This might be a good design for a t-shirt

A functional point of view of some cat theory concepts:

Functors: type constructors. They map types to types. If we consider each algebraic type as a category, the type constructors act as functors.

Natural transformations: polymorphic functions. They map types to types.

I have been “using” fvwm on the Sun machine in the office for a while. It was not really “using”, since I was never able to figure out all the fancy configurations and themes. I finanlly got tired of it and decided to dump it and clean up all the programs I compiled under my home directory.

The result is an installation of ION3. I guess I need something this simple. It’s a slow and old machine anyway. It’s the first time I have used ION although I have heard a lot of people talking about it. Time to RTFM now

Anothing thing I am tired of is the fonts. X11 on that machine doesn’t seem to support xft (or even if it does, I wouldn’t do that for performance’s sake). I will probably try to rasterize some ttf fonts to pcf. Sans fonts might look better than serif fonts without antialiasing.

I already had a nice fixed with font for the consoles. I might need one variable-width font and one fixed-width font for firefox.

Don’t know what was going on with the problem with the emacs cvs code I encountered a couple of days ago. I blow out the whole emacs directory and then checked out the code again and it compiles. I am now finally able to get the Carbon version and the terminal version work at the same time, with the elisp files shared, which is nice. Here is all that is needed for building emacs:

./configure --with-carbon-app --without-x
make bootstrap && sudo make install

I try to avoid X11 as much as possible. What’s the point of using X11 while the nice Carbon app is available?

Create file ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist and edit it with Property List Editor or some text editor. This will affect Finder and all other GUI apps launched from the dock.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
                       "http://www.apple.com/TDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>PATH</key>
        <string>/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin</string>
</dict>
</plist>

A day without rain in Corvallis is heaven. We had some sunshine, with clouds, which makes it a perfect day for shooting pictures. ISOSU’s spring festival event gathered all people in the world. I crazily shot over 100 pictures. Not too many turned out to be good. But hey, I did got some cute ones :). They are mainly portraits and welcome to visit the gallery.

There was a time that I was crazy about Oregon covered bridges. There are all together about 52 covered bridges in Oregon and I had seen about half of them. I was lazy to arrange the pictures though. While waiting for my battery to be charged today, I decided to pull them out of my iPhoto collection and sort them out.

I went to a rafting trip with Outdoor Recreation Center of OSU. We started from the Packsaddle State Park and took out after Mill City. This is actually exactly the same trip as we did 4 years ago. But it was still fun to do it again. The rapids are mostly class 2 or 3, not too difficult, but still exciting. It wasn’t too cold today although there was no sunshine.

Our guide was a girl whose name is Sandra. She is a 4th generation Japanese American. She is very much into water related activities like rafting and kayaking. She even encouraged me to take some Kayaking lessons, which sounds tempting :P. She also recommended Umpqua river, which has a great scene and also some higher level rapids (3-4). The best season might be early summer, when the water is still big. Hmm, looks like I might want to look up some rafting companies in the area and see if they have any such trips.

She also let me take over and practice some guiding for the latter section of the trip, when the water was pretty smooth. That was a fun part. It wasn’t that easy to be a captain. The guide stick is longer and heavier than normal paddles, and I had to paddle hard to steer. It was also hard to coordinate the timing to get the boat to the exact position when it passes the rapids. We also don’t want the raft to go through the rapids sideways, coz it increases the risk of rolling over.

It was a fun trip to warm up for the summer. I am looking forward to some more strenuous and difficult rafting trips this summer.

Well, I think we have a lot of problems with our education system, including, but not limited to English. (Chinese is a big problem as well, but that would be too big a topic to open up, so let’s focus on English here).

I respectfully disagree with the comment on level 1. I do think foreign languages are important and it doesn’t conflict with our native language. There is a quote I like very much: “if fish were scientists, the last thing they discover would be water. they don’t see water, they see through it.” The same can be said about culture, people don’t see their own culture, they see through it. We are not conscious about our own culture until we see other cultures, which are vastly different from our own. We then begin to understand our own culture through the reflection on other cultures.

I keep talking about culture where the topic is language because I think they are inseparatable. Languages very much reflect the way of thinking of their speakers. On the other hand, languages have huge impacts on their hosting culture too. Every now and then I involuntarily compare Chinese with English and Chinese culture with western cultures and I can often find very interesting similarities and discrepancies. And in my opiion, no language is superior than another, you can’t rank languages in this way. Languages are vehicles of thoughts, as no thoughts are necessarily better than others. Different languages focus on different aspects that are closely related to the social and natural environment of the speakers.

An interesting example is that most Chinese speakers are frustrated by the tense in western languages and we often appreciate the simplicity of Chinese in this regard. There was a movie “Artificial Intelligence” directed by Spilberg. The movie itself wasn’t interesting at all. But there was one line that I still remember. It was by the robot played Jude Law. Just before he died, he said to the little boy: “I am”, after stopping for one seconed, he rephrased “I was”. Personally I think those two lines are the essense of the whole movie. I appreciate the conciseness and simplicity very much and I very much doubt we can translate into Chinese in an elegant way. Three words (actually two) so simple, but raised such a profound philosophy question. That is amazing.

OK, I have now played with a bunch of emacs distributions for OS X now. Impression so far:

• CarbonEmacsPackage: too bloated and Japanese oriented. I don’t really need unicode support, not even Chinese. I use emacs mainly for Haskell and latex. The whole package is about 160MB, too big!
• Aquamacs: This is probably the most aqua look and feel version, it doesn’t feel like emacs any more :P. I don’t like the idea of having one window for one frame that much. And I don’t want to hack. And I kinda want to keep my settings more or less uniform among all platforms (linux, freebsd and solaris, not including Windows).
• Emacs-on-Aqua: this is the “real” aqua version of emacs. All others being carbonized (carbon is used in the official emacs). This version works on OpenStep too. It looks and feels good. I also want to try it on Linux. The only problem is it’s based on 20.7, which is way too out-dated. A lot of customizations are not working. Haskell modes doesn’t seem to like it either.
• Yet Another Carbon Emacs Distribution It looks very much like CarbonEmacsPackage

. Still a little too big and bloated too me

Looks like I’d better hack a little bit and tailor something for myself. Stuffs I will need:

• PC selection mode
• auctex mode
• Haskell mode