Much updated: Computer Keyboard Switch Mechanisms.
Oldie but goodie: Unix Pestilence: Quotations.
Today's HAL's birthday. Run this perl code to have Mac sing Daisy Bell. Daisy Bell in “2001: A Space Odyssey”
Few days ago, i discussed whether the symbol “upside-down A” in title of anime series 〈Turn A Gundam〉 should be the unicode ∀ (U+2200; FOR ALL) or Ɐ (U+2C6F; LATIN CAPITAL LETTER TURNED A). I got the answer. Thanks to Maiko Kinzel Engelke and Benjamin Howard Lee. See bottom at Unicode Semantics: the ∀ in Turn A Gundam.
More Keyboard Geeking
New page Truly Ergonomic keyboard (review).
Plus several updates on
Improving writing, added photo, cleaned dead links, etc.
If you like the reviews, tell your friends, tweet, blog about it, buy it from amazon links on my site. Thanks.
Much updated: Computer Keyboard Switch Mechanisms.
Updated. Added a YouTube video and official site: The μTRON Keyboard
Spent about 10 hours keyboard geeking again. Several major updates in the following pages. Addition of some 15 glorious photos of keyboards and their layouts.
Today's tip for geeks.
Q: What to do when you see an attractive girl?
A: Rush out of sight quietly.
Any programing language, that uses keywoards like BEGIN END instead of any [({brackets})] , is a fuckedup language.
so, Google introduced a new language, Dart.
Q: What's Dart in a nutshell? A: Javascript with Java syntax.
Emacs Lisp, Perl, Python: Building a Multiplication Table @ http://xahlee.blogspot.com/2011/10/emacs-lisp-perl-python-building.html
NoSQL?
Found this comic:
See also essay: The NoSQL Movement.
see ✍
Preliminary report of a little programing challenge last week: Lisp, Python, Perl, Ruby Code to Validate Matching Brackets.
Updated: List of Great Windows and Mac Software.
Question: What tools i can use to monitor network traffic? either build-in or 3rd-party. I like to have a graph view (e.g. as in Task Manager) but also nice are tool that lets me know detail, such as what IP/port that's incoming/outgoing. Command line is fine. Or even some tutorial. Thanks.
Just discovered that Windows since XP comes with a command-line tool called “cipher”, which can be used to securely delete files. Shit. Why am i not told about this? I spent several hours when i need to do that in 2010. Updated: Secure Deletion, File Shredding, on Windows, Linux, Mac.
Discovered a nice unicode site. 〈Unicode table for you〉 @ Source www.ftrain.com.
See also: Xah's Unicode Tutorial.
I discoverd the link from JCS's blog @ irreal.org. Well written blog with annotated comments and links on things of interest to emacs and lisp programers.
Discovered several languages. TXL, Colm, and the concept of transformation systems. Added to bottom of: Pattern Matching vs Lexical Grammar Specification.
Updated AutoHotkey Key Notations and AutoHotkey Syntax Problems.
AutoHotkey language is the most idiotic among langs i know of. I think it's even worse than perl or unix shell.
Logitech created a solar powered keyboard. amazon.
Neat as a gadget, but not for me, because: ① Not ergonomic. ② Lack of extra buttons.
See also: Keyboards, Layouts, Hotkeys, Macros, RSI.
Discovered that there's a forum for Paul Graham's language Arc Lisp, at arclanguage.org, and there's a thread discussing my criticism of lisp, at: Source arclanguage.org.
A new version of DejaVu Font (v2.33) is out. See: Best Fonts for Unicode.
Discovered that there's actually a keyboard shortcut for copy ＆ paste in Windows Console. See: Windows Console Shortcuts.
Stackoverflow answers: “How does a Unicode character get mapped to a glyph in a font?”: Source stackoverflow.com.
Am surprised to learn that Stack Overflow is build using Microsoft technologies.
See: Source blog.stackoverflow.com.
Great going Microsoft!
Idiotic Adobe Reader (aka Adobe Acrobat).
When in Google Chrome browsing a pdf file, Chrome tells me: “Parts of this PDF document could not be displayed. Open in Adobe Reader?”. So i clicked Yes. Then, Chrome tells me: “Adobe Reader is out of date any may be insecure”, with a option to update. That's a bit strange, because i thought i have it up-to-date. So, i manually opened Adobe Reader, then clicked on the “Check for Update…” under the Help menu. It says: “No updates available”. I then checked version, it's “9.4.2”. Then i went back to Chrome and get the update, the download is “Adobe Reader X (10.0.1)”. Fucking idiotic Adobe Reader.
See also: The Complexity ＆ Tedium of Software Engineering.
and Google Chrome is really fantastic. See: Google Chrome ＆ Browser War II.
How I lost my faith [in lisp], Ron Garret
A old comp.lang.lisp newsgroup post has been dug up by Hacker News. The post is: How I lost my faith (2002-02-19) Erann Gat. @ Source groups.google.com.
i read it at the time it was posted, and just read it again. Note that its author, Erann Gat (aka Ron Garret), is somewhat a controversial figure in comp.lang.lisp. I think primarily having to do with the nasty fight between him and Erik Naggum. Also, i don't know the details, but he also don't get alone with another lisp regular Kenny Tilton.
Over all, i'll say i agree with his post there, that lisp isn't that great a language today, as i've expressed many times in the past years. My path to lisp is similar. For me, lisp started in 1998. First, there's awful amount of admiration and respect from me, even just for the association with the phrase “artificial intelligence”. Though, i never really got to the lisp-loving stage. I find problems with the lisp's list and cons in the very beginning, due to my experience with Mathematica. For real life reasons, i never actually got to code lisp. Only untill around 2006, i started to dig seriously into emacs lisp.
For all my love of elisp, it is primarily due to it being a functional language, and the emacs environment system. I can't say the love came from the lang being lispy. Ι HATE the cons, i HATE the parens (actually i LOVE the regular nested syntax (as in Mathematica), but lisp screwed it so bad). (See: Fundamental Problems of Lisp.)
(everytime you use a vector instead of list/cons, the lisp fanatics stare at you like crazy. Everytime you didn't tuck-in the closing parens at end, they think you are a newb. For all the AI automation lisp is renowned for, the lispers at comp.lang.lisp still don't get the concept of automated code formatting. They diddle with code formatting just like every stupid imperative lang. This is ESPECIALLY a slap-in-the-face because lisp's got such a nested syntax that maintains a structural info, which IS the main advantage of purely nested syntax. (See: A Simple Lisp Code Formatter ◇ A Text Editor Feature: Extend Selection by Semantic Unit.))
Discovered Google computer programing style guide. It has style guide for lang including: C++, JavaScript, Objective-C, Python, XML. At http://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/.
The ones am interested are:
I spent 30 min to read the js one. Haven't finished yet. Very good reading. If you are not a expert of the lang, you learn something about the lang too.
I'll be reading them all.
Discovered Google computer programing style guide. It has style guide for lang including: C++, JavaScript, Objective-C, Python, XML. At http://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/.
I'll be reading them and see what i found.
FSF made a declaration on Facebook. See: Mark Zuckerberg is TIME Magazine's Person of the Year? Where's the “dislike” button? (2011-02-03) by Matt Lee et al. @ fsf.org.
See also: Facebook's Ethics.
Discovered a new ergonomic layout, for French, called bvofrak. See: Dvorak, Maltron, Colemak, NEO, Bépo, Turkish-F, Keyboard Layouts Fight!. (thanks to Hugues Dumez.)
It's interesting that on their site bvofrak.blogspot.com they mentioned this (translated by Google):
Reminder. If you like this blog, you might also enjoy my other programer related blogs:
Usually i don't repeat a article in more than one place, even if it's related to both.
Discovered that the entire Perl Cookbook is now available online. Originally i thought it's official from O'Reilly, but until writing this out now, realized it's pirated. The sites actually contains 100+ O'Reilly books. The url is 〔http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/〕. Screenshot: ❐. I guess the site is making money by the ads.
Ι wonder if O'Reilly knew. Ι hope they can take action, but i guess it's fruitless. Am also guessing that there are probably tens or hundreds of such sites. (they are all over bittorrent anyway.)
See also: Software Freedom is Free Speech or Free Beer? ◇ Pathetically Elational Regex Language (PERL).
Worked with Mathematica for 5 hours yesterday. Fantastic! This old hand can still do something! lol. My plane curve packages soon to be out n am gonna be rich.
...gosh what godly hours i've spend on Mathematica in 1990s. Surprised to find that i even Unproctected builtin symbols to fix things. (get rid of asymptotes in ParametricPlot) (Draft notes as i go: Mathematica Version 3 to Version 7 Conversion Notes)
... i recall, i stopped doing Mathematica in 1998 because it's a career dead-end as a programing lang, and dived into the utterly idiotic Perl ＆ unix ＆ mysql world. (See: The Unix Pestilence ◇ Xah Lee's Computing Experience (Impression Of Lisp from Mathematica).)
Well, dead-end just as Emacs Lisp i'm spending my nights with in the past 4 years. LOL. And on that note, same thing can be said with haskell, OCaml.
Though, fringe langs are picking up these days. Remember Python, ruby, in year 2000? Who'd imagined they'd become mainstream. But it took 10+ years. (See: Language, Purity, Cult, and Deception.)
Also got reminded my age recently. Someone on stackoverflow is asking about what are those “A:” and “B:” drives on Windows. (anyone heard of floppy drives?) In another incident, i was chatting to a friend, and the topic went to internet tech in 1990s, and i was telling him about how PHP (aka Pretty Home Page) came about, then naturally i discussed CGI. After a while, i realized, those who are around 20 years old today were under 10 in the 1990s. They wouldn't know what was CGI, and no amount of explanation can tell them exactly it was like, because it has become HISTORY — if you didn't live it, you can't feel it.
Nice typing race site. http://play.typeracer.com/. You can have a friend go to the site and compete typing speed with you.
On Windows, what's the difference between 〔AppData/Roaming/〕 and 〔AppData/Local/〕?
Basically, the “Roaming” dir is for useful user data, and the “Local” one is for data like cache. Things in Roaming dir might be synced with a server so the data is available to user on different machines.
The “AppData” dir is introduced with Windows Vista, and used in Windows 7 too. In XP, it just have “Application Data” dir. On Vista and later, any write to “Application Data” automatically goes to “AppData/Roaming/”.
〈Managing Roaming User Data Deployment Guide〉 Source technet.microsoft.com
Discovered a new compression util: XZ Utils. Quote:
XZ Utils (previously LZMA Utils) is a set of free lossless data compressors, including LZMA and xz, for Unix-like operating systems (with experimental support for Windows as of version 4.999.8beta) controlled by a command-line interface. It has been ported to many Unix-like systems including GNU/Linux, Cygwin, and iOS.
See also: ZIP, Open Source, Mother-Son Relationship. (thanks to meowcat.)
Windows Vista has this Quick Launch toolbar. Basically, you can drag icons there and you can click icons there to launch apps. It also has a automatic hotkey feature. Whenever you put a icon there, a hotkey is automatically created for you. The first icon will have hotkey 【Win+1】, and second 【Win+2】, etc. The total number of hotkeys auto-created are limited to 10, from 1 to 9 and 0.
Great feature, but there's one problem. Whenever you create a new icon, or remove one, all your hotkey changes. This is quite annoying.
So, today, i disabled them all, and instead, use AutoHotkey to create hotkeys myself. Like this:
; disable the bunch of launch app keys setup by Quick Launch. Because it change keys whenever you add or delete a icon there. #1::Return #2::Return #3::Return #4::Return #5::Return #6::Return #7::Run "launch or switch skype.ahk" #8::Return #9::Return #0::Return
See also:
A fantastic video.
Quiz: in the following arrows, ⬅ ⬆ ⬇ ⬈ ⬉ ⬊ ⬋ ⬌ ⬍, which one is missing, and what is its unicode number?
Discovered Operation Payback. A internet activist group. Recently, they launched attack on those who attacked Wikileak. (See: Wikileak: US Diplomatic Cables Leak.) They DDOS attacked sites of Visa, MasterandCard, Paypal, Amazon, and some government sites. In the past, they've attacked sites such as Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Warner Brothers, and also Scientology, etc. Typically, big organizations that cracks down on piracy networks. (See: Scientology and Falun Gong)
I don't support software piracy. (See: Pirate Bay, Open Source, Free Software, Copyright.) However, in this world, much of it is political struggle. For example, there are 2 politicians B and E. You don't really like B, but you think E is by far the most evil. B is your possible chance to prevent E becoming more powerful. So, in many circumstances, you have to support B. This is in fact how alliances work.
Also, orgs like the Operation Payback are made of individuals, like you and me, where each of us make decisions individually, as opposed to big organizations that are typically mindless power controlled by a few. In some sense, that's a essential ingredient to keep some power to people, a form of Grassroots movement.
Also, i've always wondered how those DDOS attack gets their machines. I thought it's from viruses (trojan horses) downloaded unawares by users. Today, i learned the answer. There's this tool LOIC (for Low Orbit Ion Cannon). Basically, it's a software application you can download, so that you can participate in a coordinated attack agaist big sites. (the “attack” basically just means visiting the site repeatedly to drive their server out of handling request capacity; this is knows as DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack) Of course, some DDOS attack from are from rogue software (viruses; trojan horses) that hijacks user's machine without user knowning. But LOIC is the proper tool to carry out people's voices, in a meaningful and controlled way.
Andy Stewart, who wrote tens of elisp packages (see his site), started a new project on Haskell called Manatee. We voice chatted on skype for about 50 min on emacs and haskell and programing.
Manatee is a OS-like environment for Haskell hacking, currently running on top of linux and GTK+.
You can see many screenshots here: Source www.flickr.com. Or a video of screenshots at Source www.youtube.com.
Manatee home page at: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/manatee. Documentation at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Manatee.
Discovered, that in Opera, to switch to next/prev tabs in a normal way, you have to press 【Ctrl+F6】 and【Ctrl+Shift+F6】. What a idiocy. (See: Opera Pain; Opera Browser Problems.) Or, in Opera 9.2 or before, press the 1 and 2 keys on the number pad. In Opera 9.5 or later, you have to Enable single-key shortcuts in the preference. (See: http://help.opera.com/Windows/10.63/en/keyboard.html.)
So, in AutoHotkey, i added these to be consistent with all my hotkeys for browsers. (the / and * on number pad to switch to prev/next tabs.)
;; Opera hotkeys #IfWinActive ahk_class OperaWindowClass ; close window $Pause::Send ^w ; prev tab $NumpadDiv::Send ^+{F6} ; next tab $NumpadMult::Send ^{F6}
See: AutoHotkey Basics and AutoHotkey Example Scripts.
Also, after several years of hearing Opera's stupid “mouse gestures”, today i took 5 min to read up what it is. See: http://help.opera.com/Windows/10.63/en/mouse.html. Rather idiotic.
In the past few years, i've been wondering why software engineering is so cumbersome and time consuming. Usually, something that's conceptually trivial, something you think can be done in 10 minutes, ends up hours. In the past few years, i tried to write a account of it whenever this happened to me. See these essays:
(and it is quite time consuming to document this experience. Each essay above usually takes 4 hours to write.)
In all the above cases, they are typically about installing a package, setting a preference, compress a file, get spelling checker to work, setting a environment variable. If you know the technologies well, usually you'd imagine it's just 5 to 10 minutes job. But in each case, i ends up spending hours or half of a day.
In the past week, another 2 such situation happened. One is renaming a file in Subversion (svn) by changing a letter case of a file. See the problem described here: http://groups.google.com/group/ergoemacs.
The other problem is about writing a script to zip up a directory. See: Unix zip Utility Path Problem.
You might have worked in the software industry as a programer for years. Sometimes, you might wonder, “what i've actually been doing in the past few months?”. In a day job situation, half of the time is spent on meeting and communication and other miscellaneous, non-nondescript stuff. Perhaps you actually get to code only for 1/3 of your working time. Of that time, a large part, probably more than half of the time, is probably spent on getting something conceptually trivial to work, among the hacks, spaghetti code, non-existent documentations, problem in tools, etc.
As a programer, i think intuitively we think that programing is actually writing new functions, new libraries, something that doesn't exist before. But i think in reality, more than half the time a working programer spend daily on coding, is actually about fixing stupid problems, working around tools, using knowledge about the environment and past experiences.
a very detailed explanation of keyboard switch mechanisms, key label printing tech, etc.
See also: Keyboards, Layouts, Hotkeys, Macros, RSI.
See also: Pirate Bay, Open Source, Free Software, Copyright.
A unprecedented, military-grade virus that attacks nation states. Stuxnet.
Discovered new tech toy. Kinect. amazon
It's a device that, quote:
provides full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition capabilities.
basically, if you've seen the movie 〈Minority Report〉 amazon, then you know what it's about.
Here's a youtube video showing it used to control Windows 7. amazon
“Kinect Treatment of Windows 7”
Quite a tall order. I suppose, it's not smooth as the spec and demos like us to believe, but, is a inevitable start of a technology. In perhaps 5 years, it might be the dominant way to control our computers, gaming, or at least, popular for particular software applications.
It works by having 2 laser based depth sensor (detecting motion and position), 1 RGB camera (for facial recognization), and a array of microphones (for detecting location).
One million of it has already been sold since it's debut in 2010-11-15. Reviews basically all have good words to say; praising the technology, but note that few games support it, and the novelty wears off. Clearly, a keyboard, mouse, or joystick is far more efficient than a motion detection device, for at least 3 years i think.
CCleaner is really a fantastic tool. In a easy way, it lets you delete all the cache and temp files of various browsers and Windows files. If you do it manually, you'll have to find it all over your disk, or thru various browser Preference interfaces. It also lets you clean your Registry, and lets you disable or delete the startup program settings, far better interface than the tiny window of “msconfig”.
Here's some startup processes i removed recently:
See also:
Discovered that Logitech came out with a new version of their trackball.
“Logitech Wireless Trackball” amazon
For review, see: Logitech Trackball Mouse Reviews.
“Razer Naga MMOG Laser Gaming Mouse”
Computer coder's heaven: A mouse with 17 programable buttons: Best Mouse for Programers and AutoHotkey Keyboard Macros. And if you are more of a keyboard macro type of guy, you need: Logitech G13 Advanced Gameboard. Forget about your Emacs key chords. Actually, i'd suggest a gaming keyboard, except that there are no good ergonomic ones.
Mathematica 8 is released.
I got Mathematica 7 this month, as a gift from Wolfram Research. (before they released 8) (Thanks Wolfram) I haven't actively been coding Mathematica since about 2000. In the coming months, i'll update my tens of Mathematica packages on my site to Mathematica 7.
Mathematica started in 1988 as a so-called computer algebra system. Namely, it lets you do things like solve equations, factor polynomials, do integration, derivative, etc. But, due to Stephen's design, it is also a full featured general programing language, much based on lisp. (he probably would not admit it) But since about late 1990s, Mathematica is more marketed as a technical computing platfrom — a system for doing any technical computation. The reason is simple: because as a math system, the market is very limited, but as a system for any technical computation, it widens its potential audience by some 10 fold or 100. Since mid 2000s, it became increasingly more broad. Although i haven't actively been coding Mathematica, but some quick look at Mathematica 7, it is really fantastic. Dynamic visualization, data center of all technical info, and this year Wolfram Alpha.
Here's things i've done with Mathematica, all or almost all graphics in the following projects are generated by Mathematica version 3 (~1998) or 4 (~2002):
Discovered a new programing language. Factor (programming language)
For my comments, see bottom of: Proliferation of Computing Languages.
I discovered it because it mentioned ErgoEmacs. See: Source.
2 months ago, i found a fantastic mouse:
Cyborg RAT 5 gaming mouse.
But reading amazon reviews today, it seems to have its problems. For video review and detail, see: Best Input Devices (Jog/Shuttle, Touchpad, Cyborg Mouse, Pen Tablet).
The Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000, is the cheapest (~$17), yet best keyboard, beats those fancy expensive ones. I'm undecided if i prefer this to my other $50 bucks Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. The Comfort Curve is cited on StackOverflow to be among top 5 keyboards. However, it's also known to have defective key problem.
I just discovered a way to fix it. See: Fix Defective Keys in Comfort Curve Keyboard. Whack it!
Google Chrome is fantastic. I think even better than Firefox.
Bug War, from LAND OF LISP.
Recently this tweet has been going around:
Welcome to 2010: Java is a restricted platform; Google is evil; Apple is a monopoly; and Microsoft is the underdog.
who first said it?
Apple is deprecating Java! See: developer.apple.com. Quote:
Java Deprecation
As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.
This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products.
Am so glad of this. Sooo glad. Death to you, Sun Microsystems, and your Java fuck. Thank you for your incredible unscrupulous marketing lies and lawsuit gaming.
12 years ago, the creator of tcl, John K Ousterhout, wrote a well known article〈Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century〉 at Source. It is finally coming true in recent years.
A short summary of my computer language experiences, counting only serious involvement, say, few hours a day doing real jobs:
A great piece about terminology in computer languages.
See also: The Importance of Terminology's Quality In Computer Languages.
This month, my Java tutorial become quite popular. Here's the most popular pages, with number of page views in the past 30 days.
| The “static” Keyword In Java | 5.803k |
| Java Tutorial: “this” Keyword | 5.589k |
| Interface in Java | 4.627k |
| Java Tutorial: The “extend” Keyword | 4.402k |
| Java's Access Specifiers | 2.935k |
| Java Tutorial: Arrays | 2.673k |
| Java Tutorial: Defining a Function | 2.596k |
| The “abstract” Keyword In Java | 2.316k |
| Xah's Java Tutorial | 2.168k |
There are several links to them from stackoverflow.com.
Java is the most inane language. I did Java for half a year in a day job in 2000. At the time, i was not really sure what i was doing. (this is a typical situation when coding in a day job on someone else's project.) Then, in 2005 i studied Java in some detail, and wrote my tutorial. However, i actually don't code Java, am not good at it, and will never code anything in Java. (am rather sad that Google choose it as its main lang. (but, it's still much better than C or C++.))
Also, of all big software companies, i HATE Sun Microsystems with passion. It is the company with the most despicable marketing fuck, and loves to create random meaningless jargons and abuse established terms. For detail on the jargon part, see:
Of all the 2 thousand tech tutorials and essays i wrote about computing in the past 10 years, the “What are OOP's Jargons and Complexities” one actually among the top 5 i consider most significant. Am proud of it.
I really like the auto-raise feature in Windows. That is, you move you mouse to a window, and that window automatically comes to the front.
Also, you can set Windows so that single click opens a file, instead of double click.
For how to set these, see: Advanced Windows Customization Setup.
PLT Scheme lisp is now named Racket. See: http://racket-lang.org/new-name.html.
Also, here's a classic piece: The Fate of Lambda in Python 3000 and Scheme v300.
Discovered that Guy L Steele , famous as a inventor of Scheme lisp, and Robert J Chassell, known as the author of 《An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp》 amazon, both are apparantly lojban speakers! Yay! See: http://www.lojban.org/files/papers/4thtense.
See also: Xah's lojban Tutorial.
Just watched a great video:
〈ELC 2010: Rich Hickey and Joe Pamer - Perspectives on Clojure and F#〉 (2010-08-09) http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/charles/emerging-langs-clojure-and-f
It's 24 minutes. It's interview with Clojure inventor Rick Hickey, and Microsoft's F# compiler writer Joe Pamer.
Also: Robin Milner is dead. (1934-2010) He is known as the father of ML (OCaml, F#)
Today i started to use Microsoft's speech recognition software. It comes with Windows Vista and Windows 7. To use it, you will need a good microphone or headset. (See: Gaming Headset Reviews.)
To open it, just go to the “Control Panel”, then choose “Speech Recognition Options”. Then, you might want to go thru the various options and go thru 30 min of training and learning how to use it.
You can use it to control windows and menu in some basic way, but I'd use it mostly for dictation when writing essays and emails. Not sure how well it will work out, but i'll give it a shot.
What's Window's shell command to launch a app? e.g. on OS X, i can launch FireFox at a url with 「open -a firefox ‹url›」.
e.g. 「start firefox yahoo.com」.
You might have to add the program path to your environment variable. See: Windows Environment Variables.
Is there a way to set a app to launch only a single process? For example, i prefer Firefox to have a single process, and use 【Ctrl+Tab】 and 【Ctrl+Shift+Tab】 to switch tabs, so i don't have to 【Alt+Tab】 among many windows that are not FireFox. Some app, such as Windows Mail, iTune, Skype etc, are apparently setup this way.
This appears to be app dependent, not a OS level config.
Does anyone know if that's actually true?
See also: Keyboarding ＆ Macros in Mac and Windows (How to Increase Your Computer Operation Efficiency).
Discovered this nice article on newLISP, which gave me my first intro of the lang:
See also this comparison: 〈Lisp: Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Emacs Lisp〉 @ http://hyperpolyglot.wikidot.com/lisp.
If you want a quick intro by slide show, see: http://www.nuevatec.com/manual-intro.html.
Updated: The keys started to fail on my A Review Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000. Amazon reviews confirms that it's a common defect. So, don't buy that keyboard.
Discovered SubRip. It's a software used to extract subtitles from movie files, by using optical character recognization. Also, it saves its file in a plain text format with suffix “.srt”. This is extremely useful when you want to read the dialog of a movie. The format is supported by most video editors or players, including youtube.
A more advanced but still widely supported subtitle format is SubStation Alpha, with suffix “.ssa” or “.ass”. It is also a plain text format.
A older subtitle format is MicroDVD with suffix “.sub”. Also a plain text format. There are more. See: Category:Subtitle file formats.
See also:
New programing languages.
For a brief overview of major new langs, see: Proliferation of Computing Languages.
There are several new books for Clojure, for you lisp fans.
There's also a new Common Lisp book coming, scheduled to arrive next month.
A great site comparing the basic syntax and constructs between Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Emacs Lisp. If you know one of them, this site lets you learn the other very quickly. Am particularly interested in Clojure.
The actually also have other sites.
Discovered a book citing my site. 《Enterprise Interoperability II: New Challenges and Approaches》 amazon (2007), by Ricardo Jardim-Gonçalves, Jörg P. Müller, Kai Mertins, Martin Zelm. ♠. Cites: What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language.
More at: Printed Citations to XahLee.org.
Want to disable the Win key from popping up the Start menu but still want Win+‹key› to work? New tip added to AutoHotkey Example Scripts.
if you need some custome key set up, i can do it for you. Please do donate $10 though. (click button on upper right of this window)
Discovered excellent defrag software Piriform Defraggler. Also, Piriform's Recuva for file recovery is also excellent, i've used in the past. Also, discovered Partimage, for cloning disk partitions to as disk image to dvd. These are recommended to me from a expert PC friend “9 volt chicken”. These are added to: List of Great Windows Software. (all software listed there are highest quality)
Discovered a dead key. In emacs, i have the Menu key set as Hyper, and i have “Hyper+Shift+q” as a shortcut to some command. However, Microsoft ergonomic 4000 keyboard simply does not register that combination when right shift is used. But left shift works. See also: Keyboard Ghosting; How Many Keys Your Keyboard Can Take?.
Added 3 screenshots of simple programs i've written around 1992 for the HP-28S calculator. See: HP-28S Advanced Scientific Calculator.
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.
