Chinese movies / serials ... mmmmmm

... ga! Can't talk now ... must watch movie ...

No, seriously, I'm watching this great Chinese serial that we got from Times Books. They sell all sorts of current and past Chinese movies, and discounts are available to regular customers. You can shop online and have them ship the movies to you, or you can goto one of their "fairs" or "exhibits" to buy them in person. If there is ever a problem with the disks not playable, you can call their customer service for help. You might need to know how to speak Chinese, though :) .

... now, back to our regularly scheduled program ...

Angry at Lack of new Stuff?

Dear Faithful Reader(s),

I sincerely apologize for my lack of new posts over weekends. I suspect that this pattern will persist throughout the history of this blog. Nay, this pattern is not because of lack of learning of interesting materials over the weekend, but rather because I spend too much time learning new things ... I have neglected to update my faithful reader(s) on my learning progress. In the future, you may expect new things on work days only, since on non-work days I will most likely be sleeping late (until noon), then watching anime / reading manga nonstop until it's time to goto bed (excepting possibly the time I take to eat). Thank you very much for your considerations :) .

Requesting your patience,
Mabel

The Sport of Drifting

Today .... (after posting that long post) ... I read a HowStuffWorks article (cause I was bored) ... about the sport of:

Drifting

Drifting is a sport that represents practically the epitome of oxymorons (like the vocab words?). It is a sport whose very premise is based on losing control. Now, that is not to say that this sport is easy. There are many techniques available for driving, including clutch-based techniques, lock-based techniques, and other techniques. Go ahead and read the HowStuffWorks article or the Wikipedia article on Drifting as a motor sport if you are interested.

"new" blog format, and today's book

I have finally decided that I will stop putting the "Did you know that ..." and the "Well, now you know!" before and after every post. The difference may be minuscule, but it indicates a change in my philosophy, if you wish to call it that. Before, I was always trying too hard. I tried to find interesting things to blog about to draw readers to my blog. But you know what? The point of blogging is not to "draw readers" or to "inform the world" ... at least, probably not for me. Rather, the purpose of my blog is to:

1. give me a place to practice my english / writing skills
2. have a place for me to put down a "diary" of sorts for when I grow old and actually care / want to remember all this stuff

So away with the "serving the masses"! Now I blog for me, myself, and I. If you happen to read this, then great, I'm an interesting person / I've finally managed to write about ordinary things in an interesting manner. If not, then at least my mom will read this (maybe). However, I will keep those did-you-know phrases at the beginning and ends of my posts from before, just for a record. For example, I only started those phrases in my 3rd post. However, for the purposes of consistency and perfection, I changed the previous 2 entries to match entry 3 and beyond. This time though, I will leave them there as a record / memory of what came before and try to (mightily) resist the temptation to change all the ones that came before. Not to mention I now have too many posts to tediously go through and change them one by one ... :) Now, on with the post!

Today, I read The Life Murder of Bindy Mackenzie by Jaclyn Moriarty. She is also the author of The Year of Secret Assignments, though I haven't actually read that book yet. You can find more information about Jaclyn Moriarty on this (pretty nicely designed) site ... or, you could just Google it :) Once I figure out how to post spoilers without revealing everything (without changing the textcolor to match the background color ... that's cheating ... I was thinking more of a javascript or something that you can click on to reveal the stuff underneath), I'll probably post summaries / commentary / recollections on future books / posts. Wish me luck!

Oops I killed my GRUB ...

Did you know that ...

So on my hard drive, I originally had a windows partition (from my original windows xp tablet pc edition), a linux partition (formatted ext3fs for my ubuntu installation), and a 3 GB linux-swap partition. I suddenly decided over the weekend that I wanted to make a vmware image of my windows partition (since that's the virtual machine program used in this tutorial).

However, VMware converter required 12mb, and I didn't have that much space left on my windows partition. So, I went and made an image of my mom's tablet computer, then backed up everthing I wanted to keep from my windows partition and then proceded to use GParted to delete the windows partition.

Now, I couldn't just leave all that space gaping there, right? So I tried to move my linux partition foward on the drive, but of course, GParted said "no!" So, I copied my hd2 (then linux partition) foward, then deleted the original hd2, then expanded both my original swap partition and my new linux partition. So here's a diagram to help you visualize:

Original Partition Configuration:

|

hd1 - windows

|

hd2 - linux

|

hd3 - swap

|

New Partition Configuration:

|

hd1 - linux (copy of old one)

|

hd2 - swap

|

Now, I happily rebooted my hard computer, eager to install that huge virtual machine so I can used windows under linux. However, now my grub file is messed up! After trying the Super Grub Disk (which didn't help at all - it only had confusing menus and awful options that went around and around in a voyage circulaire), I eventually booted into a Ubuntu Edgy live cd, ready to (sigh) reinstall my entire system. However, when the time came to reformat my hard drive, I refused to give up! I prodded around, sudo nano'ed /boot/grub/menu.lst (after backing up, of course), yet still I couldn't get it. Eventually, I found the solution in the man pages (ah ... the good old Linux Programmer's Manual Pages ... ) under update-grub. So here's the entire code for what I did ... hope it helps anyone else with this problem :)

sudo bash
enter root password here
mkdir /media/linux
mount /dev/hda1 /media/linux
chroot /media/linux
dir

double check to make sure it looks like / on your original linux ... if now, then something's wrong and you might need a reinstall :'(

dir /boot/grub/

backup your current menu.lst ... it may not work, but it's still better than trying to write your own from scratch :)

cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst
rm /boot/grub/menu.lst

you might want to remove anything else that says menu.lst or similar ... not tested, so be careful ... better to back them up first, then remove

update-grub

when it asks you if you really want to make one, say yes ... there might be some other options I'm missing here, feel free to ask questions in the comments

update-grub

the first run generates the menu.lst file ... the second run configures it according to default settings

reboot

Now my computer works perfectly, with no glitches, and I've even managed to keep my tweakings to GRUB that I originally had without redoing all those tweaks! Apparently, update-grub was smart enough to figure out and keep my original GRUB settings. Yeah! ^_^

Thanks to Zach for telling me about chroot!

Well, now you know!

Bored? Use a FeedReader

Did you know that ...

Do you ever feel really bored when online, with no webcomics to read, all blog updates read, and even tired of staring forever at your unchanging facebook / myspace / orkut page? Most of the time, people would revert automatically to playing a game available online at shockwave.com, gamehouse.com, onemorelevel.com, or other places. However, I use a different solution. Use a FeedReader.

What do I mean by that? If you are ever lacking in things to do online, you can use a n online feedreader (I suggest Google Reader) to subscribe to a feed such as HowStuffWorks.com, Slashdot, or Reddit. These feeds are always there, ready for you to read, yet still easy to setup and no downloading required. Just pop a few rss feeds from your favorite howto sites into the reader, and voila, instant reading material. The next time you feel bored, just head on over to your feedreader and go through all your accumulated items. If any seem interesting, just read it. If not, then try again later.

An alternative solution is to use a separate email account to subscribe to newsletters. My favorite sources include about.com (containing a virtual world's worth of information), PCMag, PCWorld, and other sister / brother sites. Free email accounts are available through many sources, although I recommend GMail (now available free and no strings attached, and no loops to jump for getting an account, either! :) ) for it's labeling capabilities, conversation threading (although that feature probably won't be used much just for reading newsletters), and excellent spam-filtering.

Finally, if you're really bored, you can always goto the Optical Illusions Etc. blog and stare at those pretty things until your eyes fall out. ::wink::

Well, now you know!

Social Bookmarks Link Creator

Did you know that ...

What if you wanted to add to all your posts a line of social bookmark links, but never found out how to do all those pesky links? Well, now you can with the Social Bookmarks Link Creator! Just check the ones you wish to create bookmarks for, the list type (drop-down menu or all in a line), blog specific or static page, and which blog you're making these links for if they are blog specific, and voila, a nice chunck of code comes up for pasting into your very own blog. Here's a sample:

Social Bookmark
Blogmarks
del.icio.us
Digg it
ma.gnolia
Newsvine
Taggly
Yahoo MyWeb
Google
Netscape
StumbleUpon

Create Social Bookmark Links

Well, now you know!

howtoforge.com - linux tutorials

Did you know that ...

Howtoforge.com is an excellent place to find detailed, easy to use, and comprehensive error-free tutorials for many flavors of linux, including BSD, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, and many other linux related howtos. How do I set-up my own mail server in 15 minutes with antivirus & antispam? How about a mirror of all packages on your own home network? Just follow the links to see! All the tutorials are easy and clear, and there is a comments secttion for easy Q&A. Go and give it a try ... the worst you could do is mess up your computer, and have to restore to a previous state. You did remember to backup your computer, right?

Well, now you know!

edit: oops, you're not supposed to use the comments to ask questions ... use the forums instead :)

Turning Physical Windows Systems into Virtual Machines for Use on Linux Desktop

Did you know that ...

You can use your own install of Windows on your linux box? By using Xen, an opensource virtual machine solution, you can run windows within your linux box without having to dual-boot and restart. Just follow this link to read an excellent howto from howtoforge.com on setting up xen on debian ubuntu.

An alternate solution is to use VMware from VMware.com. A tutorial for setting up VMware to run windows on ubuntu can be found here. Although VMware is commercial software (thus not free), there is a trial version available (which is all you should need -- according to the tutorial), not to mention VMware is one of the more popular virtualization software solutions for windows on linux.

Well, now you know!

Edit: spelled commercial wrong ... "commertial", lol.

Terrier by Tamora Pierce

Did you know that ...

Today, I'm starting on a new series by Tamora Pierce, one of my favorite authors. I'm currently reading Book 1 of the Provost's Dog Series: Terrier. This series is placed in Tortall, although long before George Cooper and his time. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just Google "Tortall" or "Tamora Pierce", or you can use Wikipedia if you like that better :) ...

Some of Pierce's series in the Tortall universe include:

• The Song of the Lioness:
  
  1. Alanna, the First Adventure
     
  2. In the Hand of the Goddess
     
  3. The Woman Who Rides Like a Man
     
  4. Lioness Rampart
     


• The Immortals:
  
  1. Wild Magic
     
  2. Wolf-Speaker
     
  3. Emperor Mage
     
  4. The Realms of the Gods
     


• Protector of the Small:
  
  1. First Test
     
  2. Page
     
  3. Squire
     
  4. Lady Knight
     


• Daughter of the Lioness:
  
  1. Trickster's Choice
     
  2. Trickster's Queen
     


• Beka Cooper:
  
  1. Terrior
     


• The Will of the Empress

Some of the books in her Circle of Magic universe include:

• Circle of Magic:
  
  1. Sandry's Book (UK - The Magic in the Weaving)
     
  2. Tris's Book (UK - The Power in the Storm)
     
  3. Daja's Book (UK - The Fire in the Forging)
     
  4. Briar's Book (UK - The Healing in the Vine)
     


• The Circle Opens:
  
  1. Magic Steps
     
  2. Street Magic
     
  3. Cold Fire
     
  4. Shatterglass
     


• Melting Stones

Tamora Pierce is a Great and Prolific Writer ... she wrote lots and lots of great books that never get boring ... even on the 13th reading! There are always new details to discover in her writing and stories: new plot elements that were overlooked, new character personalities that she explored more deeply than I had realized before ... even re-reading her work was never boring. Keep up the good work (even though you'll probably never see this ;P) !

Well, now you know!

Brain Bogglers from Bogglers.com

Did you know that ...

You know those word games where you are given a picture, and the answer is some sort of pun on an idiom or common saying? Those were always hard for me since I learned English as a second language, but now I can get plenty of practice! Simply go to bogglers.com/getcode.php to embed random bogglers onto your page. Here is a sample. To see a different boggler, simply hit F5.

Well, now you know!

Edit: To get script working, paste code into "Edit HTML" mode, change all tags to be lowercase, and add <pre> ... </pre> tags around the entire block, then hope for the best

Edit: I don't seem to be able to change the table width at all ... lemme see if I can fiddle around with it a little to fix the stupid width problem ...

RiddleNut.com

Did you know that ...

Want to put riddles on your webpage? Here's an easy and free way to do it ... just goto www.riddlenut.com/build.php to select options and get the code for embedding your own custom riddle on your website. I have included a sample below using default values to show you what it looks like ... just refresh the page using F5 to see a different riddle :)

Well, now you know!

Edit: To get script working, paste code into "Edit HTML" mode, change all tags to be lowercase, and add <pre> ... </pre> tags around the entire block, then hope for the best

The Water Cycle

Did you know that ...

For total lack of anything else to talk about, the water cycle goes thus:

1. water falls down as precipitation onto land or sea
2. part of the precipitation evaporates back into the air
3. the rest of the precipitation that fell on sea joins the water there and evaporates into the air
4. the rest of the precipitation that fell on land percolates through the ground and either goes into plants / animals or rejoins groundwater (or they could directly flow into the sea ... like on flood days, or in rivers)
5. groundwater flows to rejoin the oceans and seas, water in animals and plants evaporate into the air through transpiration (aka breathing)
6. all that evaporated water concentrates eventually around small motes of dust in the atmosphere and eventually falls down as precipitation

here's a diagram I pulled off of Google Images (courtesy to http://www.educ.uvic.ca/):


Well, now you know!

ASCII Art

Did you know that ...

ASCII art is art by using symbols within the ASCII set of characters. However, to display ASCII art properly, ASCII art should be created using monospaced font. Monospaced fonts are fonts where all characters have the same width, versus proportional fonts where all fonts have different widths, like the font I am using here. An example of ASCII art is shown below:

            ^^                   @@@@@@@@@
       ^^       ^^            @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
                            @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@              ^^
                           @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
 ~~~~ ~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~ ~~ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~
 ~         ~~   ~  ~       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~       ~~     ~~ ~
   ~      ~~      ~~ ~~ ~~  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~  ~     ~~~    ~ ~~~  ~ ~~
   ~  ~~     ~         ~      ~~~~~~  ~~ ~~~       ~~ ~ ~~  ~~ ~
 ~  ~       ~ ~      ~           ~~ ~~~~~~  ~      ~~  ~             ~~
       ~             ~        ~      ~      ~~   ~             ~

you like?

Well, now you know!

Miniclip.com

Did you know that ...

Miniclip.com is an excellent site that provides small games written in flash and shockwave by various companies. All the games are free to play on their site, although a few multi-player games require registering for a free account.

There are also many games available for individual download to your computer, and webmasters who wish to put miniclip.com games on their website can use the provided code and games to either put an entire game room on their site (as shown on the bottom of my blog), or just link to / embed individual games for visitors to play (as shown here).

Snow Line Help Santa Claus collect the presents.

Play this free game now!!

The miniclip.com website has good site design, although the flash and shockwave plugins need to be installed for a full experience of the site. The games available on this site are often updated, so in the future, I will probably post about some of the new games available there when I can't find anything that would be easy to explain in a single blog post.

Well, now you know!

edit:
Unfortunately, this blog template was too narrow for embedding the flash game directly into the post, so I have only included a link here. However, I have already downloaded the template for this blog, and am in the process of revamping it so that all widths use % and all corners are generated using Nifty Corners Cube, a very handy javascript tool for generating rounded corners without using any images! I hope to be able to use my new template soon :)

Also, I am aware that the miniclip.com Game Room isn't working totally correctly right now. I will try to find out what's wrong, then post the solution here ... actually ... never mind ... I just realized. To play the games in the Game Room, you need to have this site on the whitelist for all your pop-up blockers. Unfortunately, the Game Room does not allow you to play the games within this site, you have to play them on the miniclip.com site itself ... (sigh) ... what a pity :'(

Phone Phreaks and their Blue Boxes

Did you know that ...

Way back when personal computers did even exist yet, there were these hacker people (white had & black hat) who liked to explore and play with all sorts of technologies. One of their playing fields was the telephone companies.

Telephone company switches used to be operated by hand a long long time ago. However, as those people were replaced with machines, commands started to be sent through whistles and different tones and notes. By voice (if you have perfect pitch), whistles that came as free gifts in Captain Crunch cereal, and by using the Blue Box, hackers were able to get deep within the phone system and do things that other people couldn't even imagine was possible such as calling for free cross-country, having conference calls on lines deep within the system, and generally taking advantage of the system.

Originally, it was quite difficult for hackers to produce the correct pitch necessary for hacking telephone company equipment. Eventually, John Draper (aka Captain Crunch), one of the foremost phone phreaks, created a device that produced certain tones when you pressed the buttons. This made phone phreaking much easier, since hackers no longer had to rely on whistling the correct pitch to hack telephone networks.

In the October 1971 issue of the Esquire Magazine, Ron Rosenbaum published an article entitled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" that described in detail the people, equipment, and techniques involved in phone phreaking. Soon, the general public knew all about how to place long-distance calls for free, but phone phreaking, for those first pioneering hackers at least, officially died with that article.

Well, now you know!

Site Still Under Construction ... Sigh

This website is taking me forever to put up! Perhaps I should have worked with someone else ... But then again, I have no idea who else would want to work on this site with me.

Hi, I'm Mabel, the Webmaster for StudyHelpers.org. StudyHelpers.org is a place where you can get online help for all your studying questions, post your studying ideas, get studying aids & guides, etc. My apologies for taking so long to put up this site, but I always seem to be so busy lately ...

If you are interested in helping me develop this site, have any questions or concerns, or just want to talk, please feel free to email me.

Printer Jams

Did you know that ...

Most printer jams are caused by use of inappropriate types of paper? Other common causes for printer jams include failure in printer parts such as rollers, accumulation of dust (especially in laser printers), etc.

When paper jams in your printer, trying to pull it out backwards could cause r0llers, gears, or motors to rewind, damaging your printer. If your printer does jam, you should try to pull it out the same way it was supposed to come out if your print job succeeds.

Well, now you know!

Catching Up ...

Did you know that ...

I have just realized something: I have been learning about all manner of things ever since I learned to read (first in Chinese, now in English). That means there's a lot of things that haven't yet made it onto this blog, since I just recently started this blog.

Luckily for me, there is an option under Blooger that lets me change the publishing date of my posts. Under Post Options, I can change the post time and post date, thereby making my posts seem to be put up whenever I want! :)

I probably won't be using this feature a lot, though, since it's a hassle to try to remember when I learned something, then to decide on a date and time to set that post as, then to change it ... ;P However, if there is ever a need, that option is available for everyone to use, as long as you are using the default Blogger interface.

Well, now you know!

COBOL ... or not

Did you know that ...

Today I found out that COBOL, a language that I have yet to learn, is considered to be a synonym for awful, according to linux.about.com. I'm going to google a couple more sources to double check, but if that is the case, that means I now have one less language I have to learn! :)

A good indication of how bad COBOL can be found on the OpenCOBOL website. OpenCOBOL seems to be a very popular compiler for COBOL, yet it compiles .col files by first turning them into C files, then running those files using GCC! If that isn't a big clue, I don't know how it could be any clearer. COBOL is a bad language ... or so they say.

I have looked at a couple of source code examples for COBOL, and to tell you the truth, TYPING IN ALL CAPS MOST OF THE TIME is not my idea of fun programming. :)

Well, now you know!

Trebuche ...

Did you know that ...

Trebuches were medieveal seige weapons that looked kind of like catapults, the main difference being (using the modern definitions of the words) catapults used elastic things to store potential energy while trebuches used a counterweight to store energy.

Actually, I already knew this a long time ago, but we're building a trebuche right now, so I though it would be fun to mention this.

Well, now you know!

Blogs on your own Domain

Did you know that ...

If you own a domain, you can have your blog be hosted on your own domain. For example, I own the domain www.studyhelpers.org. Since I wished to have a blog for that domain, I simply created a new blog called StudyHelpers.org, then changed the Publishing settings to use the custom url blog.studyhelpers.org. The blog is now hosted on www.studyhelpers.org servers, but I can still use blogger to manage that blog. Isn't that so cool?

Well, now you know!

Google Adsense ... now customized!

Did you know that ...

Google Adsense enables you to not only add those add blocks with links, but also specific campaigns for Firefox with Google Toolbar, Google Pack, Google Adsense, and Google Adwords. Also, users of Adsense can create specific channels to filter their results. For example, I have put this blog on its own channel within my account, so that I can see at a glance all the revenue earned from this blog alone.

Do me a favor. Click on the Firefox ad on the side and download Firefox with Google Toolbar. I mean, it's free AND from Google, what could go wrong?

Well, now you know!