Start learning category theory

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 …

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"Quick Fix: Windows XP Crashes with Blue Screen with Video Content"

For some reason, my main working machine, a Windows XP desktop, recently  started to crash a lot followed by the blue screen of death. The error message output at the blue screen does not seem to be helpful.

***STOP: 0x0000008E (0xE0000001, 0xBA490925, 0xA880D820, 0x00000000)
***watchdog.sys - Address BA490925, base at …

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Display LaTeX Math on Drupal with MathJax

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 …

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Upgrade Drupal with Almost Zero Down Time

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 …

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How to Share Mouse and Keyboard across Machines

If you have multiple machines but only one set of mouse and keyboard, then you must check out this neat little tool called Synergy. It allows you to seamlessly share mouse and keyboard across machines. It even allows you to copy and paste text across machines.

I have been using …

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Fix Drupal Search

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 …

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My solutions for problems No. 76-100 on 4clojure.com

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 …

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Develop clojure Web applications with vim

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 …

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Thinkpad Hotkeys in KDE4

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 …

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Config Spring and DWR on Jetty with zero XML

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 …

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Suspending to RAM on Debian laptop

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 …

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Create Multiple Modules Maven Project in Eclipse

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 …

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Java time resolution

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 …

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"txt2tags: a Lightweight Document Authoring Format"

txt2tags

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 …

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How to load context of text files into DB2

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 …

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