winter bricks

A week ago, the 5th semester of my university life had ended. It was not bad, I had new things learned, new concepts adopted, few old minds enhanced, few essential questions discovered, and maybe myself found.

Anyway, I’m sitting in my home, wondering the future, which is full of uncertainties.

Enough for the garbages, I’m not good at playing with words, especially not in my first language. Let’s note something real, those bricks that I, a hard-working brick-carrier, want to carry this winter.

The emacs adventure

While I was working on the OpenMRS-ID project, my once trusty editor Sublime Text 2 went broken. It just goes freeze from time to time and made me angry. Few months ago, I had a thought about trying to learn emacs. However, being scared about the complexity of ‘the Emacs Operating System’, and satisfied what I had in ST2, I forgot this gradually.

But as my ST2 went down, ‘We shall all be crazy once in a while, and it’s the perfect time to be crazy’, I thought. So I decided to give emacs a try, and downloaded it, and began to read the tutorial. ‘Oh WTF…’ There were just so many C-key and M-key keystrokes to memorize. As a VIM-like keybinding user, I cannot feel even slightly confortable with it, however, those emacs packages, like ORG-mode, are so attractive. So I googled ‘emacs + vim keybinding’.

Well, the first interesting page bumped out was this SO question, Why don’t more people use emacs with viper-mode? [closed]. There few funny words in the answer accepted,

Because you are either a vi person or an emacs person. The same way you’re either a dog person or a cat person.

And, anyway, emacs with its strange command sequence like

CTRL META LEFTSHIFT RIGHTSHIFT WINDOWS OPENAPPLE ALT K

is better suited to aliens with 87 fingers, or elite pianists :-)

However, I found the Evil package, like those other vim add-ons on other IDEs/editors. It was amazing, just amazing.

Ah, finally the Emacs OS get a good editor, evil.

The adventure so far was fun, I’m still learning the Emacs Operating System.

The Rasberry Pi OS

As we’ve learnt OS this semester, so I want to try my skills. And by suggestions of one my older fellow student(Xue Zhang). I dived into the Baking Pi online course provided by Cambridge University. Well, I was f##ked… it has nothing to do with modern OS development, but merely some low-level programming with ARMv6 assembly.

Anyway, it’s still somehow interesting, and I’ve put my works here.

Other bricks

  • The network and SDN stuff
  • Concrete Mathematics ( Bible of brick-carrying )
  • Coursera courses
    • Yale’s Introduction to Classical Music
    • NTU’s Machine Learning Techniques ( A lot to catch up… )
  • Literature
    • Love in the Time of Cholera ( El amor en los tiempos del colera )
    • A Tale of Two Cities ( And other Charles Dickens books I bought )
  • Some real OS stuff ( minix maybe? )

This will be an fulfilling summer, at least the plan is…