This line checks if GNOME or KDE power manager is running. If one is running then the script will simply exit to let the power manager to handle the lid close event. So what we need to do is to comment this line out, to let this ACPI script properly turn off the backlight (and also light it up on lid open). Remember to save the modification. Next step is to let GNOME power manager do nothing on lid close, which can be done in Ubuntu by the menu System -> Preferneces -> Power Management. In case the "do nothing" option doesn't appear, like my laptop, use the Configuration Editor to do it: execute gconf-editor; go to /apps/gnome-power-manager/buttons, change the values of both lid_ac and lid_battery to "nothing".

I've been longing to shoot a good scenery with a big moon. Some reasons make this difficult:

1. the moon has to be near the horizon;
2. the moon has to be at the same direction as the scenery;
3. I have to be far away from the scenery and use a telephoto lens to magnify the moon in the photo; (note that the moon looking big when it's near the horizon is a total pychological effect (thank Mike for teaching me this))
4. the moon is much brighter than most sceneries at night, which makes correct exposure difficult.

However, such an effect can be achieved in post-processing. R. Burden did this using Photoshop[1]. I repeated the procedure in GIMP, which is a free alternative of Photoshop:

1. open a scenery photo and a moon photo in GIMP;
2. drag the moon layer into the scenery photo;
3. in the layers panel, click the "Mode" pull-down menu, and choose "Screen";
   
4. adjust "Levels" ("Colors" menu -> "Levels") and "Opacity".

Tips: if the foreground is lit by direct sunlight, the foreground should be brighter than the moon. Otherwise the moon should be brighter than the foreground.

More hacks:

Reference
[1] R. Burden, Outdoor Photographer 2008-8, 92 (2008)

Recommended folder layout

Subversion has no restriction on the folder layout in the repository. What folder layout to choose is totally up to you. The Subversion documentation recommends creating a "trunk" and a "branches" folder at the root of the the repository. Here's a folder layout I use:

I keep the maximum-size photos in the "trunk" folder. When I need to resize or crop some photos, for example, for posting on my website, I do the converting job and then put the converted photos in the "branches" folder.

Move/Rename photos

Suppose you followed the instructions in Organize and version control digital photos with Subversion (basic) and created such a folder layout:

How do you convert this layout to the one recommended above? Here you need the "move" command. You can follow these commands:

...

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Subversion is an open-source cross-platform version control system[1]. Its official website is http://subversion.tigris.org. What is version control system (VCS)? It's a software for managing the whole development progress of a project (software project, documentation project, and so on). It stores all the development history in a place called repository. It manages privileges of developers. For example, who can add stuff to the repository, who can modify stuff in the repository, and who can delete stuff from the repository, are all managed by the VCS. It also deals with the conflicts when two or more developers are trying to modify the same file in the repository simultaneously.

Why use VCS to organize digital photos?

1. The photos are safe, once they are imported into VCS's repository. Here "safe" means you can do any post-processing to the photos without losing the original copy. Because the repository stores the whole history of the files, and you can get a copy of any historical time.
2. You can tidy up your photo folders by deleting all bad photos without hesitation. If you later find you deleted a good photo which you thought is bad, you can restore it.
3. To backup the photos is easy. VCS provides simple commands to backup and recover a repository.

Why use Subversion, not other VCS?

1. Subversion is open-source, so you can use it free of charge.
2. Subversion is cross-platform. No matter what operating system you are using, you can install Subversion on it. At least it supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD[2].
3. CVS is another popular open-source cross-platform VCS. Subversion is a newer generation VCS than CVS. The most important difference in our case, is that digital photos (jpeg, RAW) are binary files and Subversion handles binary files more gracefully than CVS does[1].

...

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1. Install MySQL as in Windows XP. MySQL 4.1 or above works on Windows Vista.
2. Install IIS7
   1. Go to Control Panel->Programs, click "Turn Windows features on or off" in the "Programs and Features" section.
   2. In the popped up window, check "Internet Information Services". Then expand it, and go to "Internet Information Services"->"World Wide Web Services"->"Application Development Features", check "ISAPI Extensions".
   3. Confirm/close all windows. To check if IIS7 is working, open your browser and try to access http://localhost

3. Install PHP5
   1. Download PHP5 Windows binary zip package, which can be found at http://www.php.net/downloads.php
   2. Extract files in the zip package to a folder. Suppose it's C:\php\
   3. Make a php.ini configuration file in C:\Windows\ . If you don't know how to make a php.ini , just copy php.ini-dist file in C:\php\ to C:\Windows\php.ini . And then edit the file. Find the line starting with extention_dir. Change the right hand side with actual extension path (C:/php/ext/). Find "Dynamic Extensions" section in the file, uncomment (delete the ";" prefix) the extensions that you want, like php_mysql.dll .
   4. Right click "Computer" and select "Manage" in the popped up menu.
   5. In the left side of the "Computer Management" window, expand "Services and Applications" and click "Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager".
   6. Open "Handler Mappings" in the middle section.
   7. In the right side of the window, click "Add Script Map".
   8. In the window popped up, fill in the blanks with these:
      • Request path: *.php
      • Executable: C:\php\php5isapi.dll
      • Name: PHP

4. Confirm/close all windows. Put your PHP+MySQL programs into C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ and use your browser to see if everything is working.

• No need to check two email boxes (@uci.edu and Gmail) any more. Check only Gmail.
• In Gmail, you can send mails as @uci.edu .
• Share Gmail's advantages with your @uci.edu email, like large storage, labels, filters, powerful search, automatic organization by conversations, etc.
• I heard that accessing @uci.edu email around noon is slow. If you assemble your @uci.edu email into Gmail, you don't need to worry about this any more.

Assembling process:

1. Open http://phwww.cwis.uci.edu/cgi-bin/phupdate.
2. Login with UCInetID.
3. In the "email" section, select "Other", and then fill in the blank next to it with your Gmail address, like abcdefgh@gmail.com .
4. Click "Submit Change Request". From now on, all your @uci.edu emails will be forwarded to your Gmail automatically.
5. Next, we should make Gmail to be able to send emails as @uci.edu . Login to your Gmail. Click "Settings" on upper right corner. Click "Accounts" section.
6. In the "Send mail as" part, click "Add another email address".
7. Input your name and @uci.edu address. Click "Next Step".
8. A confirmation email will be sent to your @uci.edu email and then it will be automatically forwarded to your Gmail.
9. Follow instructions in the email to finish confirmation.
10. Click "Compose Mail" in Gmail. Now you can see a drop-down list in the "From" line, and you can choose the address between your Gmail and your @uci.edu .

Other school emails and work emails can be assembled into Gmail using a similar progress. If the email that you want to assemble into Gmail doesn't support automatic forwarding, but it supports POP3, you can use "Get mail from other accounts" to achieve the same effect. It's in the "Accounts" section in Gmail "Settings".

1. Open "Computer", which is probably in your "Start Menu".
2. Click .
3. Do NOT click "Connect to a Web site that you can use to store your documents and pictures." Select a drive letter. Fill in the "Folder" blank with modified website address. The modification rules are:
   • If the original address is like "http://example.com/folder", then the modified one is "\\example.com\folder".
   • If the original address is like "https://example.com/folder", then the modified one is "\\example.com@SSL\folder".

4. Click "Finish" and you can see your WebDAV folder/drive in "Computer".

One way to configure a FreeBSD as an ICS client is to use the "sysinstall" command on root account. In the menu of sysinstall, select Configure->Networking->Interfaces->(your ethernet card). Then you will be asked two questions. One is about IPv6, and the other is about DHCP client. Please answer yes to the second question. Then you can get your local IP, usually in the form 192.168.0.x, from the ICS server. Save your configuration and exit sysinstall.

After using the sysinstall, you can find a few lines are added to the file /etc/rc.conf. So another way to set a FreeBSD ICS client is to manually add these lines to /etc/rc.conf.