on GFW of China

GFW=great fire wall.
On my vacation to China this last summer I tried to access this blog from different locations in China: Xi'an, Beijing, Dalian, Shanghai. Never once did I succeed.

I can read Wikipedia, but I heard from other people it's hit & miss. I had no problem with porn sites though.
I always thought this censoring by Chinese government is really stupid. Today I read a excellent column on NY Times by World-is-flat author Tom Friedman, towards the end of the article, it struck a chord with me:

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

For the benefit of the China and Chinese people's future, Mr. Hu, Tear down this great fire-wall. (tear down this wall). 胡哥, 这墙拆了得了.

Emacs utf8 and Chinese on Windows

Download EmacsW32 latest binary (emacs 23 + emacsw32). Then add following to your .emacs

(setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

All your problems of viewing/editing Chinese on Windows Emacs will go away.

Adding Emacs to right click context menu

To add Emacs (or any program) to right click context menu for any type of files, open regedit, add a key under HKCR/*/shell, name it whatever you want, I name it "run emacs".

Then under it, create a new key called "command", change it data to your path to emacs, plus a "%1" at the end.


If you want to add Emacs to just a specific type of file, for example, ".org" file for Orgmode, it's a little more work.
Create a new key ".org" under HKCR, give it data value "Orgmode.File". Then create a new key "Orgmode.File" under HKCR. Under it, create key "Shell", under which create key "Emacs", under which create key "command", change its data to emacs path plus "%1".


If you want to add Emacs to directory context menu, create the same keys under HKCR/Folder.

Of course, all these apply to any programs, not just emacs.