Flower Angel's Cat

...but tired, dreadfully tired. And worried about all these deadlines.

I suddenly find LJ accessible again today, but unfortunately I have already been blogging elsewhere for a whole month, and am unlikely to switch back. Not that LiveJournal is any harder to use, or the friends here are in any way less lovely than my new friends there, but I'm just lazy and am tired of all these moving around.

So that's the way of life.

...is that you spend too much time gloating over (NOT doing) the formatting that the actual content of your paper gets neglected.

Livejournal has been inaccessible for two days. Traceroute shows that the route is broken at 202.112.61.214--so it is, again, likely due to sabotage. How ironic it is, that exactly the same thing that had sent me here from MSN nearly a year ago is now forcing me to leave this lovely place?

Anyway, a big thanks to all my friends here (including but not limited to those on my friends list). I hope I'll have a chance to be back again.

(Note: I'm posting this through anonymouse)

Last night I spent 2.5 hours browsing through this TV series for the nobody-knows-how-many time. It had been one of the first few romantic stories I came across, and I was quite crazy about it during 2001-2003. Later I got to watch the original (1986 version), and even though it was simply gorgeous and in many ways better (fewer silly fights and no artificial-looking war scenes--and of course, it is hardly possible to act better than Liu Xuehua), the remake is by no means overshadowed. After all, it was the first time (and by some standards, the only time yet) that I had grown so attached to a fictional person. I wanted to read other people's reviews of the show, yet the many negative comments about her hurt me so much, as if they were accusing me of being selfish, manipulative, and "having the heart of a snake". Oh, how much did I wish that natural language processing technologies had been advanced enough to group the reviews by opinion, so that I could read only the ones I like to read!

Ah, a classic is a classic. There is always some reason why something becomes immensely popular, while others don't.

...if there are enough wealth in this world to allow everybody to get reasonably good food, clothes, a place to live in, essential medicine, books and televisions and computers, and in general all sorts of mass-produced modern conveniences, without having to constantly worry about losing everything in case someone falls ill or loses a job. After all, we do have huge factories churning out these necessities at an incredible speed and much, much lower cost than before. And the hard-working people can get more interesting jobs with more free time, while the lazy ones just get to do the boring stuff nine hours a day and 28 days a week for six months. This lack of freedom should be enough disincentive for them.

Is Your Son a Computer Hacker

Apart from the excessive number of links, some of which pointing to inappropriate places, this article is a priceless piece of gem.

Though I don't feel as excited about fireworks as I once did, it is still nice to have a holiday once in a while.

I saw PP1 shown on TV again today. I used to be such a fan of it, having watched it around four times since 1999, but now I find myself unable to like it as much as I once did. The plot seems much too dramatic, and the actor's looks are hard to get used to. Have I changed? Or maybe the actors and actresses have changed more? But no matter what, it isn't a comfortable feeling!

(And no, money and principle are not the main reasons.)

* * *
I dreamed about LMA's John Brooke (or could he be Demi?) today. He was about forty or fifty when I saw him, not really handsome, but not too unacceptable either. For some reason I could not recall his last name in the dream or afterwards, even though I remembered John and Meg and Daisy and Demi just fine.

BTW, what did John Brooke die from? In my dream he was sick with some kind of leukemia and could not afford the expensive treatment, but of course that doesn't agree with LMA's stories.

...is to read the stuff I wrote over ten years ago, which had spent some time on six different hard drives and had, as of ten minutes ago, a single surviving copy left in this world. And to find that my programming and English skills have not improved that much in ten years--at least, not as much as I thought. As one grows up, experience is gained, yet much of the spunk is gone.

When I got the network problems fixed, I told mom that she could surf the Internet on her laptop. "Just be careful. Don't go to strange websites or download strange software."

It had been a year or so since her Windows box--and the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on it--were last updated. But I thought it would not matter as long as she was careful. Well, network security is no joke. Within three hours, her laptop was pwn3d by spammers.

So I spent the whole of yesterday doing the exhausting and unenviable job of spyware-cleaning. Quite a number of tools were tried, but ultimately it was again the good old Knoppix live CD that saved me, for Google and /bin/rm still appear to work better than any "automatic" tool. The system refused to boot after I removed the suspicious files, but thankfully the Windows installation disc could repair it without a full reinstall.

I really don't know what to say now...

BTW, during the repairing work I tried to add an administrator password but ended up locking myself out of the system. The solution was ntpasswd, which allows the passwords to be reset (the encrypted files are, of course, lost; but there aren't any on that laptop).

I want to thank brokenhut for helpful suggestions on my network card problems. They are all fixed now. Somehow I have mixed up the two Ethernet cards ever since the machine was bought over three years ago (thankfully they're not two children ;). I took the external card (which turned out to be the VIA Rhine) out of the PCI slot and plugged it in again, and both cards worked, so I guess it was just a problem of poor contact. By the way, another lesson from this experience is that I should be very careful when changing the MAC address of my card, for various scripts, particularly udev, might get confused.

* * *
"Without modern medicine, " said Mother yesterday evening, "Your grandpa would have died twice and I'd have died once..."

"And I would never have existed." I finished.

Oh, but it is good to exist!

* * *
And I wish no one will hate anybody I love--or sympathize with. Even fictional ones. I sometimes get into arguments with my parents when watching TV shows because I try to justify some action that they find unjustifiable. I don't like such quarrels, but I do not want my favorite character described as someone "whose heart is poisonous like the snake"!

I have two Ethernet cards on my home computer: one is integrated and the other is a PCI card. The problem is figuring out which is which. Which is the RTL8139 card? Which is the one with the VIA Rhine chip? I'm too lazy to open the case so I'm not sure. And which is eth0 and which is eth1? It seems to be constantly changing. And strangely, I can use DHCP to obtain my IP address from my ISP on eth0, regardless of which card actually is eth0! And of course I didn't switch cables and only one of the cables connect to the cable modem!

To make matters worse, it seems that one of the cards is not working reliably, as sometimes the system would totally lock up or reboot if I do something on one of the cards. I'm not sure if it is a hardware problem or if it's just due to the utterly confused state of the software.

I found today a handy application for note-taking called tomboy, which comes with my FC6 linux system. It allows me to write random notes and organize them with links, without having to worry about where to save them (finding some note written three years ago and saved in some obscure directory surely isn't easy, even with advanced search tools). It is similar to a personal wiki, which had been one of my note-taking choices, but tomboy is a little easier to use and quite a bit easier to set up than web-based wikis.

Well, while we are at note-taking, I'll admit that I currently put a large fraction of my notes, mostly those recording essential ideas of papers I have read, in a plain text file about 1MB in size. I guess it would be nicer to put these notes in a system like tomboy, but a plain text file has an advantage in being extremely portable (easy to copy around and does not require special software), and with a good editor such as Emacs the usability isn't too bad. So I will probably keep that part of my notes, at least until it grows too big to be saved quickly--maybe there will never be such a day as the hardware keeps getting better :)

As I have a bit of free time these days, I decide to take a look at the hidden goodies in my newly installed Fedora Core 6 GNU/Linux system.

One of the more interesting discoveries is that I can enter polytonic Greek without installing any special software (no, I don't know much ancient Greek--it's just for fun). I just tweak the keyboard settings a bit so that I can emulate a Greek keyboard, with so-called "dead keys" for accents, on my ordinary 104-key U.S. keyboard (see http://tlgu.carmen.gr/Hellenic_polytonic_HOWTO.pdf). There is only one problem: the default GTK input method, SCIM, does not support polytonic Greek (http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-utf8@nl.linux.org/msg05216.html). The problem can be worked around by setting some environment variables:
1. Set GTK_IM_MODULE=xim, so that GTK applications uses Xlib's built-in input method support, XIM, rather than SCIM.
2. Unset XMODIFIERS, so that character composition does not go through the XIM server, which is, by default, also SCIM. Instead, the compose sequences in /usr/share/X11/locale/el_GR.UTF-8 will be used.
3. Xlib's input method support, unlike that of GTK, is locale-dependent, so I have to set LANG=el_GR.UTF-8. Of course, this means that I cannot mix Greek with any other non-English language in one application, which is, by the way, why GTK input methods exist in the first place. (Maybe I can also use .XCompose? I haven't tried.)
4. I prefer to see the user interface in English, so I set LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8.
5. GTK applications such as gedit should work now. For other applications such as xterm and emacs, I have to use an X font that supports Greek, e.g. efont-unicode (-efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*).

I also like the built-in screenreader, with which one can, in principle, work without looking at the screen. It is based on the Festival text-to-speech system. By the way, it is also possible to use Emacspeak with Festival using espeakf.pl, though I had to add the system hostname to festival's list of allowed clients in espeakf.pl.

Finally, I have taken a look at the well-known Firefox memory consumption problem. Two interesting articles on this issue are this and this. So it seems that Firefox just has to use so much memory after all. I had been somewhat annoyed by the huge memory cache (as seen in about:cache and also xrestop) full of uncompressed images when opening a site full of large images, but now it seems to be a reasonable, if not particularly clever, design decision. After all, how to implement the complicated CSS image composition features without having an uncompressed copy of the image around in memory? It is likely possible, but by no means immediately obvious.

The semester ended with a bigger flurry of birthday celebrations than when it began. Does that signify a new beginning?
Oh, please let me have a happy and productive holiday!

For the last few days I have been reading Gerhard Kramer's works and some other papers on network information theory. They are really wonderful, and not that hard to read compared to the amount of insights they contain. H is soooo right.

* * *
I'm not updating often because the network is not fixed yet. Yesterday was particularly bad, with almost all foreigh sites being inaccessible except Wikipedia. Well, with all these fiber cables still broken, it is theoretically impossible to get a good Internet access unless the cutset bound gets broken--which is arguably even more undesirable.

<rant>
At least in one sense this is true, for beta-reviewing can be such time-consuming work, particularly when the paper spans 13 double-column pages, is poorly organized, and contains tons of questionable implicit assumptions and approximations.
</rant>

Well, I know I have been ranting. Don't take it too seriously. After all, I did check myself before trying to post this on Whisping Vines.

Last night I watched a Chinese movie, which was a romantic tear-jerker about lovers separated by various historical events. It was quite as good as I had expected.

I don't have time to write a full review, but I think the thing I like most about this movie is that I do not have to hate anybody. Whatever the lovers or those around them do, they don't act out of selfishness or malice, so even though it is arguable whether they are doing the right thing, they can get the sympathy of the audience.

I'm literally overwhelmed by papers!

Someone has said that a person in pursuit of knowledge is like an expanding circle: as one knows more, he/she only finds even more questions and unknowns. Well, it is true, but at this moment I think such a person is more like an expanding 1000-dimensional sphere: the number of unknown things always greatly outnumber the number of known things, no matter how far in the path of knowledge one gets.

Still, I hope the expansion would never stop. In this way there will always be room for progress, for improvement, and for imagination.

* * *
It is now two weeks since the earthquake, and LJ is still dreadfully slow and unreliable. So are MSN and Gmail. Over the last eight months I have gotten quite used to pouring my feelings into this place, and it feels rather strange when such a channel is closed. Will it be eventually fixed? Or will it be soon before I have to say goodbye to this place forever?

The GNU/Linux system on my home computer had become quite a mess after seven years of use. It was originally Redhat 5.0, and I had not properly upgraded it ever since, but had instead upgraded most packages to their Redhat 9 counterparts and compiled some newer stuff myself. The messy mixture was usable, but it always took a lot of effort to install anything new on it, and there were also a lot of historical baggage, like, running everything as root and very limited use of unicode (Chinese filenames were encoded with GB2312). The good thing about linux (or indeed, any large software system) is that you don't absolutely have to upgrade the whole system to use a certain new feature--there is always an option of compiling by yourself. It is also a bad thing, as the system diverges more and more from a "normal" system after that, so upgrading becomes harder and harder.

So yesterday I decided that enough is enough, and did a fresh install of Fedora core 6 on a new partition. As usual, it takes quite a lot of time to make a freshly installed system comfortable to use, but anyway it is now mostly done.

Basic impression: The distribution contains plenty of nice features. The fonts look good (not that good when I set the language to Chinese--but the sweet thing is that I can input Chinese just fine in English mode, thanks to SCIM), the default Pinyin input method is the best I have seen on a linux system (though I have to manually recompile the package to use ShuangPin...), the unicode support is quite good, the display driver is acceptable (no bugs such as bad gamma correction or crash during VT switching, yet), and finally I can suspend my desktop computer using the software suspend feature (ACPI suspend did not work well before).

But there are plenty of rough edges as well, in scim-pinyin, gftp, vte, yum-updatesd, dosfsck, etc. The most serious problem is that the installer installed only the xen-based kernel by default (which is already wrong IMHO--I don't want to pay the 40MB-or-so memory penalty if I'm not using virtual machines), and somehow the graphics driver does not work in xen (another bug), so until I figured that problem out I couldn't even finish the installation. Of course, all these have been fixed, but this takes time, and it is definitely not friendly to new users.