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 …

BBC is broadcasting a documentary series titled "A year in Tibet". From the program description on BBC Web site, this documentary shows the real life today in Tibet. The first segment was shown on Mar. 6. Not surprisingly, there is a Youtube video of this first show. Surprisingly, if you …

Huahai has received his birthday gift from Yunyao, a few days early.

What's inside?

Wow, a scenic flight certificate, what a lovely gift! Thank you, babe.

Modularized software system design is often a good idea. Maven is the new software build system that is purported to be better than ant. For my new project, I want to create a maven build consisting of multiple modules. To do this, and let Eclipse treats these modules as parts …

I am writing a Java program to run psychology experiments. Since this is a generic program that may be configured for running some reaction time (RT) experiments, I am worried about the time resolution of Java. It turns out that I don't need to worry too much, except on Windows …

Fresh ideas often pop up when one is not working, e.g. while in shower or in bed. When that happens, one needs to jot them down fast. Of course, a piece of paper and a pen is still the best solution in term of speed. However, if a computer …

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. As …

I have been searching for a lightweight list solution since I started trying out the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach a few days ago. Unlike calendar events, list items (projects and actions) do not associate with a particular time and date, therefore, using a calender for them is not appropriate …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

When editing a long Latex document, it is beneficial to be able to point from current location in DVI back to Tex, and vice visa. This is what called reverse/forward search between DVI and Latex. With Latex-Suite in Vim, this functionality is already implemented, and there's no need to …

My /etc/network/interfaces got deleted when I removed mepis-network package. Everything was fine, except that kmail would hang since IP address 127.0.0.1 doesn't exist. It took me half an hour to figure it out. Had to create the file with these lines in it:

auto lo …

You may have seen that I sometimes post code here. Wouldn't it be nice if all the code are syntax highlighted, like what we see in a text editor? Well, with the help of Vim, it's easy. Vim is bundled with a "2html" script, that can turn whatever shown in …

In order to click "mailto:" links on Web pages to launch an email program, Firefox (or Iceweasel on Debian) needs to be told which email program to use.

To do this, type "about:config" in Firefox's address bar, type in "mailto" in filter, look if "network.protocol-handler.external.mailto" preference …

In this post, I discussed "clone" mode of dual head with xrandr 1.2. Now I got an extra monitor, and would like to use "xinerama" mode, wherein the built-in laptop LCD and the external monitor share a single virtual screen.

To set this up, I changed my /etc/X11 …

This site is primarily powered by Drupal, i.e. it is a PHP site. However, we have a few Web directories that serves regular HTML pages. Since I installed Drupal in document root, access to these directories becomes an issue.

The main problem is that directory index file resolution is …

My work requires me to connect to many different SSH servers, and I have different passwords for each server. It's a pain in the neck trying to type in many different passwords everyday. The obvious solution is to use OpenSSH's public key login solution, so passwords are no longer needed …

Most of Linux laptop users have done some customizations on the system so it works the way we wanted. Now we want to save the fruit of our hard labor in case bad things happen. We want to backup not just the /home directory, but the whole / directory, minus some …