October 2007 Archives

最近很久没有更新这个blog，一是为了修炼英语，每天的想法已经被我记录到了另一个英文blog上了，二是自从在本子上换用了Ubuntu后，就一直忙于研究用它来完成各种日常事物。然后就变得越来越懒了……

之前我有一篇文章，讨论所谓的“微博客”公司提供的各种服务。当时谈到了Twitter、饭否、和叽歪de。那时候我还没有得到Pownce的测试账号，没有进去试过。后来“奋发”在各个blog上留言，终于得到了一个账号。当时还是比较兴奋，但马上就发现了问题，在里面不知道该干吗。

我写什么东西没有人看，那有什么意思？于是我开始了一场游戏，在Pownce里面“疯狂”的添加好友。管它是圈子里多么有名的blogger，添加了再说，还不放过他的好友。这样以来，我的好友名单长度渐渐的超过了10个、20个……这样就有事可做了，平时可以看到大量的别人的发言，我可以做回复之类的，感觉很是自在。而且还是用英文，也有点方便的感觉。

不过那时候我就有些疑问，因为大体上来说，Pownce和当时已经很流行的Twitter功能很相似，因此我们要做出一个选择，选出一个作为最常用的。对于到现在还不支持中文的Pownce来说，用户更多、功能更完善的Twitter明显是一个更好的选择。后来就是渐渐的疏远了Pownce。从这点上看Pownce已经失败了……

现在我已经不开Pownce了，唯一进入Pownce的机会是收到有人想添加我为好友的提示邮件。考虑到自己当初也是这么入门的，因此我全部都同意。每次选择完了，都去主页里看看。最近发现Pownce里已经很少能发现跟自己有关的信息了。“杂乱无章”可以说是对它最好的形容词。原因嘛，因为用户总是选择使用Public模式来发表他们的想法，因此不管有没有联系，这些文字总是写在了我的首页上。另一个原因是当初自己乱加好友，因此与自己相关的话几乎没有。还有就是有些人纯粹把Pownce当做无聊发泄的地方，发些没有意义的视频，结果把Pownce也带的很无聊。

Today, when I was on the bus to school in the morning, I saw someone stood beside the road. Both of them had a board wrote “On Strike” held in front of them. Some of them waved to the bus and they looked pleasant. I thought they might be in some kind of party, or maybe something dangerous happened since there was “Strike” on the board. As far as I know, the word “Strike” may mean what we are doing in the game “Counter-Strike”.

When I arrived to the classroom, I found my classmates were outside. I was very strange why they didn’t go into the classroom. But then I found the door was locked. My friend told me the workers in our school refused to work since they wanted higher salary. I remembered the people on the road were the workers in the University of Manitoba.

The first class was delayed about 15 minutes. Someone came to open the door. On the second class, the instructor Loreena talked about the strike. She said there was a union protected the workers. Workers wanted higher salary but they couldn’t make an agreement to the school. So they refused to work. That won’t last long since the school will cope with it. The reason was the students wouldn’t be happy because the school life was not convenient. She was right. The trash and the white board weren’t cleaned.

Today is the real thanks giving day in Canada(the thanks giving day in Canada and in the US are in different days). Last night, we went to Garson’s home for their thanks giving dinner. This night, we had our thanks giving dinner.

In the afternoon, Annette’s ex-daughter came. Her name is Ashley(sound). She told me she was 23 years old. And she was working in McDonald’s. We had dinner together.

At here, a non religious family, we don’t need to pray before we have meal. So the supper was pretty easy. We had our turkey, some potatoes and something else. Yam!

Today, is the thanks giving eve. The homestay mother of Garson, Blue, invited Forrest and I to her home for thanks giving dinner. In western custom, people will have turkey on thanks giving dinner.

This was the second time I had turkey. The first time was in the airport of Vancouver. I bought a turkey sandwich for dinner. At that time, I couldn’t understand what did the seller say, and I spent a lot of time to explain what I want. The seller even explain what a turkey is to me!

Annette was sick, so she didn’t go with us. We took the salad made by Annette to there. When we been there, Garson and Kelin had arrived. And Blue’s neighbor and her daughter also were there. Garson told me another friend named Lin will come later. When we was having juice, Lin and her homestay daughter came.

After a while the dinner started. At first, Blue’s mother Eslin, as the oldest person at home, preyed to the God. At that time, all the members closed their eyes and got together by hands. After Eslin said the sentences of praying, all of us should say “A-Men”. Then we picked up food on the table and chose a place to have food.

On the table, the girl from Lin’s house said she was also a student of AEPUCE and she was in group 3. Before she came here, she just graduated from high school.

The turkey didn’t tasted like others told me. I felt it tasted like a normal chicken. There were some spicy chicken, too. I liked them very much. After dinner, we had some dessert and took some pictures.

In these days, ELC held some interviews between instructors and students. The main topic of interviews is about the learning and the life in ELC. Each students had to attend the interview. And each interviews is about 10 minutes.

The interviews is individual. During the interviews, only the instructor and the interviewee was allowed to stay at the classroom. All the others were going outside. Students who didn’t have interview in that day is allowed to go home earlier. So in these days, I always arrived home before 2:30.

Today I took a interview by the listening instructor, Dennis. Dennis asked me if there was any problem for my studying here. I said no. And the only problem is sometime I felt sleepy on class.

At last, Dennis asked me if there were any questions. I asked him where did he bought his file folder. He told me he bought it at bookstore, but the company might not produce it any more. Bad luck!

General Hardware Specifications of DELL XPS M1330:

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.22

Basic Installation of Ubuntu:

• Why to use Ubuntu 7.10 beta
I've tried several Linux distributions on this laptop before, such as Ubuntu 7.04, Ubuntu 7.10 Trible 4 and Sabayon 3.3b. I found they all couldn't boot my laptop (I even couldn't boot into the multiuser mode). Gentoo 2007.0 could boot normally but couldn't start X (maybe there wasn't driver of graphics card on the boot disc), but I had no experience of compiling a whole system from the very beginning. So I didn't tried. OpenSUSE 10.2 could start X, but I'm not sure how to setup the wireless internet (I'm using WEP), so I gave up at last. When I tried Ubuntu 7.10 beta, it got everything done, included sound card, wireless internet, internal digital card reader, and even the media buttons were already setup to control the volume and the start/stop in Totem. After I installed the restricted driver of graphics card, the CompizFusion worked well. The wireless internet also worked after I inputed the password. Before that, the widget had found out all of the available wireless signals. It could support a newbies of Linux to installed everything correctly on this laptop.
• Obtaining Ubuntu 7.10 beta (DVD image)
Download it here: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/gutsybeta
• Installing
The installing of Ubuntu 7.10 beta is pretty simple. On DELL XPS M1330, you have to wait for 3 or 4 minutes for it was booted totally. Then double click the Install icon on the desktop and follow the instructions. Enjoy!
• Post-Install modifications/tweaks
Nothing. The LiveDVD supports lots of hardware. I just backup some important information in the Windows VISTA partition and rebuild the whole disk for Ubuntu.

Setting up additional features for Ubuntu 7.10 beta

I dare to say the Ubuntu 7.10 beta supports this laptop well. I really didn't do any additional setup except update the system following the update-manager and get a everyday-use laptop.

More Specific Information

This is the first time for me to really use Ubuntu. I'm not sure about the previous version, but in these days the update-manager reminded me to update some parts of the system once per day. It says the formal version of Ubuntu 7.10 will be released on Oct 29 - Nov 2. I think the update information will be quite much in these days.

Contact Information

This essay is posted on my blog. If you have any question about it, you may submit comment and I'll get them in 24 hours.

It’s a long time that I didn’t update my blog. The reason was I felt a bit tired. To write English everyday is not as easy as to write Chinese everyday. And I found the advantage of English writing was it can easily express the logic. That means, you can say something academic or argue some topic. That’s simple. But if you’d like to talk some feelings like in Chinese, that’s not that simple.

While I had learnt for nearly a month in ELC of the U of M, I found everyday’s class is boring. We do the same thing everyday. Not too difficult, not serious for me. That made me lazy in these days. I would like to write a post for Linux on Laptops for telling others that Ubuntu 7.10 beta could be easily installed on DELL XPS M1330. I had this idea on last Saturday, but I still not started now.

By the way, Ubuntu 7.10 beta works very good on my M1330. I found it’s not that hard to use Ubuntu for one months. But now I still can’t play real stream on my laptop since I haven’t installed the realplayer now. And sometimes at some program, the keyboard doesn’t work. That made me have to restart that program. And for some web pages, firefox will be very slow. That made me so mad. But in all, it works well here. Especially Beagle, a desktop search tool, let me feel surprise. It help me very much.

Well, I’m looking forward to studying in a faculty. That’s what we should do everyday. A life without excites is making people dead.