Synergy for Mac OS X

SynergyKM works great on my Snow Leopard.

Serial Terminal in Emacs!

This is perfect.

M-x serial-term

Once you start the mode, the buffer works just like a regular terminal program. If you want to see the terminal log (of course *all* terminal output is there), you just go to "line mode" (C-c C-j) and all editing commands work just like you expect. If you go back to "character mode" (C-c C-k) and you can "vi" a file on the remote device. You can switch between the two modes as often as you want!

Reading a C file with HideShow mode in Emacs

I found HideShow minor mode is a great help when I read a C file with a lot of functions.

HideShow

Invoke the mode with M-x hs-minor-mode.

Ubuntu 9.10 compiz breaks vnc

I noticed that vnc client can't update the screen if I enable "Appearance Preference" to "Normal" or "Extra" on vnc server. This is extremely annoying :(

Compiz / vnc screen refresh with nvidia-restricted driver/VirtualBox/ATI fglrx driver using X.org prior to release 7.5

My current workaround is to ssh login to the vnc server and run the following command:

$ metacity --display :0.0 --replace & disown

This will set the Appearance setting to "None".

/forcefsck fixed "Stale NFS file handle"

I've got strange "Stale NFS file handle" errors in my VirtualBox disk. Something like what this person is reporting:

Subject: Re: What does "Stale NFS file handle" mean? - msg#00716

I suspected a filesystem corruption, too. But I was wondering how I could run fsck on the root filesystem in the VirtualBox hard disk. The answer was /forcefsck.

Linux Force fsck on the Next Reboot or Boot Sequence

Build Emacs from Bazaar

I didn't know Emacs development repository has moved to Bazaar. I followed the steps described in this site:

BzrForEmacsDevs

$ bzr whoami "Toshi Kikuchi <your.email@address>"
$ bzr init-repo --2a emacs/
$ cd emacs
$ bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/trunk trunk
$ cd trunk
$ echo "public_branch = http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/trunk" >> .bzr/branch/branch.conf
$ bzr bind http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/trunk

Then I followed INSTALL.BZR at the top directory.
But I needed extra options to ./configure:

$ ./configure --with-xft --with-x-toolkit=gtk --prefix=/home/toshi/built

It also required me to install a few packages. Then finally:

$ bzr pull
$ make bootstrap
$ make install

Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux

I started a life on 64-bit Ubuntu. I found Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux here:

Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux

Setting up Dell Studio XPS 16

It's been about a week since I got a new Dell Studio XPS 16 i7 laptop. The first thing I did was to install Ubuntu 9.10. The only problem was sound. This site had a solution:

Ubuntu 9.10 and Dell XPS 16 i7 install

Then I tried installing XP in the third partition. The installer disk gave me the blue screen a few times before I found this site:

How to Set Up Window XP on a Studio XPS 16 Laptop

The problem was that XP's installer doesn't know SATA! I needed to create a new installer image with SATA drivers. Nlite was a pretty nice tool to do the job. I was happy for a while until I found I couldn't boot Windows 7 any more. I re-installed Windows 7 from the re-installation DVD.

Finally I installed Ubuntu 9.10 64bit in the fourth partition since 32bit version can use only 3.2 out of 4GB memory.
That's how I got a quad boot machine :)