The art of Unix programming

Yesterday I checked out a book named "the art of Unix programming" by Eric Raymond. Wow, this is a truly great book. Now I know that it is not a coincidence that I enjoy R, Emacs, and Linux: they are all part of a grand tradition that has nurtured many brilliant scholars and hackers.

Very good book indeed.

My paper

Here is the url of my paper: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a904480633~db=all~order=page

Ubuntu 8.10 DVD

This link: http://torrent.ubuntu.com/releases/intrepid/release/dvd/

A list of books to checkout on Monday

1. Economic interdependence and international conflict : new perspectives on an enduring debate / edited by Edward D. Mansfield and Brian M. Pollins. [HF1418.5 .E274 2003]
   
2. Handbook of data analysis / [edited by] Melissa Hardy and Alan Bryman. [H62 .H224 2004]
3. Loglinear models with latent variables / Jacques A. Hagenaars. [QA278 .H333 1993]
4. Introducing network analysis in social work / Philip Seed. [HV11 .S44 1990]
   

Fresh install vs. upgrade

As the Ubuntu release dates approaching, the debate of whether a fresh install or an upgrade is the preferred way to get an update-to-date system is re-emerging.

To me, an upgrade is always preferred, simply because it took quite some time to tailor a new system, installing all the required packages, solving dependency issues. It is just too much to do that every once or even twice in a year.

Since I am really busy right now, I may well skip this release and wait for the next one (April 2009).

Copy and paste in Cygwin

Copy/paste from Cygwin: highlight the text will also put the text in the clipboard;
Copy/paste into Cygwin: shift + mouse click will put the text in the clipboard into the insertion point.

Compile aML under Cygwin using g77

I finally got the time to setup a cygwin environment on my computer and tried to compile aML. After several trial and error, I got it successfully built and tested. The procedure is pretty straightforward, with only one thing to keep in mind: choose g77 3.3 instead of 3.4 otherwise the generated binary will issue an error message "core dump" (and this is probably why aML cannot be directly built on Ubuntu 8.04). I only tested on my 32-bit machine and will try it on my 64-bit Vista office machine on Monday.

This is exciting!

Emacs with true type font support under Ubuntu

Following the instructions here (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/XftGnuEmacs#toc12), I finally get a usable Emacs with true type font support (I use Liberation Mono) installed on my Ubuntu notebook. I have to say, this makes a huge difference and makes it much easier for my eyes. I am going to use Emacs more.

Good article on matching methods

Very good article indeed. The authors have made quite a few number of excellent points.

http://gking.harvard.edu/files/matchp.pdf