Instead of digesting the turkey (which I didn't eat), I spent some time trying to come up with something that sets pidgin's "now playing" bit. Since the code is most likely called from a music player, I decided to do it over DBus instead of as a plugin. Fighting through the status API was not really a pleasant task, a couple patches and more than "some" time later, I was able to come up with this. It requires the unreleased pidgin 2.3.1, which likely will only support XMPP out of the box. MSNP14 also supports broadcasting current media, so it's an option for those of you who are brave enough to use it.

It's funny how many things broke in 2.3.0 because of a single patch that I applied.

Why do E-Trade even bother to send a text version of its email? If they don't then my mail client know to pick up the html version. It's not a problem if they actually include useful information in the text version, but all I get is this:

This is a graphic email message. If you are reading this message then your email program does not support HTML format. We recommend changing your Email Alert delivery format to plain text or upgrading the program you use to read your email. To modify your Alert format, log in to your account at www.etrade.com and update your e-mail profile settings.

Hot or not? I think not. Their interview process is clearly not filtering out enough junk.

Last year, the company briefly considered offering a job to every graduate from the University of California at Berkeley computer science program. It decided not to but still wound up hiring most of the 59 grads. "We were like: 'Hey, maybe we're hot again," says Schwartz.

Found out about EBuddy, wonder if it's LibPurple based.

Firefox 3 may not allow self-signed certs to work anymore. Here's the bug. There's a way to whitelist each host:port, but it's going to suck if you have lots of them.

When rumors were floating around that SUNW^WJAVA was about to open source Java, there were those who didn't believe it, those who would believe it when they see it, and those who believed it's just a matter of time. I've always been in the third camp, and it turned out that I was right.

Similar rumors floated around for a long time, that AMD/ATI was going to open source their graphics card drivers. I knew it would happen, and it's just a matter of time. So when AMD/ATI announced they are going to open up the spec to their radeon line of hardware, and have a 2D open source driver out by year end, I immediately purchased the best radeon card that has stable open source driver, the radeon 9250.

Just to put my money where my mouth is.

現在已經是八月，九月也差不多要來了，原本打算九月份旅行也要準備了。工作上八月底有deadline，這幾天總是在想，是不是不應該deadline之後馬上出發，因為deadline之後還會有很多工作，這樣丢下同事不管，好像不太好。日有所思，前晚終於夜有所夢，夢到回了香港，還見到了去年華東團的朋友(們?)。夢裏我們不太合情理地住在同一家酒店，第二天我還睡晚了，要他/她/們(在夢裏睡醒，當然記不清楚)到我房門叫醒我，不知道為甚麽，房門還是開着的！

今天上司跟我說，deadline可能會延期，所以我的旅程也很有可能延期。加上不想在十 · 一期間回去，要是十一月有甚麽事的話，弄不好推到明年也說不定。

去哪裏也沒想好。原本打算去西藏，但過兩個月的天氣又不太適宜。我想雲南，四川應該是首選，但如果時間許可的話第二個去處還沒想好。中國大陸特別想去的地方也都去過了，日本和台灣倒也是不錯的選擇，也可以算是「途經」吧。一個人去的話始終人生路不熟，也有安全方面的考慮，大概會先參加這邊的旅行團，回程的時候到香港探望親友，到時再看看能不能找到去雲南，四川的旅行團吧。

下個星期又是Mandatory Week of Fun了，上年的照片在這裏，下個星期有空的話我也會把今年的照片放上來。

還有今個星期是我三個朋友的生日，祝他們都生日快樂。

I've had this keyboard ever since my previous one failed (due to a combination of orange juice and some not-so-pure H2O), I am generally happy with it, except this:

The function lock, when off, turns all the function keys into special purpose keys that I never use. Worse yet, the lock is off by default and there is no way to make it stay on across power cycle. So for the past 2 years I've been manually (since there's no way to toggle the function lock programmably) switching the lock on, still I usually begin my day hitting my function keys couple times and wonder why they don't do what they are supposed to do.

Today I finally decided to figure out a way to stop this madness. Turns out you can fool Linux into thinking that those special purpose keys are the same as the function keys. See Solution for F-lock. I had to modify the setkeycodes line for my keyboard to:

setkeycodes e03b 59 e03c 60 e03d 61 e03e 62 e010 63 e019 64 e022 65 e024 66 e043 67 e044 68 e057 87 e058 88

Otherwise F5-F8 wouldn't work. Now I will be able to save 2 seconds every day for the next 2 years! (My previous keyboard lasted about 4 years)