Updated my tutorial Mac OS X Resource Fork and Command Line Tips for OS X 10.6.
How To Swap Caps Lock, Alt, Control Keys On Windows.
Wonder how much programers get paid? See:
What Is Gamma In Digital Images.
NSA Mass Surveillance (social news)
Discovered a blog by Sal Mangano (at Source). For detail, see bottom of: A Mathematica Optimization Problem.
Learning Notes On Goto, Continuation, Coroutine.
Mac OS X Changes To Unix (comments)
Expanded my vi tutorial: Emergency vi.
Started to use Google's Picasa. Some comments here: Google Picasa.
old Stuff from my main blog moving over here.
2009-12-30. Windows has a disk defrag tool build in. Just click on the disk and get properties, then under Tools tab. I am a efficiency nerd, but don't really trust defrag tools as it can corrupt your files. (sure i have backup, but to invoke it is a pain) Since Microsoft bundles it with Windows and this is 2009 not 1990s, i suppose it is safe, but still. Also, i always do partition my drives, but on this machine it's just one volumn of 685 GB. Usually partitioning is best done when you just bought the machine. But with PC today, it doesn't comes with a Windows installation disk anymore, so it's more difficult and i haven't partitioned my drives. Anyhow, on the Mac, the system does not bundle a defrag tool, and i always wondered why not.
Wikipedia Defrag has some thing to say about this:
HFS Plus (Mac OS X) In 1998 it introduced a number of optimizations to the allocation algorithms in an attempt to defragment files while they are being accessed without a separate defragmenter. If the filesystem does become fragmented, the only way to defragment it is to purchase a utility such as Coriolis System's iDefrag; or to wipe the hard drive completely and install the system from scratch.
umm... a optimized algorithm. One wonders, if Apple can solve the frag problem, then Microsoft probably would have done so too. I'm a bit skeptical that Apple's file system actually do any significantly better than Windows about the frag problem. The disk frag problem isn't really something that can be solved by “optimized allocation algorithm”.
China Closes Hacker Training Site (2010-02-08), By Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek. Source.
Scott Henderson, who tracks the Chinese hacking scene on a Web site called The Dark Visitor, observes that the crackdown follows from an investigation of a cyber attack that took down Internet access in the Chinese city of Macheng for three days. One of the hackers responsible had commercial ties to one of the men associated with Black Hawk Safety Net.
Python's Reference And Internal Model Of Computing Languages.
Unicode Popularity On Web. (web stat)
Discovered Windows Vista's VirtualStore that costed me some 30 hours in the past. Windows Vista VirtualStore Problem.
Discovered that Skype has a screen sharing feature builtin. (just click on the Share then Share Screen.) That is, you can show your screen to your friends on Skype. This is a Fantastic. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Without this feature, you have to use something like Timbuktu (software), or other Remote desktop software, but these usually lets you control the other desktop too.
The NoSQL Movement (random thoughts)
Python 3 Adoption (random thoughts)
Discovered Lout (software), a document formatter similar to TeX. The FAQ is here Source. I wonder what is its capabilities for math formulas.
See also: The TeX Pestilence.
Unix Pipe As Functional Language.
Fully detailed the emacs ahk mode problem. Emacs Ahk Mode Problems.
The AutoHotKey scripting lang is quite stupid. It has some oddities about line breaks.
This is ok:
Else If (WinActive("ahk_class Emacs") Or WinActive("ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_0") Or WinActive("ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass") Or WinActive("ahk_class gdkWindowToplevel") )
But putting the closing paren in a separate line creates compiler error:
Else If (WinActive("ahk_class Emacs") Or WinActive("ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_0") Or WinActive("ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass") Or WinActive("ahk_class gdkWindowToplevel") )
Also, the syntax is quite a syntax soup. e.g.
IfWinActive, ahk_class Notepad
if WinActive("ahk_class Notepad")
if WinActive("ahk_class" . "Notepad")
are pretty much the same.
Am starting this programing blog. This blog is a branching off of my main blog Xah Lee's Blog, so all programing related issues will be here now.
For past few hundred tutorials and articles on xahlee.org, see: Computing And Its People.