Let’s make a Mac at Zhongguancun!

I have been talking non-stop about getting a computer just for design work since mid-2008. It’s not that I didn’t have the money to get one—it’s that I didn’t want to spend that money. Were it not for the Intel Atom CPU, I would still just be talking about it.

When I set out to build a new desktop system for design, I wasn’t planning to build a Mac. However, as this is a design machine—and all design software is built for Mac and hacked onto Windows—it made sense to kill the initial Windows 7 install and switch over.

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Pre-orders open for Loongson laptop

I’ve been following the progress of Lemote, the corporate branch of the Loongson chip developers, for the last year or so. For the longest time, I had my eye on a proposed Loongson laptop on their product page.

While it’s not the same laptop, the company is taking pre-orders for an incredible little machine. It’s tiny and then some, with an 8″ LCD screen and maximum of 800×480 resolution. But all that adds up to portability.

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Heroine Anthem II cancelled, tools now PD

I have completely canceled my planned Heroine Anthem II translation. I will not be resuming it — ever. I simply cannot run the game. My computer is incompatible with the StarForce 3 rootkit that is required to run the game. Even if there were a way to run it, I no longer have Windows.

The tools have been collected and released into the public domain. You are free to distribute this and do anything you want with all the included files. The only exception is the bitmap dump of the Sun Solaris console font — I have no idea what license this font is released under.

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VMWare and the 2.6.20 kernel

If you’re running VMWare on the 2.6.20 kernel, it’s virtual FS monitor will crash and fail when you copy files.

And it crashes in a most brutal way …

You cannot destroy it because it’s a driver, and because it’s a driver not handled automatically by the system, it will never unset on bootdown. Trying to remove it the way you remove normal function drivers fails too.

However, with a little creativity, you can still get files onto your virtual drive without needing a network connection.

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Chinese support for Console

Humongous thanks go out to Sourceforge user bozho for posting this fix. I’ve been wanting to use the Console project for years as a CMD.EXE frontend, but was never able to because of its problems with CJK support.

The problem seems to be that Console 2 breaks its spacing if you use raster fonts instead of True Type Fonts in your CMD.EXE settings.

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Changing the win32 native BASH prompt

If you like using BASH on Windows but don’t want to use the Cygwin port, you may have run across some of the native BASH ports available.

Trouble is, BASH on Windows does not read your host name, and many of the native ports ignore your BASH configuration files.

If you just want to create a new static prompt instead of the default “bash$”, it’s very easy to do using a hex editor. The hack below was done on a Bash version 1.14.7(53) native port dated 2005/7/9. I don’t recall where I found it anymore.

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Get rid of Sina Mail’s ads

I got really sick of the stupid ads while sorting my inbox today, so I crawled around the code and found a good set of lines for knocking out their hidous ads. Put these in your Firefox userContent.css file.

Don’t know what userContent.css is? Google it.

/* Ad rows in the mail window */
table[id="tbList"] tr[bgcolor="#ececec"][height="26"] {
  display:none !important
}

/* Big stupid banner ad */
div[id="bxAd"][style="padding-bottom: 3px;"][align="center"] {
  display:none !important
}

Compression makes things faster …?

It does when the program in question is a 48MB MAME executable.

As a test, I compressed an uncompressed MAME executable with UPX at compression level 9. When comparing the uncompressed EXE and the compressed one, the compressed one loaded in 2 seconds while the uncompressed took as long as 10.

That says something but I’m not sure what. Could it be with processors clocking 2GHz the delay in program load time is the hard disk speed? Is it faster to load a small EXE to RAM then decompress and execute it there than it is to run an uncompressed EXE off the hard disk?

I’m not sure, but it does merit further investigation.

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Wikipedia links in the last post

In an effort to help explain the technical post son this site with as little difficulty as possible, I’ve started linking terms to Wikipedia. To do this I added a little WordPress plugin to the old my-hacks.php file.

This adds support so that typing any topic between <wiki> tags will automatically create a link to the desired Wikipedia article.

The code follows below:

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Making AjaxWp and Lightbox play nice

You may have noticed this entire site is now AJAX based. That wasn’t easy to pull off, but finding AjaxWp helped a lot.

Contrary to what the top of the page suggested, AjaxWp did not work with my Lightbox 2.0 install at all. Thinking perhaps 2.0 wasn’t supported, I tried 1.0. That didn’t work either.

It took me about three hours of fiddling with FireBug’s DOM inspector, but eventually I realized two things:

1. Lightbox was not accessible to new content coming in from an AJAX load.
2. When Lightbox was accessible, all navigation links within the lightbox were being arrested by AjaxWp.

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