The main product of my startup is written in Clojure, a language that puts enormous pressure on the memory garbage collector due to the pervasive use of immutable data structures. The new Z garbage collector on JVM has been a blessing for us, as it has largely solved our memory …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Command line manual page is an indispensable tool for working with Linux system.If you forget how to use a command, just type man followed by the name of the command. One thing I don't like about the manual system on my Debian sid is that it uses most to …

All of my laptops are now running Debian based Linux. It works great. Linux handles all my daily works well. However, there are occasions where I need a Windows machine. For example, I recently need to deliver a lecture on a system that runs only on Windows. Also, in the …

Introduction
Nowadays, it is not uncommon to see people multi-tasking with a dozen of windows open. With an 12 inch small screen, Thinkpad X61 really needs an efficient window manager for me to get serious work done. I have been struggling to find a good choice. Of course, 3D desktop …

On my old Thinkpad X31, there is a nice little program called tpb that makes all Thinkpad hotkeys work on Linux. However, that project hasn't been updated for two years, and tpb does not work with the newer Thinkpad models. On my new X61, notably, the sound volume controls are …

Thinkpad X61 has an VGA output port, so it supports dual-head display. However, with the Intel GMA965 graphics chipset in X61, the thinkpad_acpi (used to be called ibm_acpi) kernel module does not seem to support switching on or off this VGA port any more. The traditionally used commands, such as …

I got a brand new Thinkpad X61 laptop last Saturday. Unfortunately, the factory loaded Vista Home Basic was too bloated and ate up 700MB memory from a fresh boot without launching any application! If you know me, you know what I will do - remove Windows and load up Linux!

The …

My Thinkpad X31 got a small 12.1 inch screen, so I decide to increase the screen real estate by adding an extra monitor. The idea is that the LCD and the CRT monitor will display different part of the same desktop. This dual head solution is sometimes called 'Xinerama' …

Under Linux, have you ever felt that stuff on your brand new LCD display looked blurry, especially with small font sizes, the words start to look fuzzy after a while? Chances are that you did not set the LCD with its optimal resolution. There is an easy fix:

1. Measure the …

Ok, what is centralized authentication? Why bother? Well, if each person in your home or organization uses her/his own computer only, no need for this. However, if you or your organization have a bunch of machines and people need to login to different machines at different times, you've got …