估计是用蓝光盘装的SD内容的意思。。。另外左边那张是双面的，第一次见到这种双面的盘：

炫耀完毕。现在就等着Lucas出Star Wars蓝光碟来骗我的钱了。。。

昨天去了奥林匹克森林公园参加煎饼摄影版版聚。本来我对于所有奥他妈的运相关的东西都没什么兴趣的，不过这个公园实在是很大很不错。另外虽然这次来了3个女模特而且我也拍了不少照片，不过由于模特的要求所有有女模特的照片我都没有公开，让大家失望了。想看美女照片的可以按cmd+w或者j或者alt+f4等键离开。

这个公园很大，我们走了3个半小时6公里多，但是只是绕着奥海走了一圈。这也就是公园的一半而已：

坐地铁到公园南门集合，然后在植物学家MJ的带领下进门以后先右转(往东)，这里有一大片漫山遍野的二月兰：

然后植物学家就去北园找植物去了。我们就在这里拍照，大饼和梁总轮流举反光板。微软旗帜梁总：

吐舌头的大饼：

在这里拍完后梁总和一个模特有事就先走了(哦，是分别有事。。。)，剩下的人继续向前，路上看到了路边的紫鸢，甚至还有花苞：

走了两步后看到几棵叶子金黄的树，我实在是不明白为什么夏天了还有金黄色叶子的树。。。

继续走，路上大饼和版大终于研究出来了怎么收起反光板，于是大饼很高兴的把反光板顶在头上。。。

然后我们看到路边出现了一片竹林，而且竹子都是给人感觉要枯死的金黄色：

竹林里面有条小径：

我们本来以为里面会是个八卦阵什么的。。。结果不是，穿过后是另一片二月兰。

然后继续向前。这里出现了悲剧一：大饼在路边的水中看到了一只鸭子，于是我开始换长焦镜头准备拍，结果等我换完镜头抬头，发现鸭子已经消失了。。。真是煮熟的鸭子也飞走了啊。

然后又过了若干个桥后，终于来到了目的地天元。天元其实就是一个湖边的木制圆形平台，与南门隔湖相望。(我知道其实是隔着“奥海”，但是我实在是很不感冒北京人屁大一点人工湖也要叫“海”的习惯，按照这么叫，东湖就只能叫太平洋了。。。)

在天元拍了一下旁边游来游去的鱼：

和天上的风筝：

从天元出来，看到了中英法日四种语言介绍天元的铁牌，我们在那儿研究了半天法语。。。

继续向前，遇到了一大片草坪：

不过不让上，妈的。草坪边缘有一大片三叶草，我和大饼在那儿找了半天四叶草，也没找到。。。

再往前走一点，惊喜出现了。我们发现了一片蒲公英：

对，我刚才说的是“一片”！很大很大的一片：

版大吹了一口，不过拍失败了，基本看不到吹下来的降落伞：

这片蒲公英的位置大概在40.0153274536133N, 116.384353637695E。

从这片蒲公英出来后没走多远，悲剧二出现了：我的相机彻底没电拒绝开机了。看来电力强劲就是让人容易忘记充电啊。。。不过还好时间也不早了，大家已经开始往外走了。

路上路过了湿地，不过没有看见太多鸟，倒是有不少人在喂鱼，我只好用手机拍了一张。

最后走出南门，坐上地铁，奔赴五道口吃晚饭。

GPS track。更多照片见flickr。

I wrote a vim plugin named projtags, initially for loading tags file for projects. But as I can "set tags+=tags;" in my vimrc, it's not that useful on the tags file way. I expanded its feature to support commands for per projects, and this is much more useful Here are some examples:

Case 1: different coding styles

I did some squid hacking before. My coding style is as below:

set cindent
set autoindent
set smartindent
set tabstop=8
set softtabstop=8
set shiftwidth=8
set noexpandtab
set smarttab
set cino=:0,g0,t0

But squid coding style is different. They use 4 for shiftwidth. As hacking some project, you should always follow the original coding style. But add vim modeline into every file is also unacceptable. So I use projtags.vim to do this job:

let g:ProjTags += [["~/work/squid", ":set sw=4"]]

So that every time I'm editing a file within squid, vim will use 4 instead of 8 for shiftwidth, now I'm happy with both my own codes and squid codes.

Case 2: use ant as makeprg for java projects

First, I use a autocmd to set ant as makeprg for java files:

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.java :setlocal makeprg=ant\ -s\ build.xml

It works well for java files. But as I did some Android development these days, I also have lots of xml files to edit (and then make to see the result). I can't use such a autocmd for xml's, as not all xml's are in a java project. So projtags.vim is again the answer:

let g:ProjTags += [["~/work/pmats", ":set mp=ant\\ -s\\ build.xml"]]

So I can always use ":make" for ant under my Android project now, no matter it's .java or .xml.

My vimrc segment for tags and projtags

set tags+=/usr/local/include/tags
set tags+=/usr/include/tags
set tags+=/opt/local/include/tags
set tags+=tags;

let g:ProjTags = []
let g:ProjTags += [["~/work/squid", ":set sw=4"]]
let g:ProjTags += [["~/work/pmats", ":set mp=ant\\ -s\\ build.xml"]]

Patches for projtags.vim (e.g. Windows support, I haven't tested it but I guess it won't work under Windows now) are welcomed You can get the code from the git repo for my various scripts.

Pwitter is a good open source Twitter client for Mac. I just added supporting for 3rd party twitter API to it to make it better.

You can get my patch here or my build here.

There's no GUI for setting 3rd party twitter API address. Instead, you need to change the configuration file. You can use either Property List Editor or the Terminal "defaults write" way. Here's an example:

$ defaults write com.aki.Pwitter twitter_https -bool NO
$ defaults write com.aki.Pwitter twitter_base "teewt.yhsif.com"

To restore the default settings ( https and "twitter.com" ), you can just delete the custom settings by:

$ defaults delete com.aki.Pwitter twitter_https
$ defaults delete com.aki.Pwitter twitter_base

It's useful when you can't connect to twitter.com directly, like me in China. Enjoy it.

Columbus V-900 is so far the GPS that best fit my requirements: it can log, it can take waypoints while logging, and it (can) have a big storage for logging (via TF card). I got one from WC, a friend to give it a try.

It log GPS tracks to CSV format, WC wrote a script to convert it to the GPX format, but without waypoints. So I rewrote a Python script (as I'm not so familiar with perl), to add the waypoints to the GPX file.

Get the script here, it will use the voice record filename as the name of the waypoint if available, or otherwise just "Waypoint #N". You may want to edit the converted GPX file to rename the waypoints.

This script will convert a line contains start and end IP separated by space like:

221.192.0.0 221.199.207.255

Into IP mask format (with comment) like:

#221.192.0.0 - 221.199.207.255
221.192.0.0/14
221.196.0.0/15
221.198.0.0/16
221.199.0.0/17
221.199.128.0/18
221.199.192.0/20

The script is:

 1 #!/usr/bin/env python
 2
 3 import sys
 4 import re
 5
 6 def ip2int(ip) :
 7         ret = 0
 8         match = re.match("(\d*)\.(\d*)\.(\d*)\.(\d*)", ip)
 9         if not match : return 0
10         for i in xrange(4) : ret = (ret << 8) + int(match.groups()[i])
11         return ret
12
13 def int2ip(ipnum) :
14         ip1 = ipnum >> 24
15         ip2 = ipnum >> 16 & 0xFF
16         ip3 = ipnum >> 8 & 0xFF
17         ip4 = ipnum & 0xFF
18         return "%d.%d.%d.%d" % (ip1, ip2, ip3, ip4)
19
20 def printrange(startip, endip) :
21         bits = 1
22         mask = 1
23         while bits < 32 :
24                 newip = startip | mask
25                 if (newip>endip) or (((startip>>bits) << bits) != startip) :
26                         bits = bits - 1
27                         mask = mask >> 1
28                         break
29                 bits = bits + 1
30                 mask = (mask<<1) + 1
31         newip = startip | mask
32         bits = 32 - bits
33         print "%s/%d" % (int2ip(startip), bits)
34         if newip < endip :
35                 printrange(newip + 1, endip)
36
37 while 1 :
38         line = sys.stdin.readline().strip()
39         if not line : break
40         chars = line.split(" ")
41         print "#%s - %s" % (chars[0], chars[1])
42         ip1 = ip2int(chars[0])
43         ip2 = ip2int(chars[1])
44         printrange(ip1, ip2)
45

The emails sent by NucleusCMS (e.g. new comment notification) didn't encode the subject, but just put the raw text there. For english language file, that's OK. But for other languages such as Chinese, it's not that good. It will produce garbled text on the subject (but not always garbled, weird).

So I wrote this patch to resolve this problem. Google tell me that if I want to encode an email subject in PHP, I should use the mb_encode_mimeheader() function. But Dreamhost just didn't provide any mb_ functions in PHP. I dug more about email subject encoding, and found that a hardcoded base64 should just do the trick. As the original sending mail code in NucleusCMS hardcoded UTF-8 in the Content-Type, I assume that hardcode UTF-8 in the subject is fine, too.

Although I've got 802.11n working on my Asus Eee Box, copy big files between Eee Box and my lap-top over WiFi is slow (as my Time Capsule is far away). So I use a cable for file copying, that's gigabit!

But I have to set my lap-top's ethernet to use DHCP in office, to avoid 2 network configurations on my lap-top, I need my Eee Box to act as a dhcpd, that can automatically assign an IP to my lap-top, but don't harm the router/nameserver configurations on my lap-top, and the existing DHCP in the WiFi network.

I aptituded the dhcp3-server package, and look into the default configuration file, got this code:

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.254;
}

And it works!

We configured some Squid 2.6 servers that use external_acl_type to use some headers sent by client for access control. And the authentication isn't username/password routine, but use some tag to calculate hash. When running, the memory used by Squid just keep increasing from time to time, just like it have a memory leak. We tried to disable the acl on some server, and these servers runs just fine.

As external acl run in individual process, even if the acl program have memory leak, the memory used by the squid process shouldn't be growing.

We tried many ways to figure out the problem, but all fails. Finally someone noticed that in the external_acl_type documentation, there's a parameter named "cache", with this description:

result cache size, 0 is unbounded (default)

"unbounded"! So this is the problem. For username/password routine, cache is useful. the next time some user with the same username/password comes, Squid can get the result from cache without communicate with acl program. But for our authentication method, as the headers used to calculate hash is differ from every request, cache is totally useless.

I really hope that "0" means no cache and "-1" means unbounded. But anyway, set "cache" to 1 can do the trick. Now the Squids don't have memory problems anymore, although cache replace will slow them down a bit.

In my last blog, I use ndiswrapper for wireless driver and it can only use 802.11g, but not 802.11n. But today I've got the solution!

According to this article on EeeUser forum, the rt2860 chipset released the source code for Linux driver! Download them from the official website, and build it. You will need kernel header package to build the driver.

After successfully build, use "modprobe rt2860sta" to install this module, and you may also add the line "rt2860sta" to your "/etc/mmodules" file to load it automatically every time (but seems that modprobe have done this, you may don't need this step).

Now here's a problem: seems that wpa_supplicant didn't support this driver. So you need to set wireless parameters by iwpriv manually. And the biggest problem is WPAPSK, you can't just input your passphrase to do it. Luckily there's a webpage that can calculate the WPAPSK for us. I'm using WPA2 and it works. I'm not sure about WPA. But WPA is broken! Why don't you move to WPA2?

Save the below script to "/etc/restart_wireless.sh" and give it execute privilege:

iface=ra0
w="iwpriv $iface"

total_start=$(date +%s)

init_start=$(date +%s)
echo -en "iwpriv config..."
$w set NetworkType=Infra
$w set AuthMode=WPA2PSK
$w set EncrypType=AES
$w set SSID=Your SSID
# get WPAPSK from http://www.wireshark.org/tools/wpa-psk.html
$w set WPAPSK=Your WPAPSK
echo "done"
init_end=$(date +%s)
init_time=$(($init_end-$init_start))

assoc_start=$(date +%s)
assoc=0
assoc_report=10
assoc_loop=310
echo -n "Associating..."
for ((i=0; $i < $assoc_loop; i++)); do
        if [ "$(iwconfig ra0 2>/dev/null | head -1 | cut -f2 -d: | cut -f1 -d" ")" == "\"\"" ]; then
                if [[ $(( ($i+1) % $assoc_report )) == 0 ]]; then
                        echo -n .
                fi
        else
                echo done
                assoc=1
                break
        fi
        sleep 1
done

if [[ $assoc != 1 ]]; then
        echo failed
        exit 1
fi
assoc_end=$(date +%s)
assoc_time=$(($assoc_end-$assoc_start))

total_end=$(date +%s)
total_time=$(($total_end-$total_start))

echo -e "Time spent (sesconds)\n\tinit: $init_time\n\tassociation: $assoc_time\n\tTotal: $total_time"

Credit to a1l0a2k9, the above script is also from EeeUser forum, but I removed the DHCP part and modprobe part. If you are using DHCP, then you may need the DHCP part and modprobe part from the original script.

Now the "/etc/network/interfaces" part, add the following lines for the ra0 interface:

iface ra0 inet static
up /etc/restart_wireless.sh
address 10.0.14.14
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.14.1
auto ra0

(for DHCP users: change "static" to "manual" and remove the "address", "netmask" and "gateway" lines.)

And now, "ifup ra0", then you're done!

UPDATE: now we have 802.11n!

My old home server is dying these days, so I bought a new Asus Eee Box B202 to replace it. It uses Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1G memory, 80G harddisk, 10/100/1000 Ethernet and 802.11n wireless.

The first thing I do on it is install Debian Lenny, my favourite system for server.

Preparing USB flash for net install

As it didn't come with a cd-rom, I choose USB flash. I use the SD card from my camera and a USB card reader to combine a USB flash, and it can be used to boot successfully.

I prepared the USB flash according to the Debian Lenny documentation, but meet some problems:

1. Google for hd-media returned the hd-media link for Sarge as the first result, I used the boot.img.gz from Sarge and lenny-businesscard iso but the iso can't be found by the installer, so the installer (boot.img.gz) and the iso must match.
2. The hd-media from Lenny and the Lenny beta2 iso didn't match, neither. The installer can recognize the iso, but complain about mismatched kernel version, and prompt you that it need network update. But the installer from boot.img.gz didn't come with ethernet driver, so it will fail and can't continue.

So finally I have to use "the flexible way" and net install. I use the initrd.gz that have ethernet driver, and the vmlinuz from Lenny hd-media. None of the iso is needed (and you can't use them), all packages will be downloaded from one of the Debian mirrors.

After prepared the USB flash, DON'T FORGET to lock the write protection lock before boot. It will save your life later.

Install Debian

Boot from the prepared USB flash, and it contains only GRUB CLI, so you need to boot the installer manually:

root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz
initrd /initrd.gz
boot

Now you have a Debian Installer that can drive your ethernet card, so you're ready to install.

Install steps are normal, nothing more to say until the grub-install step.

grub-install failure

On the grub-install step, it will complain that grub-install (hd0) failed. Why? cause (hd0) is your USB flash and (hd1) is your harddisk! That's why lock the write-protection lock is important, or otherwise it may succeed without write your harddisk mbr. That's really stupid. Manually install grub on (hd1) and it will continue.

And the installation completes.

The X problem

After installation, you may find that your X didn't work. This is because it uses a Intel Graphic chipset for lap-top, but it's not lap-top. Ubuntu wiki have the solution, and it works.

Wireless driver

UPDATE: follow my next blog article for official driver and 802.11n!

After installation, the first important thing to do is to drive the wireless card. It uses AzureWare card which uses a rt2860 chipset. And luckily, ndiswrapper can do it.

Follow the instructions on Debian wiki to install ndiswrapper. The Windows driver is on the CD (you have another computer to read the CD and copy the driver to the Eee Box, do you?), I used the WIN2KXP one. After install ndiswrapper, it works.

But there are some problem in the /etc/network/interfaces, if you use WPA (I didn't get thie problem when using WEP):

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
address 10.0.14.14
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.14.1
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

The configure above can be used to connect router (that I can see it from router admin), but the IP 10.0.14.14 can't be reached by another computer in the subnet. But if you execute an extra:

# ifconfig wlan0 10.0.14.14

Then it will be OK. I don't know why but if I move the "auto wlan0" line after the "wpa-conf" line, it works fine. Maybe it must wait wpa-supplicant to do something first?

Another problem is that it can only use 802.11g wireless, if anyone knows how to drive it to 802.11n, please tell me

The end and photos

Finally, I have a new home server now.

My company uses svn, and a VPN without Mac client. So I can't commit from home. In order to manage my off-time works, I use git-svn on my MacBook Pro.

Today I'm going to sync my 2 commits in git to svn, using:

$ git svn dcommit

But after committed the first change, the svn server have no spaces left! So the second commit was failed:

End of file found: Can't read file '/tmp/report.tmp': End of file found at /usr/bin/git-svn line 3856

After svn admin resolved this problem, and I dcommit again, but it still fails:

Merge conflict during commit: File or directory '***.cpp' is out of date; try updating: The version resource does not correspond to the resource within the transaction. Either the requested version resource is out of date (needs to be updated), or the requested version resource is newer than the transaction root (restart the commit). at /usr/bin/git-svn line 461

And I've tried

$ git svn fetch

but the problem remains. So I decided to manually commit that change.

First, generate a patch from git ("HEAD^" means make a patch against the parent of HEAD, so it's my last change):

$ git format-patch HEAD^

And this command will generate a 0001--***.patch file. Then, use "svn co" to checkout a svn working copy, and apply that patch:

$ patch -i /path/to/0001--***.patch -p1

Then, get my last commit log from "git log", then use "svn ci" to commit it.

Now back to the git working copy, rebase svn:

$ git svn fetch
$ git svn rebase

Then try dcommit again, no conflicts and no commit made (as the svn repository is already up to date).

Hooray!

As Bug #428274, I can't accept any meeting requests sent to my work mailbox, and have to add the meetings into Lightning manually. This is really annoying. As the bug got fixed, I decided to upgrade Lightning to a 0.9pre nightly to get it working.

After upgrading, the following error dialog will greet me every time I start Thunderbird:

I googled this error message and found that it was caused by the incompatible extension ThunderBirthDay. OK, delete the calendar should fix it. No! The calendar was hide from Lightning's calendar list!

Fine, downgrade Lightning and then remove the calendar should work. But unfortunately, Lightning 0.9 have changed the storage format and can't downgrade to 0.8 anymore.

So how to delete that calendar? Maybe I should delete the calendar direct from Lightning's storage. According to the official FAQ, it's stored as an SQLite database file.

Under Thunderbird's profile directory, I got a "storage.sdb" file. I tried to use the command line sqlite to open it, and it works:

$ sqlite3 storage.sdb 
SQLite version 3.5.0
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite> .tables
cal_attachments              cal_metadata               
cal_attendees                cal_properties             
cal_calendar_schema_version  cal_recurrence             
cal_calendars                cal_relations              
cal_calendars_prefs          cal_todos                  
cal_calmgr_schema_version    cal_tz_version             
cal_events                 

The "cal_calendars" table seems to be the one I'm looking for:

sqlite> select * from cal_calendars;
1|storage|moz-profile-calendar://
2|thunderbirthday|moz-abmdbdirectory://abook.mab

Yes it is! so I need to know how to delete that record:

sqlite> .schema cal_calendars
CREATE TABLE cal_calendars (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, type TEXT, uri TEXT);

OK, then this should work:

sqlite> delete from cal_calendars where type = "thunderbirthday";
sqlite> select * from cal_calendars;
1|storage|moz-profile-calendar://

It DOES work!

Now my Thunderbird is quiet on starting.

But, the guys in Lightning really should give a chance to delete calendars that aren't compatible. I should file a bug for it. I've filed Bug #450121!

There's a macro in ACE to eliminate a compiler warning:

379 // Some compilers complain about "statement with no effect" with (a).
380 // This eliminates the warnings, and no code is generated for the null
381 // conditional statement.  @note that may only be true if -O is enabled,
382 // such as with GreenHills (ghs) 1.8.8.
383 # define ACE_UNUSED_ARG(a) do {/* null */} while (&a == 0)

But when I use this macro, gcc 4.3 will complain:

warning: the address of ‘a’ will never be NULL

I've started the Miao project one year ago, aim to build a smart pinyin input method for Mac. But I just got a new job 2 weeks after I started this project. This is quite a busy year, and I haven't really wrote much code for it.

A month ago Yong Sun from Sun begin to port SunPinyin to Mac, and now it's more than just works. I'm satisfied with the Mac port and use it everyday. As the Miao project is scratching my own itch, and I'm not itchy anymore, I should call it a day.

Sorry for anyone who waits for Miao, but I'm not going to reinvent the wheel.

On the Mac side, the initial backup takes me about 6 hours to backup 126GB data, by ethernet cable, so the speed is about 20GB/hr.

The writing speed via 802.11n wireless is as below:

fishy@Makelele:~/Video$ dd if=Pixar\ -\ Lifted.wmv of=/Volumes/Cacapa-1/foo.wmv
91582+1 records in
91582+1 records out
46890385 bytes transferred in 15.478993 secs (3029292 bytes/sec)

That's about 3MB/s. So I think the speed on Mac is acceptable, but it should be faster.

On the Linux side, I use Debian Lenny, with samba, afpfs-ng and a 100M ethernet cable (my Linux machine didn't come with a Gigabit ethernet port). The facts are:

Writing via AFP:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=prog03.mdb of=foo/foo.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 6.89061 s, 649 kB/s

Writing via SMB:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=prog03.mdb of=/media/cacapa/bar.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 6.57683 s, 680 kB/s

Reading via AFP:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=foo/bar.mdb of=bar.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 8.87068 s, 504 kB/s

Reading via SMB:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=/media/cacapa/foo.mdb of=foo.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 0.919922 s, 4.9 MB/s

So the conclusion is that, for writing, AFP and SMB are both slow. But for reading, SMB is much much faster than AFP, so you should use SMB to connect a Time Capsule on Linux.

After long waiting, I got one finally.

The box:

Unboxing:

And then working!

And here's a note, the command to limit my 1TB Time Capsule use only 500G for backup (so that I can use the other 500G for other stuffs), according to the comment of this hint:

hdiutil resize -size 500g -shrinkonly /Volumes/path/to/sparsebundle/

But the speed of backup is really really slow, that disappointed me. What a shame! It would be perfect if the backup speed up.

Finally, Video on Flickr!

I've uploaded a test video:

And here's the same video on youtube, to be compared:

So here's the comparison:

• Speed: youtube is much much faster than flickr, anyway, youtube consumed half of California's bandwidth, so it's no surprise.
• Who can upload: everybody, every free users can upload to youtube, but only pro users ($24.95/y) can upload videos to flickr now.
• Geotag: you can geotag your video on flickr, but seems that you can't do it on youtube.
• Original file: you can download the original file of your video in flickr's embed page, so in case you lost your original file, it's a way to get it back.
• Sizes: there's only 1 size on youtube, but many sizes on flickr to embed.
• Group: on flickr, you can group your videos along with your photos, so the photos/videos can be grouped together.
• Privacy control: you can filter viewers with your flickr contacts, as I already have a community on flickr, but not on youtube.

So, from now on, I may move from youtube to flickr, flickr rocks!

I've got an email from my host administrator to warn me that one of my MySQL table consumed lots of system load, and the table is nucleus_trackback.

But I haven't got any "real" trackbacks, so they are all spams, and more accurate, crazy spams, that simply too much to overload my DB.

So I have to wrote this patch to add an option to NP_Trackback: drop blocked trackbacks directly. After enabled, trackbacks that blocked by NP_Trackback (failed spam test or no link) will not be stored into the DB.

I have a Linux file server in my home running Debian Lenny, and I always use SMB for file sharing, it have a very very bad performance. Today I suddenly remember Apple have an AFP protocol, so gave it a try.

I use "apt-cache search afp" to find out that there's a package named "netatalk" can provide AFP file sharing, so install it. But I can only login use guest account, not my system user, from Leopard.

I googled it and found that the problem is: on the Debian side, as a license issue, the Debian package didn't come with SSL support; on the Leopard side, it didn't allow you exchange your password with AFP server without SSL. So the solution is build netatalk yourself, with SSL.

The building steps are described on this blog, and I also disabled atalkd as the author suggested, it caused netatalk to start-up much faster than before.

So finally I got a AFP server for my Mac (compare this icon to the famous BSOD icon for SMB servers in Leopard ):

And as expected, AFP is much much faster than SMB, here's the write test:

For AFP:

fishy@McManaman:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/Home\ Directory/foo
^C57345+0 records in
57345+0 records out
29360640 bytes (29 MB) copied, 11.0833 s, 2.6 MB/s

And for SMB:

fishy@McManaman:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/fishy/bar
^C4235+0 records in
4235+0 records out
2168320 bytes (2.2 MB) copied, 10.6889 s, 203 kB/s

I'm impressed!

UPDATE: As in RFC 2822, the format Gmail used is "obsolete", which means although it's not recommended, clients such as Thunderbird should support it.

Finally I've got my Gmail account with IMAP access. I use Thunderbird as the mail client, and find that the "date" of many mails are the time I retrieved them via IMAP, which is incorrect.

These mails including gtalk chat logs and Gmail invitation accepted responses, that means most of the mails are sent/generated by Gmail.

An incorrect date mail have a Date line in the headers like this:

Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2006 05:35:25 -0800 (PST)

And a normal mail have a Date line in the headers like this:

Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 19:16:34 +0800

Seems that the problem is, Thunderbird didn't recognize a Date line with a 3-letter timezone description(the "PST" in this example), so it use the date retrieved instead.

As most of mail clients (even Gmail itself) didn't add this timezone description in the Date line while sending a mail, I guess it's Gmail's fault to add it into the chat logs and invitation responses to make it unstandard? Anyone can tell me what's the definition in the RFC?

I was struggling to find a good multi-blog system to replace LifeType used on buddie5.com in the past few weeks. I've tried Movable Type but didn't feel satisfy with it. Finally I found that NucleusCMS, which is used here, have good support for multi-blog, so I think it's the solution for me.

Although NucleusCMS itself have good support for multi-blog, as it's mainly used as a single blog system like WordPress, nearly none of the plugins considered the multi-blog situation.

So I made patches for the plugins I used, to make them multi-blog ready.

These patches generally move some option from global to blog, so that every blog can have its own setting. And for some plugins that have an admin area, I also filtered the things it can admin to avoid security risk.

• patch for NP_TrackBack 2.1.0:
  1. move notify options into blog settings (Notify, NotifyEmail and NoNotifyBlocked)
  2. show admin area when user is blog admin (copied from NP_Referer 1.0 code )
  3. in admin area, user can only see/manage the trackbacks in a blog he have admin privilege
• patch for NP_Referrer 1.0.1:
  1. roll back to 1.0 to show admin area for non-admin users
  2. in admin area, user can only see/modify the referrers in a blog he have admin privilege
• patch for NP_Calendar: move the locale option into blog option
• patch for NP_RSSItem: move lang, RSSLink and RSSImage option into blog option.
• patch for NP_WeatherReport: move city_name, city_id and unit option into blog option.

I love Thunderbird, so I use Thunderbird + Lightning instead of Mail.app + iCal as my personal schedule and mail solution.

Also it's promised to have a syncing feature, it didn't have now. But I need the ability to sync my schedule with my Palm Treo 680. I can sync my Palm with iCal, so getting the linkage between Lightning and iCal is a good way to do this.

First, I installed the Provider for Google Calendar extension to get the bidirectional access to Google Calendar to Lightning.

Then, I use GCALDaemon to sync my iCal with Google Calendar. It can also sync Google Calendar with Lightning, but Provider for Google Calendar is much better at this.

Now if I add/modify/remove an event in Lightning, Provider for Google Calendar will update my Google Calendar immediately. Later, GCALDaemon will find the update, and update iCal. Now I sync my Palm with my computer, it will get the update.

If I update an event in my Palm, and sync it to iCal, GCALDaemon will update Google Calendar later, and then Lightning will update it later.

So it works.

Make a symbolic link with the ics file of Lightning and iCal may also work, but I can't find the ics file for Lightning

You can subscribe my busy/available status on Google Calendar now

This should also works for Mozilla Sunbird.

We use diff to find out the different lines in 2 files, but sometimes we also need to find out the same lines in 2 files. So we need the "reversed diff"

And this command can be used as the reversed diff:

cat file1 file2 | sort | uniq -d

There're 2 versions of iconv.h in which the iconv() have different prototypes.

In Debian, it's:

43 extern size_t iconv (iconv_t __cd, char **__restrict __inbuf,
44                      size_t *__restrict __inbytesleft,
45                      char **__restrict __outbuf,
46                      size_t *__restrict __outbytesleft);

And in other systems, such as Mac OS X, it's:

83 extern size_t iconv (iconv_t cd, const char* * inbuf, size_t *inbytesleft, char* * outbuf, size_t *outbytesleft);

So you can see that the second parameter, "inbuf", can be "const char **" or "char **"

It will make a big problem while writing code for both systems. One resolution is to use condition compile ("#ifdef" blah blah...), but RoachCock@newsmth give me another (and much better) resolution: use operator overload (so it's C++ only):

133 struct iconv_param_adapter {
134         iconv_param_adapter(const char**p) : p(p) {}
135         iconv_param_adapter(char**p) : p((const char**)p) {}
136         operator char**() const
137         {
138                 return (char**)p;
139         }
140         operator const char**() const
141         {
142                 return (const char**)p;
143         }
144         const char** p;
145 };

When you calling "iconv()", call it like this:

111         size_t res = iconv(data, iconv_param_adapter(&s), &inbytesleft, &outnew, &outbytesleft);

Thank you RoachCock!

expat is a good XML parser, light and quick. But it only support latin1, UTF-8 and UTF-16 naturally, if you want to use it to deal with other encoding XML's, you need to set a unknown encoding handler.

I use libiconv to convert the GBK string to Unicode for expat.

First, implement a function to pass to XML_SetUnknownEncodingHandler:

int
XML_Stream_Parser::xml_unknown_encoding(void* data, const char* name, XML_Encoding* info) {
        iconv_t cd;
        if(strncasecmp(name, "GB", 2) != 0 || (cd = iconv_open("UCS-2BE", name)) == (iconv_t)-1) {     // not GB, unsupported
                fprintf(stderr, "can't convert %s\n", name);
                return 0;
        }
        for(size_t i=0; i<128; i++) info->map[i] = i;
        for(size_t i=128; i<256; i++) info->map[i] = -2;
        info->convert = XML_Stream_Parser::xml_convert_gb;
        info->release = XML_Stream_Parser::xml_convert_release;
        info->data = cd;
        return 1;
}

In this function, I tell expat that for GBK encoding, ASCII 0~127 is left as is, and ASCII 128~255 will need to be dealt together with the next byte.

Then implement the "convert" and "release" functions:

int
XML_Stream_Parser::xml_convert_gb(void* data, const char* s) {
        const size_t out_initial = 4;
        size_t inbytesleft = 2, outbytesleft = out_initial;
        char *out = new char[out_initial], *outnew = out;
        size_t res = iconv(data, &s, &inbytesleft, &outnew, &outbytesleft);
        int ret = 0;
        if(res == (size_t)-1) {
                fprintf(stderr, "error in conversion\n");
                delete []out;
                return '?';
        }
        for(size_t i = 0; i < out_initial - outbytesleft; i++)
                ret = (ret<<8) + (unsigned char)out[i];
        delete []out;
        return ret;
}

void
XML_Stream_Parser::xml_convert_release(void* data) {
        iconv_close(data);
}

In "convert", I use iconv to convert the string to unicode, and return the unicode to expat.

The limitation in this interface is that it can't deal with 4-byte GB18030 codes, as I can't judge whether it's a 4-byte code just by the first code.

Anyway, I suggest that all XML should be encoded to UTF-8, so that this is unneeded

farmr is a GreaseMonkey script.

It's purpose is to recover some image source URL that was f'ed by some firewall, with the URL with web proxy.

I used the web proxy code from gladder, credit to gneheix.

For Camino users that can't use GreaseMonkey directly, you can use GeekMonkey.

Enjoy it and f' back.

I need some efficient way for Miao for word database, and I guess SQLite is the solution. So I wrote this simple test program to get familiar with SQLite API. (read more for the program)

And there's something should be kept in mind: don't use "`"s.

As I used to use MySQL before, I always put "`" in SQL statements, for example:

create table `foo` (`bar` int)

It's OK in SQLite command line program, but not in the C library.

When I execute a SQL query with "`", I'll get this error message:

sql error #1: unrecognized token: "`"

So I deleted "`"s in the SQL statement, but still get this error message:

sql error #4: malformed database schema - unrecognized token: "`"

This really drive me crazy, as I don't know what's wrong. But finally I've got the reason: that's because there's "`" in the "create table" statement. So I recreated the table and rerun the program, it's finally OK now.

 1 #include <stdio.h>
 2 #include <stdlib.h>
 3 #include <sqlite3.h>
 4
 5 #define NAME "miao.db"
 6
 7 int main() {
 8         sqlite3 *db;
 9         sqlite3_stmt *stmt;
10         int rc;
11         char *errmsg = 0;
12
13         rc = sqlite3_open(NAME, &db);
14         if(rc) {
15                 fprintf(stderr, "can't open db %s: %s\n", NAME, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
16                 sqlite3_close(db);
17                 exit(1);
18         }
19         rc = sqlite3_prepare(db, "select * from words", 0, &stmt, 0);
20         if(rc!=SQLITE_OK) {
21                 fprintf(stderr, "sql error #%d: %s\n", rc, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
22         } else while((rc = sqlite3_step(stmt)) != SQLITE_DONE) {
23                 switch(rc) {
24                 case SQLITE_BUSY:
25                         fprintf(stderr, "busy, wait 1 seconds\n");
26                         sleep(1);
27                         break;
28                 case SQLITE_ERROR:
29                         fprintf(stderr, "step error: %s\n", sqlite3_errmsg(db));
30                         break;
31                 case SQLITE_ROW:
32                         {
33                                 int n = sqlite3_column_count(stmt);
34                                 int i;
35                                 for(i=0; i<n; i++) {
36                                         printf("%s = ", sqlite3_column_name(stmt, i));
37                                         switch(sqlite3_column_type(stmt, i)) {
38                                         case SQLITE_TEXT:
39                                                 printf("%s", sqlite3_column_text(stmt, i));
40                                                 break;
41                                         case SQLITE_INTEGER:
42                                                 printf("%d", sqlite3_column_int(stmt, i));
43                                                 break;
44                                         case SQLITE_FLOAT:
45                                                 printf("%f", sqlite3_column_double(stmt, i));
46                                                 break;
47                                         case SQLITE_BLOB:
48                                                 printf("(blob)");
49                                                 break;
50                                         case SQLITE_NULL:
51                                                 printf("(null)");
52                                                 break;
53                                         default:
54                                                 printf("(unknown: %d)", sqlite3_column_type(stmt, i));
55                                         }
56                                         printf("\n");
57                                 }
58                         }
59                         break;
60                 }
61         }
62         sqlite3_finalize(stmt);
63         sqlite3_close(db);
64 }
65

tags: sqlite, c, program
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Different editor configurations, especially tabstops are always pain for co-work. So if everyone uses vim, you can specify some vim instruction to override one's vim configuration in your file, just like:

// vim:tabstop=4:

And if everyone uses emacs, you can also specify emacs mode line like:

// -*- tab-width: 2 -*-

But what about make vim to read emacs mode line? I've wrote a script to do so.

As I didn't use emacs at all, I don't know which instructions can be specified in the emacs mode line. I just wrote a handler for "tab-width" as an example. If you are familiar with both emacs and vim, please help me to add more handlers into this script.

After more handlers added, I'll submit this script to vim.org.

Why another pinyin input method?

The answer is simple: the current pinyin input methods on Mac doesn't satisfy me. I'm going to scratch my own itch

ITABC (comes with Mac) and Pinyin Module in OpenVanilla isn't a smart input method; QIM is smart but it's a shareware, and a expensive shareware (USD 19.99 or RMB 69.00, but only for one major version free update); FIT is smarter than ITABC and free (for charge), but is not smart enough and I don't like some of its feature but can't turn them off.

Miao will be a smart pinyin input method, designed for people who likes to input a whole sentence once. It will learn user's accustoming and finally become a essential tool in inputing (after some training).

The idea and feature

I won't focus on pre-train dictionaries, just like Sogou Pinyin or Google Pinyin. My focus will be on "learning"

For each sentence you input, it will record the words within the sentence, including continuos words and non-continuos words, and calculated for probability.

Continuos word probability will be used to auto-learn new words, that is, if there's a high probability that two known words will comes together, they will be formed as a new word.

Non-continuos word probability will be used for candidate word sorting. The word with the highest probability will get ordered first. As a instance, for the pinyin word "yaoming", if the sentence comes with "huojian"(火箭/Rockets), "maidi"(麦迪/McGrady), it's more likely to be "姚明"(Yao Ming the NBA player); If the sentence comes with "can"(惨/misery), it's more likely to be "要命"(Kill me!).

The license

It may be licensed under GPL or BSD license, it's not decided yet. But I can assume that it will be certainly free, as freedom!

About the name

"Miao" is the pinyin of the Chinese character "喵", which just like "meow" in English, is "the characteristic crying sound of a cat" (from Oxford American Dictionaries).

It's a pinyin input method, so I choose a pinyin word as its name

Other informations

I should write it as a module for OpenVanilla, instead of stand-alone. The reason is that I'm not going to reinvent the wheel. I want to focus on the learning algorithm, but not the system interfaces. And this may make it easier to port into other platforms, for example Linux.

The project homepage will be http://oaim.yhsif.com. I'll start it soon, any contribution, e.g. codes, ideas or artworks, are appreciated.

If you use vim for programming, then you can't live without ctags (can you?). ctags generate the "tags" file, vim and its plugins use this file to help your programming more efficiently.

By default, vim will only use the "tags" file under your current working directory. You can use this command to see it:

:set tags?

Generally, your "tags" file under you current working directory won't contain informations about system libraries (glibc, stl, etc.). If you miss them, you can generate tags file for your system libraries, and ask your vim to load them:

set tags+=/usr/local/include/tags
set tags+=/usr/include/tags

If you are working on a big project, which have many subdirectories, the "tags" file under each working directory may be not enough, as you also need some information about the functions under other subdirectories. So you can generate a "tags" file under your project root, and ask vim to load it when editing a file within your project:

autocmd BufEnter ~/work/myproj/* :setlocal tags+=~/work/myproj/tags

Thanks for Ryan Phillips, you can also add "tags;" (notice the semicolon) to your tags so that vim will automatically look up "tags" file in the file tree (":help file-searching" for document):

set tags+=tags;

To make it easier to use, I've also made a script named "projtags.vim" so that you need only set your project directories in your vimrc:

let g:ProjTags = ["~/work/proj1"]
let g:ProjTags+= [["~/work/proj2", "~/work/proj2.tags"]]

Happy vimming

Live Spaces made some change days before, and that makes me unable to see any live space pages.

When I use Camino to visit live spaces pages, I always get a "XML Parsing Error", even the page I'm visiting is not the RSS but a html. When I use Firefox or Safari, I always get a HTTP 500 error.

The "XML Parsing Error" is really weird. It seems that the live spaces server send a wrong "Content-Type" so that Camino treat it as a XML document and try to parse it use a XML tree, and that failed (with "view source" I can see the html source corretly).

But Camino didn't have a extension like live HTTP headers to see what Content-Type do the server send, thanks to smorgan on MozillaZine Forums, I can see it using curl.

This is what curl get:

McManaman:~ fishy$ curl -v http://spaces.live.com -o /dev/null 2>&1 | grep Content-Type
< Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8

This is what Camino will get:

McManaman:~ fishy$ curl -v http://spaces.live.com -o /dev/null -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en; rv:1.8.1.4pre) Gecko/20070408 Camino/1.1b+" 2>&1 | grep Content-Type
< Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8

This is what Firefox will get:

McManaman:~ fishy$ curl -v http://spaces.live.com -o /dev/null -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0" 2>&1 | grep Content-Type
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

And this is what Safari will get:

McManaman:~ fishy$ curl -v http://spaces.live.com -o /dev/null -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3" 2>&1 | grep Content-Type
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

As you can see, for some common browsers, such as Firefox or Safari, live spaces server send the right Content-Type. For unknown browsers (including curl, Camino, etc.), it claims that it's "application/xhtml+xml". Oh my god, what did they think they are doing? What can they get from this Content-Type? I can't understand this at all.

So the only word I can say is, "live spaces suck, one more time"

If you prefer DMG or CDR format, then you can just use Disk Utilities to make image of your disks. But if you prefer ISO format, then this is the way.

1. Insert your disk into your driver, of course.
2. Unmount it but didn't eject it. To do so, you need to type this command in your Terminal: "sudo umount /dev/disk1". "disk1" may vary depends on your other drivers.
3. Use dd to create the image: "dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/path/to/foo.iso". Again, "disk1" may vary.
4. When it's done, you've got the ISO image file, and you may eject the disk now. But as a bug in Finder, you can't eject a volume which you unmounted in Terminal in normal ways. Instead, you need to type this command in Terminal to eject it: "sudo diskutil eject /dev/disk1"

The Finder bug is really annoying, even a logout can't eject the disk, you must reboot your machine. But fortunately I've found the workaround on macosxhints.

If you toke some photos by your camera, and want to post them to somewhere (for example, I want to post the photo of my Treo 650 because I'm going to sell it), you may need to batch resize your photos.

This bash script shows how to uses ImageMagick to batch resize your photos:

1 #!/bin/sh
2
3 for file in *.JPG; do
4         convert -resize 1024x768 $file ${file%.JPG}_resize.jpg
5 done

wget -Y -e "http_proxy=host:port" url

"How to set proxy for wget?" I've been asked this question for many times, but it seems didn't appears in the "-h" output nor man page, so I always forgot it.

That's why I'm making a note here

UPDATED: Troels Bay have use another way to do it, please wait for his official build

Google Reader Notifier by Troels Bay is a great open source application that provide a desktop notifier for Google Reader, the online feed reader, and also a feed subscriber. As I'm using Camino as my browser, which didn't have a build-in RSS support, I need it even more to subscribe feeds to Google Reader with one click. (not just "notifier" )

But when subscribe with preview, if there's a "?" in the URL, the problem is that Google Reader will ignore the part after "?". So that for example my photos on Flickr, "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=76236359@N00&format=rss_200" , will be recognised by Google as "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne".

So I wrote this patch to escape URL before submit to Google.

 1 --- Google Reader copy/GRController.m   2007-03-11 18:45:56.000000000 +0800
 2 +++ Google Reader/GRController.m        2007-03-11 18:49:46.000000000 +0800
 3 @@ -1610,7 +1610,15 @@
 4  
 5         if ([[prefs valueForKey:@"dontVerifySubscription"] boolValue] != YES) {
 6  
 7 -               [[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@://www.google.com/reader/preview/*/feed/", [self getURLPrefix]] stringByAppendingString:url]]];                    
 8 +               NSMutableString * escapedUrl = [NSMutableString stringWithCapacity: ([url length]*3)];   // for the worst case the length will growth to 3 times
 9 +               [escapedUrl setString:url];
10 +               [escapedUrl replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"?" withString:@"%3F" options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [escapedUrl length])];
11 +               [escapedUrl replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"&" withString:@"%26" options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [escapedUrl length])];
12 +               [escapedUrl replaceOccurrencesOfString:@":" withString:@"%3A" options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [escapedUrl length])];
13 +               [escapedUrl replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"/" withString:@"%2F" options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [escapedUrl length])];
14 +               [escapedUrl replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"=" withString:@"%3D" options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [escapedUrl length])];
15 +
16 +               [[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@://www.google.com/reader/preview/*/feed/", [self getURLPrefix]] stringByAppendingString:escapedUrl]]];                      
17                         
18         } else {
19  

Under my Debian Linux, when I use screen, I always get some keymap/TERM setting problems, for example, the backspace key never work.

But if I set TERM to "vt100" before launch screen, it's OK, so this alias can resolve the problem:

alias screen='env TERM=vt100 screen'

For the poor network, I always need a multi-thread http downloader. Firefox has a extension DownThemAll!, but after I finish surfing websites (but didn't finish downloading yet), I used to press Command+Q to quit Firefox, and the download was interrupted. lftp has a built-in downloader: pget, so use pget is a good idea:

alias pget="lftp -c pget"

Put the codes into your bashrc file, and restart your terminal, it's done.

First of all, I must say MySQL sucks!

As from MySQL 4.1, if the database default charset is UTF8 but the default charset setting in my.cnf is not UTF8, you must do a "SET NAMES UTF8" query after connection, to make sure that in this mysql connection, all query will be handled as UTF8. otherwise seems that it will use latin1 as default.

If the "SET NAMES" isn't queried, the articles and comments won't be malformed, but the data that stored in MySQL database isn't actually in UTF8 encoding, so that for example mysqldump, or phpmyadmin, won't get the right data.

So what we need to do is check database's charset setting, and send a "SET NAME" query to ensure we're using the database's charset setting.

I've found that LifeType did this thing, so I copied its detecting code and made patches for NucleusCMS and Wikka Wiki (and also my custom homepage for LifeType, of course!).

But before downloading the patches, I should tell you that:

First, you MUST convert your database. Cause before you patch NucleusCMS or Wikka Wiki, your articles, comments, etc. that already posted, was stored in the old way in the db.

To do that, follow the following steps (this is in case the my.cnf indicate "latin1" but your database was in "utf8", if you're using other charsets, modify them):

1. mysqldump -h host -u username -ppassword database --default-character-set=latin1 > dump.sql
2. Edit dump.sql, on Line 10, replace "latin1" with "utf8"
3. mysql -h host -u username -ppassword database < dump.sql

Second, you must ensure that in your database, ALL charset settings are set to "utf8". The word "ALL" means databases, tables and fields.

Finally, here're the patches: for nucleus, for wikka, released under GPL. WARNING: Use it on your own risk, and make backup before patching.

Gecko based browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Camino, Mozilla Seamonkey, optimized 3rd-party builds of Firefox and etc. , didn't display buttons on webpages well on Mac OS X.

For aqua buttons, that shown in Camino and some optimized 3rd-party builds of Firefox, the CJK buttons often be malformed and cause you can't see the text on the button well. For common buttons, they're just ugly.

I've found a hack through the internet, and I'm not so sure what did it actually do (seems to be some dirty tricks), but it works. So I cut off some unnecessary codes and made this patch. To use it, just execute the following command under terminal (Terminal.app or iTerm.app, replace "/Applications/Camino.app" to the path of the app you want to patch):

cd /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/res/
patch -i /path/to/moz-forms.patch

And it's done.

Before:

After:

I didn't write this patch. I just found it and made it easier to use.

Camino is superb fast. Much much faster than Firefox and maybe a bit faster than Safari.

Compare to Firefox, it comes with some good system integrations, including Address Book integration, Keychain Access integration, etc. And compare to Safari, it's much closer to Firefox, it also have a "about:config" thing (though a little different from Firefox), and a powerful ad-blocking engine.

So I'm going to give it a week's trial, to see if I can be used to it.

Although it's close to Firefox, it didn't have extensions. So there's something I missing in Firefox:

1. It can't force links that open a new window to open in new tab. I can use about:config to set "browser.link.open_newwindow" to "1" to disable links that opens a new window, but can't use a new tab instead. Anyway, this is acceptable. At least they won't open lots of new windows to annoy me.
2. I can't type a site name (e.g. "google" ) and press cmd+enter to automatically surround it with "www." and ".com", this will open it in new tab and use "I'm feeling lucky" search. So I must type more words to input a address.
3. Keyboard short-cut is different from Firefox, it mixed some Firefox short-cuts and Safari short-cuts up. I don't like this. I prefer a configurable keyboard short-cuts. Maybe I can configure it in System Preferences? UPDATED: Oh yes, I can configure them in System Preferences. This makes me feel much better.
4. I can't specify the text encoding of the keyword in the search tool-box. Some search engines in China only accept GBK keywords but Camino can only encode keyword in UTF-8.
5. Lack of spell checkers. It can't use the system spell check for standard text editors (cause it didn't use the standard text editor?), nor the spell checker provided by Google Toolbar for Firefox or Firefox 2.

Anyway, a impressive thing is that the build-in ad-blocking engine is powerful, and the default black-list is very useful that it filtered out almost all the ad from the pages I visited. And if the black-list isn't powerful enough, I can edit it myself.

Or at least, Skype for Mac is for geeks? There are some cool stuffs in Skype for Mac, but not available on other platform versions of Skype.

1. In the chat style tweak window, the chat example is from George Orwell's 1984. Maybe because of Mac begins from 1984?
   
2. In the newest beta (currently) version, the history events was brought on and off with a cool effect, similar to the water wave effect of dashboard.
   

In fact, to uninstall TeXLive should be very easy: "rm -Rf /usr/local/texlive", that's all.

But things are sometimes not so easy. If you've chosen to make symbolic links to your system path (/usr/bin) during the installation, like I had, then you have to unlink all the links TeXLive created.

It's hard to do that manually, so I wrote the following script. You just need to run it under your /usr/bin directory and it will unlink all links that pointed to /usr/local/texlive.

 1 #!/bin/sh
 2
 3 tlprefix="^/usr/local/texlive/"
 4
 5 for file in *; do
 6         if [ -L ${file} ]; then
 7                 link=`readlink ${file}`
 8                 tllink=`echo "${link}" | grep "${tlprefix}"`
 9                 if [ -n "${tllink}" ]; then
10                         echo "going to unlink \"${file}\" that links to \"${link}\"..."
11                         unlink ${file}
12                 fi
13         fi
14 done

It unlinked 240 symbolic links from my /usr/bin directory, horrible! I'll never choose the "make symbolic links to your system path" option again during the installation of TeXLive.

I have used my old lap-top as a home server. Cause I'm using ADSL at home, I have to use a dynamic DNS.

I choosed a Chinese dynamic DNS provider "Peanut Shell", they've provided a Linux client to commit your IP.

But the Linux client they provided is close-source and often crashes. After it crashed, my domain name can't be kept up-to-date.

So I have to write a script to make sure it's still running:

1 #!/bin/sh
2 pid=`pidof phlinux`
3 if [ -z "$pid" ]; then
4         echo "phlinux not running, start it as daemon now..." >&2
5         /usr/local/phlinux/phlinux -d
6 else
7         echo "phlinux is running"
8 fi

Save this script in some place, and make a link to your "/etc/cron.hourly", so it will be checked every hour.

UPDATED: or maybe you don't want to get mail report on every check, I've updated the script, and you should write a script in your "/etc/cron.hourly" instead of link the script, and writes "/path/to/your/script > /dev/null"

Yesterday I made a patch for NucleusCMS plugin NP_TrackBack, and post in into the forum. On the forum, I've found another amazing plugin from the same author: NP_Revision

It's amazing because, it can track all your changes, just like a wiki (or CVS/svn)! It can show the old version, and show the diff's.

For instance, this is the diff between revision 1.0 and revision 1.1 of my last post.

But seems for the posts post before installation of this plugin, the time was wrong. I'll try to fix it later.

btw: I've changed the url here from Fancy URL to Fancier URL. So if you're using bloglines or google reader or some RSS reader that track changes, you'll get notify for old items. My apologize for that. Old stuff fancy URLs still works.

You are visiting a NucleusCMS powered blog. NucleusCMS is a good blog system, the only (?) problem is that it doesn't support trackbacks itself. So I use the plugin NP_TrackBack to add trackback support.

NP_TrackBack was good, especially on its anti-spam ability. It blocks nearly all my received trackback pings automatically (I haven't got any real trackback yet, all I got were spams).

NP_TrackBack can also send a notification to me when a trackback ping received. But the problem is, that it also send me notification about blocked trackback pings.

I have faith on its anti-spam ability, so I don't wanna get notifications about blocked trackbacks. But I do hope get a notification on real trackbacks. So finally, I've made this hack.

I've added a option to NP_TrackBack not to send notification on blocked pings (see the screenshot below), so that my mailbox won't be spammed instead of my blog. And its default value is "no", so that it won't change your default settings.

Here's the patch file and the plugin php file itself (don't forget to replace the ".txt" extension with ".php" ). Cause I've added a option, you can't simply replace your old file if you are currently using NP_TrackBack plugin. You may need to uninstall your old one and install your new one to make it work.

1. Get the latest darwine distribution from sf, and install it. Files on sf seems differ from files on darwine homepage
2. Get IEs4Linux
3. Install wget, cabextract, etc. from MacPorts
4. Run the ies4linux script. You should need to add wine path into PATH before that. The wine path should normally be: "/Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/bin".
5. After ies4linux script finished, edit the generated "ie6" script, add the following line(you can also add this line into your bashrc):
   

   export DISPLAY=":0.0"

After that, you'll be able to use "ie6" to start-up ie 6 via Darwine. Remember to open X11.app first.

As you can see, the font is really, really ugly, and Chinese characters can't be displayed properly.

I hate times that in the "am/pm" format. It's a big waste of screen space, especially when I am using a 13.3 inch screen. I miss the 24-hour format time, but I didn't find it in Mac.

But finally I've found the way:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Open International
3. Click the Format tab
4. Click the Customize button beside "Times"
5. Hover your mouse over the hour indicator, and it will show a arrow. Click on the arrow you'll get a drop-down list to choose hour formats.

Here's my snapshot:

So I get my 24-hour format time back, in my iCal, Mail, anywhere.

Here's a example to make a virtual class in c++, similar to "interface" in Pascal and Java:

 1 #include <stdio.h>
 2 #include <string>
 3 #include <vector>
 4
 5 class base_foo {
 6 public:
 7         virtual std::string name() { return "base_foo"; }
 8 };
 9
10 class foo: public base_foo {
11 public:
12         std::string name() { return "foo"; }
13 };
14
15 class bar: public base_foo {
16 public:
17         std::string name() { return "bar"; }
18 };
19
20 int main() {
21         std::vector<base_foo*> foo_list;
22         foo f;
23         bar b;
24         foo_list.push_back(&f);
25         foo_list.push_back(&b);
26         printf("%s\n%s\n",
27                         foo_list[0]->name().c_str(),
28                         foo_list[1]->name().c_str());
29         return 0;
30 }

The result of this program is:

foo
bar

QTerm is a Qt based open source BBS client

I've made a static build of the latest release (0.4.0) on my MacBook. It's a static build, that means you don't need Qt installed, you need just this app to run stand alone. And it's not a Universal Binary, it can only run on Intel Macs

QTerm is designed to be primarily ran on Linux platforms, so that the keyboard shortcuts are in Linux-style. I've also made a modified version to change some of the keyboard shortcuts into Mac-style. The changes include:

1. alt+0~9 -> cmd+0~9
2. alt+up, alt+down, alt+left, alt+right -> cmd+up, cmd+down, cmd+left, cmd+right
3. copy: cmd+c, paste: cmd+v

Here are my builds: original version, modified version. They are bzipped tarballs of ".app", extract them and move qterm.app to your Applications folder.

Here's a funny domain name: http://www.mamashuojiusuannizhucedeyumingzaichanggoogledounengsousuochulai.cn/

This domain is in Chinese pinyin, which means:

Mom says that, whatever how long your domain name is, Google can also search it out

But, can google really search it out?

The title said it.

I've got my new MacBook (hooray!), and decide to name my computers, base on their system.

For my new MacBook, the name's McManaman, he's one of my favorite players

Based on this rule, I named my old lap-top with Debian to deBoer.

And finally, I decided to name my router Routledge, this name is perfect for a router, isn't it?