Bye Bye Blogger...
Yeah, I've moved to a new site --
suksit.com (That's my first name ^^). Because I miss some features that Blogger does not provide so I just create my own blog using
Drupal.
However, thanks to Blogger for providing me a place to start blogging :)
Emacs and X.Org rgb
Due to
Blognone Tech Day 2006 effect, I came home and installed
Emacs to try it out.
emerge -av emacs went fine without any errors but when I try to start emacs from Terminal, here's what I got:
$ emacs
Undefined color: "black"
Googling around, I found that Emacs was looking for "rgb.txt" which did not exist on my system.
This is because I'm using
X11R7.0 -- a completely modularized X Window System, and it doesn't come with all the tools like X11R6.x package. So I have to manually
emerge -av rgb to get the rgb application.
After emerge finished, I tried to run Emacs again and still got the same error. Another google search, it suggested I should take a look at
/etc/X11/xorg.conf for RgbPath. In my
xorg.conf, it reads:
RgbPath "/usr/lib/X11/rgb"
But "rgb.txt" wasn't there, so where is it? I typed in
locate rgb.txt and found that the file was in
/usr/share/X11. Then I modified
xorg.conf according to the path that
locate told me:
RgbPath "/usr/share/X11/rgb"
Restarted X, called up Terminal, typed "emacs" then hit Enter... and wheeeee! Emacs popped up! Time to check it out!
ps. Now I know one Emacs command --
C-x C-c :P
Blognone Tech Day 2006
Today I went to
Blognone Tech Day 2006 seminar at Kasetsart University from 1.00pm to 5.30pm. The concept of the seminar was "Developer's Exchange", which was a mixed of various topics.
Each topic was described in a short and easy-to-understand way -- mainly to give the concept/overview about the topic and to introduce the presenter whom the audiences can contact later if they need more details.
Here're the topics covered today:
- Ruby on Rails by Polawat Phetra
I was late and by the time I arrived the presentation was almost finish. However, I still had a chance to see some demos and was impressed to see that your can create an AJAX-ed webpage with only a few lines of Ruby code. - Python on Zope by Sugree Phatanapherom
Couldn't really catch up the details because I was sitting in the far back and could not see well. However, I think it's more difficult than RoR, and Sugree said there are not many hosts that support Zope. So just knowing that "Zope" exists is enough for me :) - Mono: Open Source .NET Framework by Wiennat
A nice presentation about .NET Framework architecture, why Mono was developed and its features. BTW, Mono = Monkey XD - Emacs: Hacker's Text Editor by Poonlap
Brief history of Emacs and introduction of its features. I've never seen a text editor that is capable of playing games, surfing internet, checking emails or even providing an AI to talk to. I just came back and emerged emacs right away, gotta try it! - IP PBX using Asterisk by Dome Charoenyost
Completely lost about what the presenter said (out of my field, I guess). But we sure did enjoy the presentation and laughted a lot ^^ - Linux Virtualization using Xen by Somphol Boonjing
Shows another solution for virtual hosting on Linux. But I still think VMWare is better... - Game Theory by Jittat Fakcharoenphol
Describes the Nobel Prize-winning theory of John Nash (there is a movie about him -- A Beautiful Mind). There were a bunch of examples, but I'm still not clear about how can it be used in real life =.= - Emerging Technology 2006 by ปรเมศวร์ มินศิริ
Shows that the world is walking towards Web 2.0. In the future, all applications will run on internet and will be platform-independent. - Thai Word Breaking using ZWSP by Wason Liwlompaisan
An idea of how to break Thai words correctly e.g. "ตากลม" can be separated into "ตา-กลม" and "ตาก-ลม" and both words do make sense. Lew's solution is to have a special Unicode character -- "ZWSP" (I guess it stands for something like "Zero-Width Space") -- inserted between each word. It seems to be an elegant solution but I still wonder how can we manage to input this special charecter between each word we typed?
Phew!... Quite a lot of topics in just 4 hrs and a half, right? However, it helps opening my vision about programming and new technology a lot. And I just love the
Blognone t-shirt!! Hope there will be a seminar like this again :)
ps. Too bad I didn't get the
Ubuntu Stickers :(
DOS vs UNIX line breaks
I was writing a
shell script to parse some data in
csv format generated by Microsoft Excel and was wondering why the script didn't work as I expected.
I took a look at the .csv file using
more command and it looked OK to me...
Half an hour passed by and I still cannot figure the problem out, I used
vi to open the csv file and saw that there were additional
^M characters everywhere in the file.
After googling around for a while, I found that the
^M's were there because the csv file contained "carriage return (
\r)" characters, which is the default line break character in Windows, instead of "new line (\n)" characters as it should be. To fix this problem, I have to execute the command
tr "\r" "\n" < inputdata.csv > gooddata.csv
to remove all ^M's and after that my script worked just fine.
Xfce 4.4 beta1 released!
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.
Xfce 4.4 beta1 was released yesterday. Here are some new features:
- Thunar File Manager a new file manager that replaces xffm.
- Desktop Icons the most requested feature is now implemented.
- Panel is completely rewritten. You can now add/remove as many panel as you wish, panel plugins can be downloaded at xfce-goodies, including xfapplet which allows you to use GNOME applet on Xfce panel.
- Others
- Preferred Applications allows you to choose default application for web browsing, mail reading etc.
- Mousepad a notepad-like application for Xfce
- Orage a calendar application for Xfce. I'll just use Google Calendar anyway ;)
More info and screenshots are available at
Xfce Diary. Give it a try! And you may never want to use GNOME or KDE again XD
