Make Ubuntu Dapper to display Chinese well in two minutes

With Ubuntu Dapper you can make Linux to display Chinese fonts (or maybe for other languages as well) much much easier than before. After you read this you’ll find out to make Linux to display Chinese well can be as simple as this.

  1. Get the font Simsun.ttc from Windows or some other high quality Chinese fonts and put them in the folder /usr/share/fonts/truetype.
  2. Update the font cache by runing “sudo fc-cache -fv”.
  3. Last and not least run the command “sudo fontconfig-voodoo -f -s zh_CN” and you are done! restart X and check it out.

Here are some screenshots for the effects:

You can even see bold, italic, bold+italic fonts:

Firefox browsing Yahoo China:

Tips to test potentially unsafe software without hurting computer.

If you really want to test out or use a program that might be potentially unsafe, contain virus, or do something you didn’t expect, but you don’t want your computer to be hurt, what should you do? Here’s some tips to do it safely.

  • for both Windows and Linux you can make a Windows virtual machine with VMware and make a snapshot before testing those programs, if something is wrong with the program you can go back to the snapshot.
  • For linux users there’s even more options, we could test the program with a non-root user account, but still you might want to create a new user account to test it if your own user account has many datas because some programs might destroy datas that they can access.
  • For advanced users they can use other options like make virtual machine with user-mode kernel or mount with unionfs to test the program with a virtual root account.
  • For Windows users running programs with limited users might help, but most Windows programs won’t run properly under those accounts, for now the only solution that I can think of for this is VMware. You can also track what the program does by using Filemon to monitor file changes, Regmon to monitor registry changes, and Urlsnooper to monitor the url the program accessed, or any other utilities in addition of those mentioned above.

Something about Blogger’s template format and tips to show html code in posts

Did you know that Blogger.com‘s template is just a special HTML file with some special template tags in between? That means you can customize your blog just like editing a web page.

That gives you the maximum flexibility to customize the blog’s design. You can add and change anything you want from top to bottom. To learn more about the template tags and what they do please visit http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42095.

I found it useful to put ”> into your template’s section, so that search engines will show your website’s description in their result instead of some stupid message like “Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does this mean? Blogger · Send As SMS · Get your own blog · Flag Blog · Next blog” if you have NavBar on.

If you want to put HTML codes in your blog to let others copy you can’t paste them directly in the Edit Posts window, it will give you some error message, here’s a way to get around it:

  • Copy the codes you want to paste into the post and paste it into a HTML editor (like FrontPage)’s design section.
  • Check the source code of the contents you just pasted, you will notice that the symbols “<“, “>”, or others became &??; now you can copy those codes with &??; and paste them in the posts, although you still see &??; now, when you published your post the &??; will become the appropriate symbol again when it show in the blog.

Note: You can’t get away with it by putting the unmodified codes inside the text box, Blogger’s editor still won’t let you save it even if you do that.

Laptop Theft in broad daylight


From youtube:
“Security camera footage of a laptop being stolen, in broad daylight.
To read the story – see http://www.stubbedtoe.co.nz/blog/blog.php?blog=10
The guy hasn’t yet been caught. ”
That video made me remember that once my sister’s laptop was also stolen in broad daylight when left unattended in the library, the thief wasn’t cought either, sad :( ……………………… Fortunately the laptop was the oldest generation that can only run Windows 98, it’s almost worthless now anyways.

Explorerdestroyer.com provides html code to encourage user to switch to firefox if IE is detected

Explorerdestroyer.com provides HTML code to detect if a user is using Internet Explorer, if he does, then a message that says ” We see you’re using Internet Explorer. Try Firefox, you’ll like it better. ” will pop out, it also tells us about the advantage of switching to firefox and the user to click the button on the right to download Firefox with Google Toolbar, which is your own adsense button. As always if a user liked it, downloaded firefox by clicking the button and installed it you’ll get $1.00 commision. I’ve seen couple of website loaded with it.

There’s three levels of setting available: Gentle(Level 1), Semi-serious(Level 2), and Dead-serious(Level 3). Level one just display a message and the download button on the top of page if a user is using IE; level two displays a splash screen with a message, a download link, and a link that you must click to skip the message and continue to the website; level 3 won’t even let you go in the site unless you use firefox, but because of this you have to use a non-adsense button for the download link, adsense’s policy doesn’t allow people to force others to click the ads.

For more information and demos please see http://explorerdestroyer.com/.

Wow! pictures of houses taken from the sky!

WTH? did I take this picture of my friend’s house from the sky front and back? No, it came from the amazing new Windows Live Local service (Formerly Virtual Earth) I mentioned before, now whenever you see the map of some big cities you can see them in bird’s eye’s view. with that you can see any place front and back as if the picture is taken from the sky. The technology used is called Pictometry, its images are taken at a 40 degree angle using a patented process, and it’s widely used by local and state Governments, including police and fire departments. Now everybody can give it a try now to see the all the places around us for free.

Check out colinux, it’s very cool

… “If Linux runs on every architecture, why should another operating system be in its way? ” …

Afraid of installing linux? Want to use linux occasionally while using windows without partitioning? check out colinux, it can install and start linux from a file in windows without rebooting, unlike Vmware, it has very little performance penalty. with it you can do everything in linux under Windows, except for X.

The only thing to remind is the software is still in alpha and it might crash the computer, although for me it almost never crashed.

Tips and tricks and tech thoughts for computers, internet, and mobile.