Finally I found a xft branch of emacs. I just can’t bear with X core fonts without antialias any more. Just check out the branch from cvs and build. It runs without a problem on Debian and Ubuntu:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
cvs up -Pd -r XFT_JHD_BRANCH

I was working on a simple imperative language interpreter, mostly for the purpose of demonstration of scoping and parameter passing. It’s more like a debugger than an interpreter. Anyway, I guess it’s not important in this post. What I really want to document here is several refactorings I have done on the program.

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SSH is not designed for running in a chrooted environment. There is a patch to OpenSSH, which can be found here . It can chroot based on the user’s home directory (looking for a “.” and chroot to the directory prior to the “.”). This is a very nice trick. However I decided to do my own hack, because I do not want to mess with my already running sshd. In case I screw up, I will be locked out of the headless server. The main difference between my approach and chrootssh is that I have the whole sshd running in a chrooted environment. Instead, chrootssh is on a per user base.
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I didn’t realized the problem until yesterday when I posted between 11pm and 12pm. The date showed was today. Then I realized it’s the problem with the time zone. I set time zone to UTC-7 when I set up this blog because it was day light saving time then. But we have now changed back to UTC-8. There is a time zone plugin that automatically changes the time zone for you. How nice! Check it out.

It’s been bothering me for a while. I can’t seem to associate GhostView with ps files on OS X 10.4. I came across this post today but haven’t tried it yet.

I prefer setting the background color of my terminal to black. The problem is, blue is hard to read on black. The default color setting of ls happens to output normal directories in blue. The solution is TerminalColors , a patch for Terminal.app that enables you set the ansi colors. Nice!

We went to a two-day mountaineering course with Outdoor Recreation Center this weekend. The course took place on Mount Hood. I first thought they would make a summit attempt. But it turned out it is more oriented at training. The weather was fierce. The coaches said they had never had this course in such a bad weather. It was snowing like hell at Timberline lodge. The snow was up to my chest in some places. We weren’t able to get around too far from Timberline lodge.

A storm hit the area on Saturday. Highway 26 was partly flooded and tree branches are everywhere on the highway. We have even seen some big trees blown down. After driving very slowly for an hour, we arrived at the place where we originally planed to camp. But it seemed that the place was flooded. What’s worse is that the gust wind was quite scary. The trees were waving helplessly. They might fall down any time. We had a discussion and decided that it was too dangerous to camp there. One of our coaches, Matt, happened to have a friend in Sandy. He decided to resort them for help. They are a very nice and friendly couple. We ended up staying at their barn. That was a very distinctive camping experience. I slept right next to their Jaguar. Jaguar, the car, not the cat

I am really tired of managing bookmarks. I use two Macs and at least two or three PCs, not to mention some PCs have dual or triple boot. It’s impossible to keep all the bookmark synced. Now I decided to move the bookmarks to del.icio.us. I wish I can find something that I can install on my own webserver that does the same thing for me. After all, it’d be a lot faster on a LAN.

Took some pictures of fall foliage last week. Might be the last sunshine this year.

I looked into MPD and decided that it is not exactly what I am looking for. I am expecting something better integrated with mt-daapd. It’s now tempting to write one myself. The basic idea is having a daemon running background. The daemon can make use of gstreamer to play the music. The web server is used to communicate with the client. The client requests a song list (as well as a list of playlists, I guess) and present them in a browser. When a song is clicked on, it sends a command to the server and the http server controls the daemon. I dug into mt-daapd source code a little bit and found out that it is actually running one webserver for both administration task and daapd. The server determines which handler to use based on the URL. One can easily add another handler for controlling the playing daemon. Now I just need to arm myself with some knowledge in gstreamer and daap. I found a good spec about daap on the web. Not sure how much changes since iTunes 4.01, but it’d be a good start.

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