I had the chance to be an oral examiner for Cambridge Business English Test. I participated all the three levels: preliminary, vantage and higher. I noticed there are some loopholes in the test, and frankly I think ESOL could do better to make more money. Read the rest of this entry »
Some loopholes in Cambridge BEC test
June 7th, 2009Putty with ssh key authentication
June 5th, 2009When using ssh keys generated by puttygen.exe, I receive a “Server refused our key” error. Then I found out that the error-proof way is this: generate ssh key pairs under Linux, and then convert the private key into putty format using puttygen.exe. Read the rest of this entry »
Quotable Quotes from Movies
June 4th, 2009Well, it is June 4th and I have to write something on the Internet.
For about two weeks, I have been watching Avatar: the Last Airbender to ease the burden of my major work — revising my doctoral dissertation. I enjoyed season one and two of this animation abundantly, but season three just ruined the intense flow of the storyline. I especially hated episodes 305 about Ember Island, because the terrific adventures of Avatar is turned into stupid beach dates stories. Episode 317 is also a boring roundup of past story lines, leaving me the impression that the producers are trying hard to
invent something to fill an empty show slot. Read the rest of this entry »
A belated resolution for the year 2009
May 6th, 2009I know this is a bit late to make resolutions at this moment, but I still have time, don’t I? These are the things I really want to do and achieving any of them will make me look back this year with contentment. The aims are somewhat tuned down in case I fail shamelessly. Read the rest of this entry »
Enabling Webcam for HP DV2000T laptop under Lenny
May 4th, 2009Owning a slightly dated rig actually has one great benefit — the software for it is mature enough that not too much hacking or hair-tearing is needed. This is exactly the case for my two-year-old HP Pavilion DV2000t laptop. When staring installing Debian on it, I found the hardware is well supported. Read the rest of this entry »
Publish blog posts under VIM
May 4th, 2009I was looking for a blog publishing tool under Bash environment in Linux, and my search brought even better results — vimpress. It is VIM powered blog publishing tool.
There have been many introductions to this wonderful VIM plugin, but allow me to repeat the information just for my own record. Read the rest of this entry »
Fine-tuning Debian Lenny Desktop
May 4th, 2009Linux is never perfect. One has to tweak it hither and tither to make it comfortable for daily use, to make it YOUR OS. In this post are kept the tweaks, hacks and fooling around recorded on my Debian journey. Read the rest of this entry »
How to mount Samba share under Linux
May 3rd, 2009I have a West Digital MyBook box serving as a file server for my home LAN. I can locate and use its samba share under Nautilus sometimes, but for some unknown reason, the share doesn’t show up occasionally. I decided to mount it via /etc/fstab and put it into /media, so that I can directly access it on Gnome desktop. Read the rest of this entry »
Install Debian Lenny on HP DV2000t
April 29th, 2009I experienced a slump over the past two days, and it appears nothing could better /dev/zero my grudge than tinkering with Lenny on my HP laptop. Here are the notes I summarize for the installation and tweaking. Read the rest of this entry »
The Shanzhai Phenomenon in China
March 22nd, 2009Shanzhai (山寨) can be literally translated as “camp on a mountain”. It also carries overtones as an outlaws’ camp on the mountain. Anyone who have read one of the Four Classic novels — the Outlaws of the Marsh — will get an idea what an outlaw’s camp is like.