tkh’s blog

RMS

I just found that Richard Stallman will come to UNM next week to give us a talk. I have to make it, but the schedule conflicts with the programming language class. As the processor is a strong supporter of GNU Emacs, we decided to ask him to reschedule the class so we can go to the talk. Hope it works.

Gentoo 1.4 for ppc

I downloaded Gentoo Linux 1.4 LiveCD for PowerPC, and hoped to use it to repair my OS X system in case it wouldn’t boot. After burning the CD, I booted from it on my iBook. I got Linux console, but I see weird noises when I start the X server. I tried to tweak XFree86Config to remove the noises, but I couldn’t. It has another issue. When I quit the X server, I don’t get the console. The screen goes black and I have no control except for pressing the power button. It really sucks, but at least I can use the console and mount the hfs+ volume to fix something. Hope these issues are addressed in the next version.

Yen

Recently, Japanese Yen has gotten stronger by about 10%. Whatever the reason is, I welcome this change. Japan has intentionally tried to keep the exchange rate around 120yen per US$ to protect exporting industries. Politicians and government officials say that it’s a good thing to recover Japanese economy, but how about other industries? Many company have factories in foreign countries, and it would be beneficial if Yen was stronger. I don’t like the idea of protecting particular industries. Personally I think the appropriate exchange rate is around 100 yen per US$.

Exercise

Two weeks ago, I started going swimming because I really need physical exercise. At the first time, I only swam 250 meters and I was very tired. I was shocked that my physical strength was so weak. However, after I went swimming five times, now I can swim 500 meters and I’m not so tired. I think it wouldn’t take long time to swim over 1000 meters. I just need to go swimming regularly.

RMS

I just found that Richard Stallman will come to Santa Fe Institute to give colloquium on October 9th. Hope I can make it.

Prolog

I’m taking a course called “Programming Language Systems” this semester. This class is about logic programming, constrained logic programming, and semantics. One of the textbook is “The Art of Prolog” by Sterling and Shapiro, and I like it very much. I used to hate Prolog programming, since it seemed very hard to write what you want. However, after reading first six chapters, now I’m confident to write Prolog code. As for the runtime environment, I use Ciao Prolog because the professor’s research lab have been developing it. It’s actually nice because it’s fully modularized, so you can even use the Pure Prolog environment which does breadth first search, and the standard Prolog which does depth first search with backtracking simultaneously in a same program. Hope I would learn a lot from this class.

PalmOS

I wrote a tiny PalmOS program that converts your height and weight from metric system to imperial system. I used guikachu to design the UI, and generate a rcp file. Then I used prc-tools to compile the code and build .prc file. For debugging, I used the PalmOS Emulator (POSE) with rom images downloaded from PalmOne’s website. It’s really good that all things can be done on a Linux box, but I hate to develop applications for PalmOS. Why? PalmOS API is so crappy, its design is flawed, and the documentation is too superficial. For example, you must check the documentation if a function locks a memory handle, and if it does, you must unlock the handle yourself by calling non-symmetric API calls. It’s not intuitive. Another example is that the documentation doesn’t specify the requirements for the input arguments. So in this case, you need to feed whole kind of arguments to get an idea of what it really accepts.

I don’t want to write a big program, but it’s okay to write a small one. I’m thinking about writing a game, if I have spare time this semester.