Doom 的呐喊

Google Release Search Interface for Fallout 3

2009-04-01T14:15:00.000+08:00

Google has released a search interface for Fallout3. To use it just bring up the Pipboy interface and hit the tilde key (~), then enter google followed by a return, the google interface will show up. Google's product manager Doug Garland states that this is for the players' convinience, and Google may release more similar products later (for example, a search interface in The Sims 3).

Wiki Moved

2008-11-05T02:44:00.001+08:00

My wiki has moved to here. I have redesigned the style to a dark theme and rearrange the footer area. Stuff about XeTeX was added into the TeX section and slightly changed the index page.

Plan to add a page about Gnuplot and maybe GNU/Linux, when I get the time.

In fact I was trying to put a Wordpress blog onto that host. But the service is such a rubbish that I was forced to give up...

iBus Input Method Engine

2008-09-08T19:23:00.002+08:00

大家都知道在 Linux 里有两个中文输入法最著名，一个是已经停止更新的Fcitx，还有一个是现在常用的输入法引擎 SCIM。SCIM 虽然好，但是有很多的兼容性问题，所以我一直用 Fcitx。现在据说是原来发明 SCIM-python 的人，觉得 SCIM 太搓了，于是又写了这个 iBus，架构优良，完全用 Python 写的，实乃我辈中人之良择，遂装之。

目前 iBus 还是个很初级的版本，我是用 git 搞下来以后编译的，自己写了 PKGBUILD 脚本，后来才发现 AUR 里有，冏... 装的过程基本顺利，不过这个东西的 dependence 实在是多，而且由于用到了 python-gconf，必须装 gnome-python，还好 Arch 的这个包不要求 Gnome~~

这个版本的 iBus 虽然初级，但效果已经很好，可以进行一般的整句输入，真是大大超出我的预料～，日后必有作为！上截图~~

现在我已经把 Fcitx 换下来了~ 哈哈

Linux vs. Mac @ last.fm

2008-08-11T21:06:00.005+08:00

The Mac group in last.fm has 80+ members, Apple has much more, 800+ in total, while the Linux has nearly 5000 members, which really surprises me. Is it because "Linux rocks"? :-D

And BTW, the top 3 artists in the Linux group are Radiohead, Pink Floyd and Metallica. Pretty rocking, huh?

Slow Motion in Leopard

2008-07-28T12:49:00.002+08:00

Found a "hidden" feature in Leopard. When you let the system do an animation, hold shift while do so will make the animation slow. For example, when minimizing a window, hold shift while press the yellow button will make the "genie" effect slow (enough for you to see the detail about how the window shrinks). Also, when you drag a file into a driver icon on the desktop, a finder windows will show up. Holding shift will make this a slow motion.

GTA IV

2008-05-03T23:14:00.005+08:00

GTA IV has been put on shelves in market. I've just watched the 4 trailer videos, and I think the graphics sucks in comparison to Assassins Creed, the animation sucks in comparison to Prince of Persia 3, and the modeling sucks in comparison to Doom 3. But, guys, BUT: it has got "Grand Theft Auto" in its name. What else can a man want from a video game?

EMI Sued MP3tunes

2008-04-24T10:52:00.000+08:00

April 22th, CEO of MP3tunes sent all users an email, saying that MP3tunes was sued by EMI because of that copywrong thing.

As you may be aware, the major record label EMI has sued MP3tunes, claiming our service is illegal. You can read about the case here. Much is at stake -- if you don't have the right to store your own music online then you won't have the right to store ebooks, videos and other digital products as well. The notion of ownership in the 21st century will evaporate. The idea of ownership is important to me and I want to make sure I have that right and my kids do too.

I don't think MP3tunes did wrong and we all know what rights we have. So I just want to say, EMI, you suck!

I Need an Apple Cinema Display

2008-03-20T13:31:00.001+08:00

Yes, I do. Because when I'm working on my paper, my desktop becomes this:

The apps are Emacs, xpdf x 3, rox file manager and terminal.

And I can optimize it a little, which results in this:

I can make use of one xpdf now, while lose the usability of the terminal...

Report IP and More via e-mail

2008-02-16T19:56:00.004+08:00

Want to SSH to you machine at home but don't know the DSL IP address? Why not make your home Linux mail it to you? I wrote some tiny programs that would keep an eye on you mail spool and do stuff according to some specific mail subject. For example, I can send an e-mail to myself which has a subject [CMD] ip_wan and sometime later I will receive an e-mail containing the WAN IP of my router, so that I can easily make a SSH/ftp/telnet session between where I currently am and my box at home.

The first program check my e-mail spool and tell if doing some tasks is needed.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import mailbox
import StringIO
import rfc822

SPOOL="/var/mail/corsair"

def lookUp(mbox):
    MBox = mailbox.mbox(mbox)
    Deletes = []
    CMDs = []
    for Mail in MBox.items():
        Msg = StringIO.StringIO()
        Msg.write(str(Mail[1]))
        Msg.seek(0)
        MsgParsed = rfc822.Message(Msg)
        if MsgParsed["Subject"].startswith("[CMD]"):
            CMD = MsgParsed["Subject"][6:]
            MBox.remove(Mail[0])
            CMDs.append(CMD)
        Msg.close()
    MBox.close()
    return CMDs

def main():
    for CMD in lookUp(SPOOL):
        print CMD

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()
    sys.exit(0)

And the second is a shell script that does specific task according to standard input.

#!/bin/zsh

MailAddr="My Email Address"

mailsend()
{
    print -l "Subject: CMD reply\n" $1 $2 | msmtp $MailAddr
}

for CMD in $(cat); do
    case $CMD in
        ip_wan)
            echo "Sending wan IP..."
            mailsend "Wan IP is" \
                $(wget -O - -q http://myip.dk/ | sed -nr 's|^<title>Your IP: ([^<]+)</title>$|\1|p')
            ;;
        ip_lan)
            echo "Sending lan IP..."
            mailsend "Lan IP is" "$(ifconfig)"
            ;;
        *)
            ;;
    esac
done

You can tell that this script currently only support sending LAN and WAN IP.

A possible usage of these two programs is to run the following every some minutes:

mailcmd.py | mailcmdexec.sh

Terminal Broadcasting

2007-11-07T11:53:00.000+08:00

Some days ago I registered an Aardwolf MUD account, and want to show to my girlfriend about MUD and how to play it. So I needed a method to copy the content of my terminal to hers, which I called terminal broadcasting. I got help from the official BBS of my college, that I could redirect the output of the script program to the target pt. The shell command ran thus:

$ script /dev/null 2>&1 | tee /dev/pts/2

Where I assumed that the target pt was /dev/pts/2.

Why was script functional? What I wanted was to duplicate the content of my terminal to hers, both of which, in fact, were file under /dev. So what I've got to do was to write the content of /dev/pts/1 (I assume it's my pt) to /dev/pts/2. Generally, for regular files, one can just do a redirected cat like this

$ cat /dev/pts/1 > /dev/pts/2

But since /dev/pts/1 changes continuously, the command above does not suit our needs. Furthermore, if we just redirect the output, we ourselves are not able to see the content of /dev/pts/1, which will make us unable to do any thing in it. So quite natually, tee will be used. And for the real-time-update stuff, we need a tool that gives us a subshell, and "watch" all the input and output and err. It very seems that a shell itself will do; however, unfortunately, a shell is too low-leveled for this task, and script is the very program (just see what script does: it write the content of current pt to a file). But the question is that why redirect? It seem a simple script /dev/pts/2 will do it perfectly. Yes it seems; however the answer is concerning the "update continuously" thing: by default, script only updates the file when encounter a line break (return), so we have to use a pipe. If you really hate pipes and redirection, you can pass a -f as an option like this:

$ script -f /dev/pts/2

It works similarly as using a pipe.

So for now we have two methods, and there is one more: using a named pipe.

$ mkfifo temp.fifo
$ nc -l -p 1234 -c "cat temp.fifo" &
$ script -f temp.fifo

When others want to see your terminal, they can telnet you via port 1234. This is a more robotic way.

Youtube Blocked by Chinese Internet Nanny

2007-10-18T10:50:00.000+08:00

Yes. Youtube has been blocked by GFW. And meanwhile, blogspot is unblocked. Don't know what's in their brains...

在十七大召开，举国欢庆的日子里，打开 tor 以庆祝。

Wiki is GFWed

2007-10-13T15:15:00.000+08:00

My wiki (and webng.com) was GFWed. If you are not a chinese, and want to know about GFW (aka. Chinese Internet Nanny), I recommand you Chinese internet censorship machine revealed.

At first when I found my wiki could not be browsed, I thought that webng.com was down. But GaloisAbel told me today that she can read it, and I realized that webng.com might be blocked. So I inserted webng.com into my .pac (which Firefox will parse automatically) and started tor and type the URI. After a while, that familiar blue webpage appeared~~ Ha!!~~

Mac OS X on IBM T40

2007-09-23T11:04:00.000+08:00

Installed Mac OSX on my IBM T40 laptop, and Windows was totally wiped out from my box.

The installation was quite easy, and it reminded me of installing Ubuntu. What troubled me was the hard drive partitioning process. Before, The MBR on my hard disk was definitely a mess, for that since I was about to install Ubuntu, I used to dynamically part it using Powerquest Magic, and it must produce some junk in the MBR. So when I formated the used-to-be windows partition to HFS+ with Disk Utility, it refused to do that, and said that it couldn't write into MBR. I had to back up all my important data with size of 30GB onto a mobile disk, and repartition the whole drive. Finally, I could format a primary partition into HFS+ and installed Mac OSX.

This OS is amazing, and of fantastic convenience. And everything in it goes smooth and shiny. What shock me most are the dock and the structure of applications. The dock can communicate with other running applications, and it do it a lot, so I have a funny duck with its wings spread and the number of new messages when Adium got some, as well as a fat rocket on which text is shown indicating the download speed when BitRocket is flying. And for the structure of applications, each one of them is a folder whose name is ended with .app, and the stuff this program needs is in this folder, including icons, xml-s, logic, etc.. So Installing an application is all about drag the folder to somewhere local.

There are also some troubles. The first one is that I cannot get video card driver installed, so QE and hardware acceleration cannot be enabled. Another one concerning the stability of OSX x86. Some of the applications can be easily stuck or exit abnormally such as Grapher and Safari. I am planning to replace Grapher with GNUPlot.

At last, a screenshot.

Program To Generate Random Sentences and Emacs's Popularity

2007-08-17T11:27:00.000+08:00

Just wrote a program to randomly generate sentences, which is somewhat more advanced than a similar program I wrote some mouth ago. The former one just randomly chose a pre-defined pattern and fill it with randomly chosen words, while this one, using recursive transition networks to indicate some basic rules of English grammar, can produce quite nice sentences with subject and object clauses, such as

The fool which reluctantly rocks unwillingly eats a book.
The silly man that is silly unwillingly kicks a book which finally pisses.
A book reluctantly eats a bug that is red.
A man unwillingly sucks.
The piece of shit that happily runs reluctantly kicks a bug.

Another thing, popularity of Emacs has descended during these years. And now it is less popular than even GEdit and Kite. See Vincent's post.

Youtube Video URL Extractor in Python

2007-07-28T20:34:00.000+08:00

This is a little programme I've just written, youtube-url.py. It finds the URLs of youtube videos according to video IDs. Thus we can download the video file whose ID is, for example, qNKtKm3SXvs with this command line:

wget -O video.flv `youtube-url.py qNKtKm3SXvs`

The code runs thus:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Time-stamp: <corsair 2007-07-28 16:16:38>

# Corsair <chris.corsair@gmail.com>
# Usage: youtube-url video-id

import sys
import urllib2
import getopt

def main():
    # Options parsing, fake for now.
    try:
        Options, Args = getopt.gnu_getopt(sys.argv[1:], "", [])
    except getopt.GetoptError:
        # print help information and exit:
        pass

    if len(sys.argv) == 1:
        print "Pleas specify a video-id."
        sys.exit(1)

    VideoID = sys.argv[1]
    WatchPage = urllib2.urlopen(
        "".join(["http://youtube.com/watch?v=", VideoID]))

    HtmlLine = ""
    while HtmlLine.find("SWFObject") == -1:
        HtmlLine = WatchPage.readline()
    UrlOriginal = HtmlLine[HtmlLine.find("BASE_YT_URL")+12:]
    UrlOriginal = '?'.join(["http://www.youtube.com/get_video", 
                            UrlOriginal[:UrlOriginal.find('\"')].
                            partition('&')[2]])
    
    # Redirect
    RedirectOpener = urllib2.build_opener(
        urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler)
    Request = urllib2.Request(UrlOriginal)
    UrlReal = RedirectOpener.open(Request).url
    print UrlReal

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Also, there is a Ruby version by Cheng Meng

New Blog and This Blog

2007-07-20T15:21:00.000+08:00

Create a new blog on scinese.com, 'cause this blog is blocked by Chinese Internet Nanny. The plan is that I write this blog purely in English, and the scinese one in Chinese.

The new blog is Wordpress based and has its traditional problem that it checks and alters my html code pretty much (even the code in <pre>).

Rockbox

2007-07-16T20:57:00.000+08:00

刚才吃方便面的时候，不禁想起了以前住宿舍，用量子力学压面的生活...

给 iPod 买了袜套，又忍不住自由的诱惑，重新安上了 Rockbox 系统。比以前进步不少，菜单有了图标，好像也比以前快了，tag database 和 bootloader 都升级为第二版，但是耗电的问题还是没有解决，所以暂时不敢放弃苹果原来的操作系统...

重新制作了一个主题，自己觉得还挺不错的，发布一下~~~

我的 Wiki 和考试拉稀

2007-06-20T12:02:00.000+08:00

更新了我的 Wiki，写了一些关于 Mutt 的东西，改进了代码加亮，最重要的是 hack 了 Muse 的源码，使产生的 xhtml 符合 xhtml 1.1 标准，patch 已经提交给 Muse 的邮件列表。

妈妈的，考试的时候又拉稀了...

LaTeX 幻灯片

2007-06-05T12:14:00.000+08:00

要做幻灯片，所以这几天找了一些关于 TeX 做幻灯片的文档，基本上就是 pdfscreen + ppower4, Beamer, ConTeXt 这几个东西。第一个没用过，因为比较麻烦，后面两个都试了一下。ConTeXt 是最牛逼的，强大而不失简洁，美丽而不失庄重，实乃我辈中人之良择，可惜配置中文字体未遂... Beamer 就比较好办，因为是在 LaTeX 之上，只要 LaTeX 能出中文就没什么问题，效果虽然比 ConTeXt 要逊色不少，但是强大而不失简洁，美丽而不失庄重，实乃我辈中人之良择。

顺便做了一个幻灯片用来测试，模板部分参考了沈坚的。只是个 Demo，内容不必在意。

How to Convert Video for iPod: The Freeway

2007-06-05T11:03:00.000+08:00

The freeway = the free software way.

There is a non-free way as well. See my old post which also includs the format and limit of video files that an iPod can accept.

Software needed:

For video transcoding: ffmpeg, x264
For audio transcoding: FAAC
Muxer: MP4Box
Misc.: MPlayer

Take a flash video (flv) from youtube for example. Such a flash video includes a MPEG-2 video stream and a MP3 audio stream, both of which are need to transcode. Assume the filename is liu4.flv.

First off, play this video file in mplayer which will display the format of this file (frame rate, coding, etc.). Keep them in mind.
Transcode the video stream. iPod accepts both MPEG-4 and H264 stream. For MPEG-4 coding:
```
ffmpeg -r [fps] -i liu4.flv \
-vcodec mpeg4 -b [bitrate]k liu4.m4v
```
Notice that the position of options makes sense! For detail, go to ffmpeg's manual.

Things are a little tougher if you wants to use x264, for that x264 only accepts YUV 4:2:0, YUV4MPEG 4:2:0 and avi/avs (if compiled with AVIS support) as input, so for a flv file, it should be first convert to YUV4MPEG (make sure you have adequate space on the hard disk).
```
mplayer -vo yuv4mpeg:file=liu4.yuv liu4.flv
```
Then
```
x264 -B [bitrate] --fps [fps] -o liu4.264 \
        liu4.yuv 320x240
```
Transcode the audio stream. First dump the audio stream from the flv.
```
mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile liu4.mp3 liu4.flv
```
Then use something to decode the stream to wav. I prefer Lame. After that, use FAAC to encode it to aac.
```
faac -b [bitrate] -o liu4.m4a -w liu4.wav
```

Finally, mux them up.

MP4Box -fps [fps] -add liu4.m4v
MP4Box -fps [fps] -add liu4.m4a

That's it. One last thing: variable frame rate and fake variable frame rate video files are not support by this freeway. (Is there a encoder that support it?)

锂离子电池 FAQ

2007-05-26T13:32:00.000+08:00

锂离子电池没有记忆效应
锂离子电池真的没有记忆效应
锂离子电池真的一点记忆效应也没有！
不用激活，因为出场时电池已经激活好了。
只有带“油表”的电池才需要每月放满-充满一次。“油表”是指电池中记录容量信息的芯片。放满-充满的过程是为了 reset 油表中的信息，而不是为了再次激活电池。

所有的笔记本电池都带有油表，其它的小型移动设备（比如手机和各种 music player）大多都不带。
因为没有记忆效应，所以不需要用光再充，完全可以随用随充，而且这是推荐的使用方式。
不是充的次数越少寿命就越长，而是放满-充满循环的次数越多寿命就越短。锂离子电池的寿命大约是 300~500 循环，在这个次数以后电量才会有比较明显的下降。

假如一个电池的容量是 800 mAh，某此使用了 100 mAh，然后又充满，这等于是 1/8 个放满-充满循环。
过放电和过充电是最大的伤害。
但是不用担心笔记本电脑或 ipod 总是接着电源会炸掉，因为充满以后就自动断路了。（锂离子电池不能浮充！)
上一条只对质量比较好的移动产品成立。
高温是对电池的第二大伤害。
保持 p, T 不变，锂离子电池的电量在 40% 左右时有最长的寿命。
实在看不惯周围的人折磨自己的电池，特发此文。
How to prolong lithium-based batteries

以下是关于 iPod 的。

iPod 的电池都是锂离子电池。
iPod 的电池是 Sony 或 Sanyo 产的，是正常人能见到的最好的电池，所以如果你的电池寿命显著的低于平均，那基本上是你自己的问题。

KOSS Spark Plug

2007-05-19T12:10:00.000+08:00

3年高寿的 Sennheiser MX400 挂掉了...，昨天去买了一个 KOSS 的 Spark Plug，就是传说中的火花塞~~~，￥160。堡了一夜，说说感受。

先说点客观的，频响范围。很多人都说包装盒上写的频响是骗人的，其实不是，只不过是那些人理解错了。盒上的那个频响是“有响应的频率”，那些 10 ~ 20K 或者 20 ~ 20K 基本上都还正常，而一般说的频响是“有正确的响应的频率”，当然就不可能是那个数了。上学期为了测试我的 Sennheiser PX200，我用 Matlab 生成了很多各种频率的正弦波，这次又派上用场了 :-)。经过测试，KOSS SP 在 40~12K 内的频响基本上是正确的，可见在￥100~200 这个价位上，火花塞的低音下潜算是很不错的了，高音么... 嗯，今天天气真好啊~~

再来点主观的。作为一代低音王 KOSS PP 的简化版，火花塞的低音真不是盖的，量是没的说，质也还可以，一般的鼓和 bass 都还听得清楚。中音来说，由于低音的量比较高，有些喧宾夺主（认为低音是主的人请把准备扔出的西红柿和臭鸡蛋自行吃下），但是质量也还可以，虽然没有 PX200 来的圆润，但在同价位的耳塞中应该算是平均水平。高音则是火花塞的硬伤，KOSS 在这里犯了 Hifi 的大忌。Hifi 设备的一条重要准则就是宁可不发，也不发错，而火花塞不仅发错了，而且一点隐藏的意思都没有，形容一下就是稀稀拉拉的，好像拉稀一样。对于那些充满三角铁的曲目，比如 Bedrich Smetana 的 La Moldau（我也不知道是第几乐章），简直是惨不忍睹... 音场上，火花塞是入耳式的，所以不错，比 PX200 要近一些。瞬态我就听不出来了，可能我的耳膜瞬态就不好...

总的来说，火花塞的音色算是极其有特点，音染很重的那种，声音偏闷，而且比较冷，人声出不来那种甜的流蜜的感觉。作为我的 PX200 的调剂还是不错的:-p。在￥200 以下的价位，这种有特点的耳机还真不多。比较适合听摇滚和 Jazz（流行不算在音乐的范畴内），古典也还凑合。当听到 Pink Floyd 的 Time 开头那一坨铃声的时候，请一定强迫自己认为昨晚没睡好觉，以至影响听力...

看图：从左下到右上为 KOSS SP，MX400，PX200。

GNU Screen Is Fucking Amazing!

2007-05-17T22:53:00.000+08:00

I was doing some DLA thing in a screen session. After half an hour's slow and boring calculation I decided to have some fun. So I opened up Firefox and started browsing. At that time, for that it seemed that a web page required some multimedia plug-ins which I did not have, the system stuck for a second and the X server restarted, which meant that I was forced to logout!

I was quite upset and thought that I have done a half-an-hour full-cpu-consuming (can them be combined thus?) job for nothing. But after I logged in again, I found my CPU was still working in high load. Opening up Top, I recognize my calculation program at the first sight -- it remained there. Filled with hope, I started screen using the -r switch and reattached the previous session and found that it was exacting what I lost. It was really amazing~~~

So one suggestion: start your terminal using termname -e screen.

GTR 2007

2007-05-05T15:38:00.000+08:00

狗日的，我居然不知道今年的第一场 GT 是在我的生日和其后的一天举行的，而且是在珠海，真是人神共愤...

看图先。珠海赛道：

赛道相对不是很难，有两个稍有难度的弯。1组的冠军是Lamborghini Murciélago（终于...），可怜的 Maserati...

2组的前两名是意料之中的两辆 Ferrari 430，Porsche 997 只拿到第四（默哀一小时）...

Scheme48 vs. PLT Scheme 与今天晚上坐在我右边的傻逼

2007-04-25T20:57:00.000+08:00

Seems that Scheme48 have some problem with lambda solving. I was doing exercise 1.37 in SICP and defined a procedure to represent "continued fraction" process:

(define (con-frac N D n init-value)
  (if (= n 1)
      (/ (N 1) (+ (D 1) init-value))
    (con-frac N D (- n 1)
              (/ (N n)
                 (+ (D n) init-value)))))

And I used the following code to test this procedure in Scheme48

(con-frac (lambda (n) 1)
(lambda (n) 1)
100 1)

It showed an error:

Error: attempt to call a non-procedure
       (100 100)

While in PLT Scheme, the procedure can run properly. I had no idea why this happened.

再说一下今天晚上，我去上西方文学鉴赏课，那个老师三十岁出头，看着还挺年轻。说屠格涅夫的《父与子》的时候说到了六四。老师说，那场风波的时候我正在上高中。坐在我右边的一个傻逼立马小声说，64年的时候你上高中？

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