Software

I am tracking Debian sid on my Thinkpad laptop, a few months ago it started to use pm-utils and broke suspending to RAM (sleep) functionality. Basically, the machine would go to sleep then immediately resume.
It turned out that this problem can be easily fixed by creating a file /etc/pm/config.d/local, and put in a line

The reason is that pm-utils by default does not unload Ethernet card module e1000, so the machine would be waken up by Ethernet card activities.

The task is fairly simply --- I need to load the content of some text files into DB2. There are many ways to do so, but since I only need to this only once (hopefully), I want to find an easy way without writing any external code.

So here is the solution:

(1) create a table containing a CLOB (VARCHAR should work as well, if we know the maxium size of the files in advance) column. For example:

create table test (docid INTEGER GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY,doc CLOB)

A lot of people implement GTD methodology entirely with Gmail. I don't feel comfortable doing that because gmail is not that secure. And I think depending on a network service is a bad idea for a GTD system. So I still download all my emails to my local computers.

Nowadays we do a lot of text input on the Web, like posting on forums, filling out a support request form, commenting on someone's blog, etc. Although Web forms often offer a variety of so-called rich text editing capabilities, nothing beats the good old desktop editors. For a vim person, a plain Web textarea simply is not the place for text editing. Fortunately, for Firefox users, this pain can be eased. There are a few Firefox addons that allow people to use external editors for editing textarea.

Although Firefox is considered very safe and stable, it sometimes hangs. In the past, when it hung, my solution was to remove the whole ~/.mozilla/firefox directory. It worked every time (reinstalling Firefox doesn't help). Of course, I would always backup my bookmarks.html and other files under the chrome sub-directory first. Then I had to reinstall the add-ons when I got a working firefox. It turned out I shouldn't have taken such a drastic action.

Although I have never laid my hands on an Apple computer, I have seen people going crazy about them. I remember seeing some kids shouting hysterically in front of Apple store on the release day of Tiger a few years ago. The user interface of Apple's OS is said to be one of the selling points. So when I was feeling tired of Mepis Linux's default look last night, I decided to try an OS X look for a change. It turned out to be relatively easy to do.

KDE widget

In this post, I set up vim as a manual page viewer, using ManPageView plugin. It turned out that the same plugin can be used to view info pages as well. All one needs to to is to add ".i" suffix to the command that you are seeking help on. For example, ":Man sed.i" will show the info page for sed. With this information, we can set up vim as info page browser, just add these lines in ~/.bashrc: