Watched 2 video reviews of Logitech G13 Advanced Gameboard (fantastic for programers)
Discovered a new book that cites my site. The book is:
Mathematica Cookbook (2010), by Sal Mangano. amazon.
The cited article is: The Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Fully Nested Notations.
For more, see: Printed references to XahLee.org and XahLee.org Site Awards and Recognitions.
Got this accolade today for my Java Tutorial:
Thanks much for your informative Java programming aid online. I'm an old crow who cut his teeth on assembly language - and left programming for my career in SatCom. But all roads seem to circle around some programming application and your website has been very helpful with my current interest. Thanks much for the time and effort your spent to create it!!
MS Engineering control theory UC-Berkeley '72
Wee!
Spent about 8 hours in the past 2 days keyboard geeking again. Reworked several of my articles on keyboards, recheck links, read a bunch more reviews and history, watched many videos, thinking about the design, etc. Ah, the joy of keyboard geeking. I'm probably among the top 100 keyboard freaks in the world.
Many articles now has a independent page, separated from large articles. They are:
The overall index of all keyboard related articles is at: All About Keyboards, Keyboard Layouts, Shortcuts, Macros.
Notes on Unicode BOM Byte Order Mark.
Also, created a index of my articles related to unicode, at: Unicode Related Tutorials and Essays.
In Windows Vista, when viewing a folder, you can view it as icons or list or detail. There's no direct keyboard shortcut, but you can do this:
You can set a key using AutoHotKey, so that Ctrl+1 is icon view, Ctrl+2 for detail view, similar to the Mac.
Q: Is there a way to switch to next app in Flip 3D?
Yes. Press Ctrl+Win+Tab to go next app. Press Ctrl+Shift+Win+Tab to go next app. Again, you can create a AutoHotKey script so that for example F1 switchs to the previous app, and F2 next app.
I'd be happy to send you little utilities for the above hotkeys. A donation is appreciated.
The mouse on Mac OS X is often too slow, even if you have used the Preference pane to set the tracking speed to the fastest. You can fix this. Start Terminal.app, then type:
defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling
The above will show your current scaling value. To make it faster, do:
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling 5
You need to re-log for this to take effect.
For more tips on using Mac commands, see: What's “.dmg” File? (Mac OS X tutorial).
How to autocrop border with ImageMagick? Answer: like this “convert -trim cat.png cat.png”. For more, see: ImageMagick Tutorial.
Some misc tips on how to disable the Win key in Windows, added to AutoHotKey Basics. Also, you can use IntelliType to disable the Win key. However, the “Win+L” (lock screen) cannot be disabled. See also: Microsoft IntelliType Hacks.
Created a page of AutoHotKey example scripts: AutoHotKey Example Scripts, and AutoHotKey Key Notations.
Discovered that on Mac Os X 10.6, tar, gzip, gunzip preserves resource fork by default. Updated at: Mac OS X Resource Fork and Command Line Tips.
Discovered that on the Mac, to securely delete files, just use the builtin command srm, like this: “srm -r -s dir_path”. For detail, see: Secure Deletion, File Shredding, on Windows, Linux, Mac.
If anyone is using Windows Mail ... is there a shortcut so that it put the current mail into a seen/read/processed folder? Precision dragging is getting me tired.
Windows Mail is superceded by Windows Live Mail in Windows 7. Is it worth the hassle to upgrade? There's Thunderbird i'm using for Google Mail. It is better than Windows Mail but not that much better. Let me know what you think.
Most keyboards has a volume key, but very annoying. You press it, and the volume increases by 1%. So, you have to press it 10 times. So, you think you might hold it. But, when you press and hold, the system doesn't respond for a second or two, then all of a sudden went all the way up.
I created a little app that fixes this. Press Ctrl and the Plus key on the numpad will increase volume by 10%. With the minus key decrease by 10%. Fantastic!
Please send me a donation and i'll send it to you. (paypal to xah@xahlee.org ) (the app runs on my Windows Vista, should work in XP and Windows 7 too.) Thanks!.
A very interesting read. WHAT EDSGER W. DIJKSTRA BLOGGED ABOUT LISP? (2010-03), By Kazimir Majorinc. Source.
For other articles related to Dijkstra, see:
Sun Microsystems is dead. I'm so glad. I hate Sun very much. Them with their aggressive marketing lies and jargons with java. They are the most abusive of marketing jargons of any tech company. Keeps creaing spurious, useless, jargons just for the purposes of marketing. Abusing the term API, Interface. Calling their OS as “Platform”, and there's JDK, JSDK, J2EE, J2SE, Tiger, version numbering abuse 1.x to 1.2 == Java 2 now 1.3, JavaOne, JFC, Jini, JavaBeans, entity Beans, Awk, Swing. And before my time, from SunOS to Solaris. Lies about open standards. In the first 5 or more years of java, where Java sky rocketed their sells of their Solaris OS and server hardware, but keept creating obstacles on a quality java on Linux, during the dot com days (~1997-2001) where Linux is also raging is its main threat. (we can safely say that Linux + Cheap PC won now.) And finally in their brink of commercial death, Sun Microsystems pulls the trick of saintly open sourcing Java like Netscape did.
Learned about Open XML Paper Specification, aka OpenXPS. It is a page description language and a fixed-document format, based on XML. Basically, similar in purpose and function to PDF and PostScript. It's Microsoft's tech but standardized and royalty free. When you print, you can print into a file, then this file can be viewed in any other display or printing device, and should appear identical, just like PDF.
You can try it. Copy this paragraph. Paste it in Notepad. Ctrl+P to print it, choose the XPS Document Writer as the printer. Then, choose a name such as “xyz.xps”, save it. Then, use unzip to decompress the file. Then you'll see several dir and files in xml format. The file named “1.fpage” contains the main file content of this text.
Wonder how much programer gets paid? See:
Discovered a blog by Sal Mangano (at Source). For detail, see bottom of: A Mathematica Optimization Problem.
China Closes Hacker Training Site (2010-02-08), By Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek. Source.
Scott Henderson, who tracks the Chinese hacking scene on a Web site called The Dark Visitor, observes that the crackdown follows from an investigation of a cyber attack that took down Internet access in the Chinese city of Macheng for three days. One of the hackers responsible had commercial ties to one of the men associated with Black Hawk Safety Net.
Discovered Lout (software), a document formatter similar to TeX. The FAQ is here Source. I wonder what is its capabilities in for math formulas.
See also: The TeX Pestilence.
The AutoHotKey scripting lang is quite fucking stupid. It has some oddities about line breaks.
This is ok:
Else If (WinActive("ahk_class Emacs") Or WinActive("ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_0") Or WinActive("ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass") Or WinActive("ahk_class gdkWindowToplevel") )
But putting the closing paren in a separate line creates compiler error:
Else If (WinActive("ahk_class Emacs") Or WinActive("ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_0") Or WinActive("ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass") Or WinActive("ahk_class gdkWindowToplevel") )
Also, am tired of the “ahk-mode.el” by Robert Widhopf-Fenk. If you write “if” with lowercase "i", then it won't be syntax colored, even the lang's keywords isn't case sensitive. Also, if you move cursor by word over “$NumpadDiv::”, it thinks that “::” or “$” are part of the word but are not. Also, when you press Enter, it fucking tries to smartly format your line and break your string into separate lines.
Might want to create my own ahk mode, but that'll take like 10 hours with everything well done.
Was reading about Eve online, a massive multiplayer online spaceship game. Here's a interesting quote:
Both the server and the client software for Eve Online are developed in Stackless Python, a variant of the Python programming language. Stackless Python allows a relatively large number of players to perform tasks without the overhead of using the call stack used in the standard Python distribution. This frees the game developers from performing some routine work and allows them to apply changes to the game universe without resetting the server.[52]
Humm... Stackless Python. And then on this article, it mentioned that Second Life is also using it. The source of this claim is here http://wiki.secondlife.com/w/index.php?title=Eventlet&oldid=51543.
Central to the issue here is Coroutine, which i never understood. From reading the Wikipedia article, it appears to be a language feature that allows mutual loop. For example, 2 functions f and g, each calling the other at the end. Normally, that would quickly run out of memory or such. hum... still not sure i fully understand. How does on mathematically explain this feature?
When thinking about computers, often i model it to manipulating abacus. (you could use Turing Machine to model but more complicated to think about) So, a subroutine, is then a reusable part of algorithm, or, reusable part of instruction on how to manipulate the abacus. So, normally, subroutine is expected to terminate, meaning, given a unit of abacus manipulation instruction set, the way you use this is to expect it to reach the end of instruction, then follow another instruction. But coroutine, is then such a instruction set that is not expected to reach a end. Rather, you expect that in the middle of the instruction to follow some other instruction set (kinda like Goto). This all makes much sense now.
Am starting this programing blog. This blog is a branching off of my main blog Xah Lee's Blog, so all programing related issues will be here now.