Because I had much trouble finding a free copy of the document on the ’Net, I have made a table of the symbols and their functions below. I have marked those not present in Unicode as �.

Some examples: copy is usually [⎈ + C] and close is usually [⎇ + F4].

I was bored, and it didn’t seem to have been done before, so here’s some Future action in C#.

The Code

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Threading;
 
public class Future<T> {
        public delegate R FutureDelegate<R>();
        public Future (FutureDelegate<T> del) {
                Del = del;
                Result = del.BeginInvoke(null,null);
        }
        private FutureDelegate<T> Del;
        private IAsyncResult Result;
        private T PValue;
        private bool HasValue = false;
        private T Value {
                get {
                        if (!HasValue) {
                                if (!Result.IsCompleted)
                                        Result.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne();
                                PValue = Del.EndInvoke(Result);
                                HasValue = true;
                        }
                        return PValue;
                }
        }
        public static implicit operator T(Future<T> f) {
                return f.Value;
        }
}
 
public static class MainClass {
        //This is purposely wasteful!
        public static ulong Fib(ulong n) {
                if (n > 1) {
                        return Fib(n-1)+Fib(n-2);
                }
                else if (n == 1)
                        return 1;
                else //n == 0
                        return 0;
        }
        //Demo using futures.
        public static void Main(string[] args) {
                Console.WriteLine("First, call synchronously.");
                Console.WriteLine(Fib(40));
                Thread.Sleep(1000);
                Console.WriteLine("Next, call asynchronously.");
                Future<ulong> fib40 = new Future<ulong>(delegate{
                        return Fib(40);
                }); //Begins computing Fib(40) at this point...
                Thread.Sleep(1500);
                Console.WriteLine("Note that we can do other things in the mean time, and that the thread only blocks when we ask for the value.");
                Console.WriteLine(fib40); //Need it now!
                Thread.Sleep(2000);
                Console.WriteLine("We can then ask for the computed value as many times as we like.");
                Console.WriteLine(fib40); //Already computed.
        }
}

Caveats

Most notably, this doesn’t do promise pipelining (and I doubt I could without some compiler magicking), so instead of nesting futures, you’ll want to seperate them out. That is; instead of:

t3 = new Future(delegate{return new Future(delegate{return x.a()}).c(new Future(delegate{return y.b()}))});

…you’ll want to do:

t1 = new Future(delegate{return x.a()});
t2 = new Future(delegate{return y.b()});
t3 = new Future(delegate{return t1.c(t2)});

…although you’d probably want to do this anyway if you don’t want to wander into The LispZone.

/etc/bind/named.conf.options

//Add this somewhere inside the options{}; section...
        forward only;
        forwarders {
                //OpenDNS
                208.67.222.222;
                208.67.220.220;
        };

Don’t use this method any more! I have a much easier way to do it in a more recent post.

But for posterity…

First install resolvconf and pdnsd: sudo apt-get install pdnsd resolvconf. Resolvconf handles the messy interaction between different programs fighting over the /etc/resolv.conf file, and pdnsd provides a persistent DNS daemon, which will cache the DNS lookups on your machine in order to make browsing faster.

Next, you just need to edit pdnsd’s configuration file, /etc/pdnsd.conf as root. Edit it to look like this:

global {
        perm_cache=512;
        cache_dir="/var/cache/pdnsd";
        max_ttl=604800;
        run_as="pdnsd";
        paranoid=on;
#       next setting allows ppp/ip-up update the name servers -- ABa / 20040213
        status_ctl=on;
        server_port=53;
        server_ip="127.0.0.1";
}

#Edit these to be your own servers if wished:
server {
        label = "OpenDNS";
        ip=208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220;
        proxy_only=on;
        timeout=10;
}

# if you installed resolvconf, and status_ctl=on
server {
    label="resolvconf";
}

source {
        ttl=86400;
        owner="localhost.";
#       serve_aliases=on;
        file="/etc/hosts";
}

And finally, restart pdnsd with sudo /etc/init.d/pdnsd restart to use the new settings. In the example above, I've used OpenDNS's servers, but you can change these to whatever you want. As far as actual results go:

~$ dig example.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> example.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 17447
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;example.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com. 172800 IN A 192.0.34.166

;; Query time: 513 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Thu Oct 5 15:24:19 2006
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 45

$ dig example.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> example.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 19338
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;example.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com. 172799 IN A 192.0.34.166

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Thu Oct 5 15:24:20 2006
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 45


find . -type f -iname '*.mp3' -print0 | xargs -0 mp3gain -r -k

Unfortunately, this seems to have problems with very large collections (I suspect that the command line is being filled up), so here’s what I came up with:

find . -iname '*.mp3' -execdir mp3gain -r -k "{}" \; &

If you’d rather use album normalization (and you have your files separated by album such as “~/Music/David Bowie/Hunky Dory”/):

find . -iname '*.mp3' -execdir mp3gain -r -k -a "{}" + &

How to use it

Simply open a terminal, browse to your music directory (using cd), and type it in.

Break it down

What the command does:

1. find . -iname '*.mp3' finds all MP3 files in the current directory and all subdirectories.
2. -execdir mp3gain -r -k "{}" \; & executes “mp3gain -r -k” on each file (the filename goes where {} is found). The semi-colon indicates to execute the command once per file, but since ; is also a significant character for bash, you need to escape it with a backslash. The final ‘&’ tells bash to run the command in the background.

Attempting to fix this by forcing the install of the 32-bit version of uqm doesn’t work, because for some reason then apt won’t recognise that it is installed and complain that uqm-content has unmet dependencies. So here’s the official recommendation from me:

1. Install uqm normally with the package manager.
2. Download the i386 .debs, extract them and overwrite the binary files from uqm (there are two of them).
3. Install ia32-libs-sdl for the 32-bit versions of the libraries it depends on.

… and it should work perfectly. If you want voice-overs and music (yes!), head to the UQM download page, and download the second two files listed under “Content” (you already have the first). These are in fact just renamed zip files, so unzip them to /usr/share/games/uqm/content/ and you’re good to go.

And the game? Excellent. This is much better than the last game I bought—Civilization IV.

Install command-not-found then add this to your ~/.bashrc:

function command_not_found_handle {
        /usr/bin/command-not-found $1
        return $?
}

And you’re all done:

~$ ssed
The program 'ssed' is currently not installed, you can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install ssed


1. Download the version of Opera 9 for i386 Linux from the official site.
2. Go to the Ubuntu package site and download these packages (also for i386):
   • libqt3-mt
   • libaudio2
   • libxcursor1
   • libxft2
   • libxfixes3
3. Open each package in turn (don’t install!) and copy the libraries to the /lib32 folder as root. Open the package, then open “data.tar.gz”, then find the /lib folder. You don’t need to worry about copying anything under the /usr/share folder, these are just docs and some unneeded symlinks.
4. Install Opera by browsing to the folder where you downloaded it to and entering sudo dpkg -i --force-all opera*.deb.

All done!

Open up a terminal in the folder you saved it to:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture wine*.deb

Next, head to the Ubuntu repository and download both libXx86dga1 and libXx86vm1 (for i386). Extract them (don’t install!) and then extract the data.tar.gz files inside of them. Browse to the /usr/lib32 subfolder, then copy both the symlink and the shared library to your /lib32 folder (you’ll need to do this as root). Make sure you do this for both these packages.

I’m currently testing this with the IEs for Linux script, and everything seems to be working so far. IE6 runs perfectly (it may not show up correctly the first time you open it but it’s fine after that).

XML 1.1 allows you to insert characters from the C0 range as long as they are escaped as character entity references, and mandates that you do the same for those from the C1 range.

This little fact is the reason why not all XML 1.0-valid documents are valid under XML 1.1. Nasty.