JSON is arguably the world's most popular human readable data format today.  It has largely replaced XML as the data exchange format on the Internet. One of the key reasons for the proliferation of JSON is its simplicity.  The data structure are very limited: only arrays, enclosed with []; and objects …

Clojure has been my primary programming language for a couple of years now. During this period, I have relied on my trusty Vim text editor as the development environment. Coding Clojure in Vim had been an enjoyable experience with these excellent Vim plugins:

1. vim-clojure-static
2. fireplace.vim
3. paredit.vim
4. Rainbow Parentheses …

The IT department of my company has been urging us Mac users to upgrade OSX to Lion a long time ago. After getting a few papers submitted last week, I finally got around to upgrade the Snow Leopard for my Macbook Pro work machine. Since I couldn't find Lion on …

As previously mentioned, I am learning category theory, beginning with Lawvere's Conceptual Mathematics book. This is a very elementry book that assumes almost nothing as a background. However, it is still a math book, which requires doing some exercises. Since the book provides no answer to exercises, I decide …

For people that need full features of vim, the default installation of vim on Mac OS X is definitely not enough. For example, I need to use vim to post to this blog, which requires a version of vim with python support. I also prefer terminal version of vim to …

Perhaps due to my rather small brain (literally), I dislike remembering tedious details. When in elementary school, I hated reciting classic Chinese poems, but liked composing my own :-).  In high school, I hated chemistry but loved physics, because one could do everything based on a few principles in physics, whereas …

When Tom (唐唐）was adopted from the animal shelter, his papers listed him as an "American Domestic Long Hair". As new cat parents, we were eager to find out his true breed. We searched and searched online, and identified him as a Chartreux, based on his fur color and …

As mentioned previously, I swabbed my cheeks and mailed my Y-DNA test specimen to FamilyTreeDNA a few months ago. Now the first part of the results, consists of twelve markers, are known. These are standard Y-STR results. Before showing the actual numbers, let me briefly explain.

What I ordered was …

I was brought up as a Han Chinese and I myself have never doubted that identity.  However, I do know that I look slightly different from people around me when I grew up. Darker skin, slightly curly hairs, deeper set eyes and other distinctive facial features. Put it simply, my …

MathJax seems to be the emerging standard for displaying math on the Web at this moment. It is supported by American Mathematical Society and American Physical Society, and has already been adopted by major math related discussion venues such as Physics Forums and Stack Exchange. MathJax displays math using CSS …

This site was setup in 2007 with Drupal 5, and it has not been upgraded until today. I did not feel the need to upgrade since this is just a personal blog. A few days ago I wanted to install a module, but Drupal version 6 is required, so I …

Today I tried to search "clojure" using the search box at the top right corner, but could not find anything. I know I wrote a few posts on Clojure recently, so there must be something wrong with the search functionality here. This is a Drupal site, and this should be …

Finally done with all the 100 problems listed on 4clojure.com so far :-). When new problems appears there, I will probably do them when I have some time to kill, but I will not post my solutions here any more. If I found interesting programming exercises, I may submit to …

This post continues the previous one, on my solutions for small clojure programming problems on 4clojure.com. Doing these problems seems to be addictive as I could not seem to stop myself. The site recently added a golf league feature, so one can see how short one's own solution compared …

For someone without previous Lisp experience, the hardest part of learning Clojure programming seems to be the functional way of doing things. It is like math, one really needs to do some exercises in order to master it. At this point, 4clojure.com seems to be the best place for …

I recently started to learn clojure programming. It is an interesting experience. Ever since I learned computer programming almost 20 years ago, in Pascal, on a VAX minicomputer terminal, I have not experienced this newbie sensation with a computer language. The sense of excitement and novelty is high, and the …

Yunyao and I work in a research center of a major technology company. At this time of a year, we attend job talks every week. These talks are technical presentations given by candidates for our research or development positions, as part of their two day job interviews here. Not surprisingly …

I have kept my Thinkpad X61 laptop up to date with Debian sid for a few years. The KDE4 in Debian sid is at version 4.4.5 at this moment, and I think it is mature enough for me to switch the laptop power management from my own hacked …

I hate xml configuation files. They look awful. As a result, they can be very time-consuming to write, and are very error-prone. There's no type-safty checking whatsoever. I would rather keep configurations within my Java source code. After all, we programmers are the only people looking at these configurations, why …

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 …