Mac Mini Fever

Do u catch fever of Apple's Mac Mini? It's really cute and duty cheap, compared with those bareone PC. Barebone PC is much more expensive than regular PC with the same specs, so, surprise about Mac Mini's price.
Before make a decsion to get one, read some more... For me, maybe, if compatible with Linux. Love it so much.

Mammon

Mammon
Originally uploaded by li-zhao.

Chinese new year is coming, a mammon is preparing for wish all ppls.

A story on the road from handmade toy to today's propower

Five years ago, Linus Torvalds faced a mutiny. The reclusive Finn had taken the lead in creating the Linux computer operating system, with help from thousands of volunteer programmers, and the open-source software had become wildly popular for running Web sites during the dot-com boom. But just as Linux was taking off, some programmers rebelled. Torvalds' insistence on manually reviewing everything that went into the software was creating a logjam, they warned. Unless he changed his ways, they might concoct a rival software package -- a threat that could have crippled Linux. "Everybody knew things were falling apart," recalls Larry McVoy, a programmer who played peacemaker. "Something had to be done."
The crisis came to a head during a tense meeting at McVoy's house, on San Francisco's Twin Peaks. A handful of Linux' top contributors took turns urging Torvalds to change. After an awkward dinner of quiche and croissants, they sat on the living room floor and hashed things out. Four hours later, Torvalds relented. He agreed to delegate more and use a software program for automating the handling of code. When the program was ready in 2002, Torvalds was able to process contributions five times as fast as he had in the past. The Twin Peaks truce is just one of the dramatic changes during the past few years in the way Linux is made and distributed. The phenomenon that Torvalds kicked off as a student at the University of Helsinki in 1991 had long been a loosey-goosey effort, with little structure or organization. Young students and caffeine-jazzed iconoclasts wrote much of the code in their spare time, while the overtaxed Torvalds stitched in improvements almost singlehandedly. More...

More wallop invitation available

Sorry, my wallop account expired!! Please do NOT ask invitation from me again" Get one when it's hot. Plz leave ur email in wallop exchange forum if u want
From M$:

Your Request for Additional Wallop Invites has been Processed

You recently requested more invitations for your wallop account. This request has now been processed. Please feel free to use these to invite new friends to wallop. However, please be aware that after 7 days any of your unused invitations will be recycled back into the system.

Set default application tips for debian

In debian, sensible-browser and sensible-editor point to default Web browser and editor. You can invoke differenct default browsers by set the BROWSER environement var. The problem is how to set.
The following method is due to Osamu Aoki. It works OK with xfce, and maybe with other desktop environments. The commands are, unfortunately, run before the window manager starts. This makes this method somewhat unsuitable if you have icewm.

Three steps:

1. As root, create a file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/40xfree86-common_user-xsession with the following contents:

   if [ -d $HOME/.xsession.d ]; then
    UXFILES=$(run_parts $HOME/.xsession.d) 
   #or run-parts --list $HOME/.xsession.d
   #read man page of run-parts or run_parts*/
    if [ -n "$UXFILES" ]; then
    for UX in $UXFILES; do
    . $UX
    done
    fi
   fi
   

2. As user, create a directory called .xsession.d in your home directory.

3. Put any commands you want to run when X starts (including commands for setting environment variables) in a file. Put this file inside ~/.xsession.d . Commands in any files (they do not need to be executable files) inside .xsession.d will be run on each X startup, provided the filename consists of aphanumeric characters, underscores, and hyphens only. So in particular backup files (filename ending in ~), and files with a dot in the filename will not be run.

Example: you want to run scim, which needs the following commands to be run when X starts:

export GDK_USE_XFT=1
scim -d
export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"
export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"

You can put these commands in a file called ~/.xsession.d/scim. The commands will be run when X starts. If you don't want these commands to be run anymore, you can re-name the file to e.g. ~/.xsession.d/scim.old. Because the filename now has a dot in it, its commands will not be run.

Another example: to run skype (the Internet telephony program) each time X starts, you put a file (called, e.g., skype) inside ~/.xsession.d, just containing the command skype&.

More to read ...

Customize ur debian?

Since the arrival of the very first versions of Gentoo, some people have announced that "Debian is good, but that's not optimized for [distribution in which you run make all the time]". And this is wrong, you are free to recompile software you use on Debian, using the apt system. Downloading a tarball, uncompressing it, running configure scripts and make install, is an easy task for every Linux user, but this is not adapted for the Debian package management system. Stow was a way which worked without too much effort, but compiled programs were not really integrated in the apt dependancies. The ultimate solution is to use apt-build to recompile a software already packaged for Debian. Read the article from Julien Reveret

Potential of Blogger

As the easy of maintenence of blogger, I immigrated my research homepage to blogger yesterday. From now on, when i want to add some pages to it, i only need to create a new post via blogger.

C++ implementation of Ukkonen's Suffix Tree Construction Algorithm

A very fast linear time suffix tree construction algorithm is elaborately presented by Ukkonen. I like it so much. :-) I give my source codes of a C++ implementation here, under GPL license. Actually, many parts are borrowed from ANSI C Implementation.
What's interesting is the comparison between the C implementation and mine. I compiled both on my debian linux box using gcc 3.3. Without optimization, mine is about half slower than C. With -O3 for both, surprisely enough to me, mine is a bit faster than the C implementation. I like it. :-)

prerequisite software

libpopt
To compile
g++ treekits.cpp spattern.cpp -lpopt
enjoy it.