Monday, November 29, 2010

color in xterm

to have colors for filetype recognition in ls, use
alias ls "ls --color"
or
alias ls='ls -hFG'
in .cshrc or .bashrc

when using vi, to have color to aid coding, create a file .vimrc in home directory containing:
set term=ansi
syntax on

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Thursday, September 30, 2010

skype

skype and easyjet, and probably many more companies, try to use big, fat icons that probably are meant to be cute, but they just look disgusting to me.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

summer 2010

some notable events:

clj2010... a successful conference on galaxy clusters hosted by ipmu
surging japanese yen
missing of >100 yr old people in japan
hottest summer in 70 yrs in japan

Sunday, September 05, 2010

0.5 million miles

the sum of all my miles on record so far...
0.287 M from aa
0.096M from continental
0.12M from delta+nwa
0.011M from united+ana

Saturday, July 24, 2010

manta rays

off shore from sheraton, kona, in big island, hawaii; taken by iris

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

the very first light

it's a very good account of the tremendous efforts that the cobe team has put together to decipher the beginning of the universe.

the new additions in the 2nd edition, added after the nobel awards to john mather and george smoot, really need serious editing.

what george smoot did to the cobe team was really unethical and terrible.

Friday, March 19, 2010

cd

given that it's so expensive to buy CDs in japan, taiwanese travel agencies should use the cheap CDs/DVDs to attract japanese tourists!

Monday, February 22, 2010

mac osx 10.6

is it worth upgrading from 10.5?

the cost is not much (~US$30), and the time it took was not too long (less than 1-2hr). i did not notice the improvements apple advertised (faster this, faster that...), and i had to download and installed developer's tools to be able to code.

overall, i don't think this is worth the time and money. if os 10.5 runs fine on the computer already, i think it's better not to touch it. i consider myself lucky that upgrading didn't break things (so far... fingers crossed!).

------------------------

after using it for a month, my feeling is that what apple does best is advertising. using terse phrases to attract customers.

after installing 10.6, from time to time when i compile codes the compiler would strangely be switched from gcc to lex, which then overwrote my code!

Sunday, February 07, 2010

gmail

i mainly use two email accounts: one at work, the other gmail. for some reason i cannot access to my work account from home, so i have to rely on gmail at home. i thus have to cc/bcc to my work account work-related messages i send via gmail (using the custom "from" address so it looks like being sent from my work account). i also set up my work account so that it forwards messages to gmail. bottom line is, when i send a message from gmail, both my work account and gmail get a copy of it.

this system worked for >1yr, until recently. i no longer see the mails i cc/bcc'd to my work account in my gmail inbox. after spending several hours trying to figure out what's wrong, i learned from this discussion that it was due to google's decision to make gmail "more self-consistent".

basically, if the "from" and "to" (or cc/bcc) address are the same (in my case my work account), gmail regards the message as being sent to a mailing list and it will automatically remove the "inbox" label of the message, so the mail can only be found in the "all mail". one can add the "inbox" label to the message by hand, but it's annoying.

a workaround is to set up a filter, so that for all messages from my work account are treated "never send it to spam". for some reason this put the messages back to inbox.

google should have warned the users of gmail such change, however minor it may be seen to them!!!

Thursday, February 04, 2010

citeulike

how to search for papers with multiple tags:

to find papers tagged with "gf" and "radio_galaxy":
in the personal library, type in the search box
+tag:gf and +tag:radio_galaxy

or directly from the url:
http://www.citeulike.org/user/AAA/tag/gf,radio_galaxy
where AAA is the username

see some discussions here