ZHONG GUO REN

Shelley Young: you know
Shelley Young: your blog makes you look like a commie

Just so you know, I’m not a commie.

Now that I’m blogging again, I ought to write down what I have been doing for the past few months.

When I got back to the US last spring, I went to talk to Olin Shivers about my idea of implementing R5RS on top of Alan and Ian’s COLA runtime. While I think that is still a good idea, it didn’t pan out then and I moved on to work on something else.

Instead I have been working with Olin to restart the Scheme Underground effort that has (pretty much) been abandoned since the early 90s. Our initial plan was to work on a nice interactive shell that’s based on Olin’s work on scsh, however that idea was abandoned after realizing that the Tüebingen crew already did something similar with Commander S. However, with its customizable viewers, Commander S is actually quite a bit more than just a normal interactive shell, so I still think it’s interesting to implement our original (simpler) concept.

To get up to speed on Scheme, I learned about Termcap and Terminfo and ported Paul Foley’s terminfo.lisp to Scheme. I also took another Common Lisp project, Linedit, as inspiration and wrote my own Scheme version from scratch.

Lately, I have been working on porting MIT Scheme’s Edwin editor to Scheme48. I hope to get a terminal-based text-only version done before the beginning of the summer. Wish me luck.

With a domain name like a-chinaman.com, I can’t help but make my site a bit more Red. To that end, I have added a custom favicon, as well as tweaked the theme’s color scheme to better reflect my Red sentiments.

I took Srinig’s Fluid Blue theme and sinified it by changing it to use the reddish colors from the Tango Project’s color palette. I’m called my derived theme Fluid Red, it’s available in my Git repository.

Didn’t feel like working this afternoon, so instead, I updated my blog software to WordPress 2.5.

Here’s some Scheme code for all of you fans out there:

(define-record-type keystroke
  (%make-keystroke %value %meta?)
  keystroke?
  (%value char-value)
  (%meta? meta?))

(define-record-discloser keystroke
  (lambda (k)
    `(Keystroke ,(keystroke->sexpr k) ,(keystroke-hash k) )))

(define (parse-key form)
  (if (list? form)
      (let ((tag (car  form))
            (val (cadr form)))
        (case tag
          ((control) (%control  (parse-key val)))
          ((meta)    (%meta     (parse-key val)))
          ((key)     (%key     val))
          (else      (error “This is not a valid key form “ tag))))
      (%key form)))

You know, they say Bushco is getting ready to bomb Iran sometime in the next 6 months.

I saw this clip from News Hounds from Hannity and Colmes, and my first thought was:

If that were not the Iranian govt lynching an Iranian, but the American govt doing it to an “Islamo-fascist”, wouldn’t Hannity approve of it completely?

Here’s the clip, see it for yourself:

So I’m back in Hong Kong.

I haven’t been doing much - other than playing Wii tennis, I have mostly been staying at home. Yesterday, I decided to venture out to the bigger world that is Central, Hong Kong.

I went to the new shiny mall in town, the IFC (giant penis-shaped building by the waterfront) and strolled around. Everything in that mall seemed über expensive. I didn’t feel comfortable at all walking into one of the stores wearing my ratty cardigan from American Apparel and a tote bag that says ‘ILLEGAL DRUGS’.

To escape it all, I ended up sitting around at a McDonalds.

Afterwards, I met up with my mom at c!ty’super, the local Whole Foods-like supermarket. While waiting in line, I saw this caucasian woman in her late 20s holding a shopping basket with a box of DeCecco pasta and other groceries on one hand, and a hastily printed copy of Rachael Ray’s You won’t be Single for Long vodka cream pasta from the Food Network on her other hand.

I think I’m the only one in the checkout line who noticed it. If she were in the US, I think she probably wouldn’t dare to put her new recipe in such proud display.

UNIQLO typography, originally uploaded by Duncan Mak.

From PEN magazine.

I turned 23 years old today. More photos on Flickr.

自幾個月前，開始讀了舒國治的兩本書以後，一直都有把其中一些作品翻為英文的念頭，但遲遲都沒有實現。

今天開始，希望能每天寫一點點，看看能撐多久。

I started reading two of Shu Guozhi’s travelogues and essays a few months ago, and had the thought of translating some of his essays into English, as an exercise for myself. Now that summer is upon us, I guess it’s time for me try this out.

I’m starting with the first essay in his collection An Ideal Afternoon.