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 …

My colleague has highly recommended to me the following CSV reader/writer: https://supercsv.sourceforge.net/

I am yet to test it out, so I will need to come back provide my review. But just put a pointer here, since this tool is not realy easy to find without the …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …