Ubuntu Advocacy
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Random Ubuntu Advocacy. Refresh your browser couple of time to witness randomness.
Source http://crunchbang.org/archives/2008/01/25/random-ubuntu-advocacy/
Archive for January, 2008
Parenting The Shy Child
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
This subject is interesting not only for me but for lots of parents with shy children.
I have a daughter 2 years and 9 months.
Shall I consider her shy at this age?
She is shy with new people, with strangers, afraid to talk with them but after a while (half an hour or more) staying with them she is no longer shy but she is still afraid to talk. But she is not shy with other kids, with her friends.
I am thinking that she might be confused about the language. She is learning in the nursery English and Arabic. At home we are talking with her in our mother tongue: Romanian language .
Here is a compilation of some interesting paragraphs I have found on my research related to parenting a shy child.
Do you have a shy child?
Children are shy in different ways for different reasons each child is different from the others.
Understanding the nature of your child’s shyness will help you develop a program geared towards your child’s specific needs. Is your child shy in groups? At parties? Meeting new people? In novel situations? Or, pretty much everywhere? Does your child have trouble eating in public? Playing with other children? Making phone calls? Knowing the nature of you child’s shyness will help you identify the specific skills your child needs to be more at ease in social situations.
It saying that the shyness is coming from parents, it is true? I think so. Also it saying that the parents to help their children not to be shy they have a social life, meeting people, inviting in your home friends, children . Going out to dine, going to some spectacle for them.
Tips:
“”"
Do . . .
- Go first in social situations. Be the first person to say “Hi,” to introduce yourself or to strike up conversations.
- Make a list of the kinds of things you would like your child to feel comfortable doing (e.g., talking with other children, asking for help from store clerks, making phone calls, etc) and make a point of doing these things in front of your child.
- Be friendly. Routinely smile, say high and greet the people you see as you go through your day.
- Compliment others often. Notice what you like about people (friends, family and strangers alike). Tell a stranger you like their hat or a friend how wonderful their dinner was.
- Make an effort to help other people when you see they are in need. Open doors for people, pick things up when people drop them or offer to carry things for friends.
- Role model taking risks and learning from them. Help your children learn by making positive comments about how you felt while you did things. Things like: “I thought that would be harder than it was.” ”That wasn’t much fun, but I’m glad I did it and got it out of the way. At least now I don’t have to worry about it.” Or, “That didn’t go as well as I thought it would, but at least I know what to do next time.”
- Enroll in social skills classes and let your children know that you’re going. Bring back the things you learn from class and share them with your family and friends. I routinely encourage parents (shy or not) who take my social skills classes to practice their new found handshake, conversation and introduction skills with their children, friends and family. Don’t be surprised if your new skills make great party conversation, too. Most people struggle with social skills and are eager learn what you know so they can try it out themselves. Show your children that learning new skills from a class is a good thing.
Don’t . . .
- Cross the street to avoid people you are too nervous to see.
- Embarrass your child in public.
- Criticize people in public.
- Berate yourself for having failed when you try things and they don’t turn out the way you would like.
- Berate your children when they make a mistake.
“”"
Source: www.shakeyourshyness.com.
Helping Dolphins Fly
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
From Jonathan’s blog, CEO and president of Sun Microsystems, Inc. we can learn that Sun is “putting a billion dollars behind the M in MAMP”.
That’s right, Sun is acquiring MySQL AB, the developer of the most widely used open source database. MySql is sharing a big portion of database market share pie, along with SQL Server and Oracle. Due to its open source nature, trends indicate an increasing adoption.
Curious now. Sun recently open sourced Java … and now they complete their open source portfolio with MySQL.
Hopefully this is good news for the open source community.
Cyrus IMAP authentication failure solution
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
I am managing a remote server (Debian) which accommodates an IMAP server (Cyrus). Users may set up an email client or check emails via a web browser, using SquirrelMail.
Today I have noticed that I could no longer check my emails. I would get an authentication failure message. I have checked and cross-checked my username and password. Both were correct. So what was wrong?
Getting via ssh on the remote server and launched:
ps aux | grep saslauthd
Nothing. No output.
Aha, saslauthd daemon is not running. Then lets try to start it up:
/etc/init.d/saslauthd start
At this point, it complaint that START variable must be set up to yes in order to automatically launch the daemon. Looking for /etc/default/saslauthd, I have noticed that there is another file /etc/default/saslauthd.dpkg-old.
Solution:
Edit /etc/default/saslauthd, locate the line START = no, and replace it with START = yes, then again
/etc/init.d/saslauthd start
And it works. Checking my emails. It works fine, now.
So, what was the problem? An update overwrote my original file. Editing this file I realized that it stayed in default state START = no. Bringing START = yes, saving and restarting my daemon sorted out the problem. I did even a remote restart to be sure it is loading on reboot.
And yes it works.
Vine Bush în Dubai
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
Mâine, 14 ianuarie 2008, Bush va avea o vizită oficială în Dubai. Nu, nu sunt un simpatizant al lui și nu scriu aceste rânduri pentru a îi face intr-un fel sau altul reclamă.
Sunt mai degrabă curios de faptul că ziua de mâine a fost declarată oficial liberă atât pentru sectorul public cât și cel privat deoarece mare parte a drumurilor, podurilor sau tunelelor vor fi blocate. Bănuiesc că e vorba de acțiunile de securitate legate de vizita oficială a celui mai puternic om din lume.
Un anunț oficial, poate fi găsit pe Gulf News, probabil cel mai citit ziar de știri din zonă: Monday declared holiday for private and public sectors in Dubai.
Carnetul de conducere
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
Urmăresc îndeaproape grupul românilor rezidenți în Emiratele Arabe Unite de pe Yahoo! – Emirates Romanians. Unul din ultimele subiecte dezbătute este acela legat de obținerea permisului de conducere în Emirate.
Concluzia la care am ajuns este că în Dubai și Sharjah, acesta poate fi obținut simplu, pe baza carnetului din țară. Fără nici un examen de conducere fie teoretic sau practic. Ca acte sunt necesare permisul din țară în original și pașaportul pe care să fie aplicată viza de rezident. Mai e necesară și vizita medicală – foarte sumară, dacă e să comparăm cu ce e în țară – examenul la ochi și o picătură de sânge pentru a identifica grupa sanguină. Și cam atât – în câteva ore veți putea avea carnetul de conducere în mână.
Cât despre Abu Dhabi, Ajman și celelalte Emirate nu am date certe, dar bănuiesc că se aplică aceleași reguli.
Pentru cei cu viză de vizită sau de turist, aceștia pot folosi carnetul de conducere obținut în țară. Nu e necesar carnetul internațional. Dar mașinile ce pot fi conduse trebuie să fie închiriate.
Show hidden files on a Mac
Friday, January 11th, 2008
The main idea is to edit ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist with Property List Editor and add a new property AppleShowAllFiles (or edit it if it already exists), of class type: Boolean, and set it’s value to Yes.
Than you must relaunch Finder. How? Hold option key wilst you are clicking on Finder’s icon from the Dock and choose Relaunch from the contextual menu.
To switch back, follow same process, but this time, AppleShowAllFiles value should be set up to No.
For command line fans, type in Terminal to show all files:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles Yes killall Finder
or
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles No killall Finder
to switch back to the original state (do not shoe hidden files).
BTW, in a UNIX like environment, hidden files are those which are starting with a . (dot).
Syntax Coloring in WordPress
Monday, January 7th, 2008
I have been looking to install a syntax coloring plug-in into my WordPress blog. Browsing through the official plug-in repository, I have found SyntaxHighlighter Plus, SyntaxHighliter and WP-Syntax.
All three plug-ins seems to be easy to use, for installation being required to copy the plug-in folder to wp-content/plugins folder and to activate them via the admin interface.
But I had to have only one choice, so this is … WP-Syntax. It is based on a distinct project GeSHi, Generic Syntax Highlighter, freely available under GPL license and supports syntax highlighting for a wide variety of popular languages. GeSHi is included in numerous blogs, wikis and content management systems like Dokuwiki, phpbb, Mambo or WikkaWiki.
And now, let’s see and example, Hello World written in C programming language.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(void) { printf("Hello world!\n"); return EXIT_SUCCESS; } |
This is achieved by including the source code under <pre lang=”C” line=”1″> and </pre> mark-up tags.
Playing mms video streams on a Mac
Saturday, January 5th, 2008
How to view Microsoft Media Server (mms) video streams and other Microsoft Media video formats (eg. .wmv videos) on a Mac?
The answer stays in Flip4Mac plug-in for Apple’s QuicTime Player, but note: it will not play content that is protected with Windows Media digital rights management (DRM).
Although there is a version of Windows Media Player for Mac, this one is outdated, freezing on version 9.
Do not forget, more info, as well as download links are available on Microsoft’s – Mactopia website.
