xterm和rxvt-unicode的详细对比

有时我想，像我这样花如此多的时间在选择、比较、配置一个terminal上面的人，应该算是很少见了吧。但我相信我不是一个人，应该还有其他跟我类似的geek在某个地方默默地搜索着，尝试着。

我是根本不考虑gnome-terminal/konsole之类依赖gnome/gtk/qt的库的终端的，在剩下选择中，我所知支持UTF8的就这两个，这就是我现在要对他们作出比较的原因。他们都不是完美的，各有各的好处，各有各的让我恼火的地方。目前，我用的是自己打过补丁的rxvt-unicode。

Easy ConTeXt installation

I have tried the nightmare of struggling to install a usable ConTeXt environment; the documentations or installation guides here and there on the web always deal with the situation that you have a tetex or texlive or some other tex dist installed and you just want add ConTeXt to them, one seldom tells that “how to make a clean installation without a already existing tex environment?”

However, the guide does exist——in the ConTeXt mailing list. Here I will show how to do that according to Hans’ message since nobody has done that before.

eps to pdf conversion-use epstopdf, pls

I love the easiness and output quality of ConTeXt, and am using it to write my thesis and set output to pdf. However, when setting output format to pdf, which means using pdfetex to process the source, I found that I could not get vector quality figures.

The reason is that pdfetex only accepts pdf/png/jpg figures, in which only pdf is of vector quality. Converting eps figures to pdf with ps2pdf/imagemagick/gs can do the job but the dimension of the output is incorrect.

After Googling for quite a long time,  I reached the point that it is due to the eps “bounding box” problem, which can be solved by using epstopdf together with a ghostscript version later than 8.0. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

Google calendar短信提醒

原本以为只有美国加拿大才可以使用的，几天前发现居然是全球可用。而香港支持的运营商之中就有3。兴奋不已之中赶紧把自己的手机和google calendar帮定了。今天Jupus Open Day的briefing，真的提前10分钟收到了短信。以后看来想要Google叫我起床都可以的！

奇怪的是，收到的短信的发件人都是很直接的写”Google”，没有号码。我想用手机直接添加日程，给(GVENT)48368 发送短信，没有成功。不知道Google到底是用什么号码给我发的短信。也许，我应该打个电话给3问下，顺便也问问是不是要收费的问题。

又一次转回xfce

Kubuntu总是在启动的时候莫名其妙地死机，一般第二次才能正常启动；firefox如果不关的话，内存会一直吃到2G。终于受不了了，加上Dapper里面的xfce已经改善了自动挂载usb硬盘的功能，终于决定回归xfce（我还是不喜欢gnome）。以前xubuntu里面那个buggy的xffm终于没有被默认安装了，感觉稳定性强了很多。开着firefox几天不关机，内存也只用400M左右。KDE真是不争气阿。还小试了一下composit，贴个图。

vim不能折叠，这是Ubuntu的错？

我的vim里面不能默认开启折叠，已经忍了它很久了。昨天又一次调程序，终于受不了一页页翻代码的麻烦，决定要搞定它。于是，上freenode.net的#vim去问。一位叫做tpope的老大真是热心，细细的问我各种设置。在让他失望了无数次之后，他终于这样说“你还是手动折叠好了……”。惨阿。然后有人说vim 6.x的runtime文件都有些毛病，不能正常使用折叠——我真的怀疑他的说法：难道因为有人写错了runtime文件，所有的vi用户都没有折叠用？又有人说这是Ubuntu的毛病，我还是很怀疑……

没有折叠的日子，真的挺难受的。

A bug of intel fortran compiler 9.0

Today I was doing some molecular dynamics programming, then it was found that one parameter of the simulation changed strangely. That parameter should be a constant throughtout the run, and the program compiled under compaq visual fortran in windows platform could ran without this error. I first thought this was because the compatiblity of the code migrated from windows, but finaly I was surprised that it was a very silly bug of the compiler: intel fortran compiler 9. Okay, let’s see where that hole is.

My origin code is like the following.

if ( AllowQuenching .eqv. .true. .and. QuenchBegin <= stepcount .and. QuenchEnd > stepcount ) then
refTmp = refTmp + (aimTmp-reftmp)/(QuenchEnd-stepcount)
end if

The variable AllowingQuenching was always set to be .False. so that refTmp would never be changed. But to my surprise when AllowQuenching .eqv. .true. gave a false value, the whole if test gave a .True.!? However, when I replaced AllowQuenching .eqv. .true. with AllowQuenching, everything went well. For a compiler with great reputation, this is really silly.

不能用firefox很久了，原来是scim在作怪

我已经用上了Firefox，主要是SCIM输入法问题：请删掉旧版本，然后用以下任何方法编辑一下

1.重新编译 SCIM；
2.编辑该文件：vi gtk.immodules
把下面的语句注释掉：
代码:
#"/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/immodules/im-scim.so"
#"scim" "SCIM Input Method" "scim" "/usr/share/locale" "*"
3.换用 fcitx。
4.将用户目录下的.i18n文件内的GTK_IM_MODULE=scim条目注释掉，也就是在前面加"#"。

我推荐第二个方法。简单，省事。

how to install intel fortran compiler under ubuntu linux

The solutions on the ubuntuforum.org seem not working for my box correctly, here is my solution.

1. download the intel fortran compiler from intel’s ftp. If you do not know where to go, search for it on google. The complete package has a size of 128MB, and after unzipping, you will find some rpm files.
select the proper rpm for you computer, For Pentium 32bit processors, you can choose intel-ifort9-9.0-031.i386.rpm. Convert it to deb package with alien. I used -k to reserve the version number.

sudo alien -k intel-ifort9-9.0-031.i386.rpm

2. install the deb package.

sudo dpkg -i intel-ifort9*.deb

3. go to the default installtion directory, which is, normally, /opt/intel. Change the permission of the directory and its subs with chmod so that every user can access it.

sudo chmod 755 -R intel/

4. add the following code to your .bashrc.

# add Intel Compiler environment variables
#INSTALLDIR is /opt/intel/fc/9.0/
if [ -z "${PATH}" ]
then
PATH="/opt/intel/fc/9.0/bin"; export PATH
else
PATH="/opt/intel/fc/9.0/bin:$PATH"; export PATH
fi
if [ -z "${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" ]
then
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/intel/fc/9.0/lib"; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
else
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/intel/fc/9.0/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
fi
if [ -z "${MANPATH}" ]
then
MANPATH="/opt/intel/fc/9.0/man":$(manpath); export MANPATH
else
MANPATH="/opt/intel/fc/9.0/man:${MANPATH}"; export MANPATH
fi
if [ -z "${INTEL_LICENSE_FILE}" ]
then
INTEL_LICENSE_FILE="/opt/intel/fc/9.0/licenses:/opt/intel/licenses:${HOME}/intel/licenses"; export INTEL_LICENSE_FILE
else
INTEL_LICENSE_FILE="${INTEL_LICENSE_FILE}:/opt/intel/fc/9.0/licenses:/opt/intel/licenses: ${HOME}/intel/licenses"; export INTEL_LICENSE_FILE
fi

5. reboot your computer and use ifort to compile your source code. Intel fortran compiler can compile much faster fortran programs on Pentium computers than g95 and gfortran. Enjoy!

Atomeye generated coloring file

atomeye generated coloring file

Originally uploaded by roylez.

It is really a long time since my last post about research stuff, emmh?
This pix is generated using the shear-strain coloring in atomeye, and it shows the cross section of a Ni3Al column in compression test. From it you can easily tell that the most highly stressed area is actully the surface.