Blog my life

Today is the annual holiday for celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival on which day we eat rice dumpling and in some places people play dragon boat competition. It true that rice dumpling today was very hot today and nearly sold out. TV news reported many people sold rice dumplings in the MaAnDongLu which is a road has a long history of rice dumpling making.

People were longing the following three days holidays. We brought many things from supermarket. Some for us and some for children. It must be the happiest month for primary students because there are nearly three holidays - International Labor Day, Dragon Boat Festival, and Children's Day. I was unlucky that my memory of the time in primary school was boring and studying forever. My parents were busy and had no time , especially no money, to enjoy the holidays. The happiest time for me was to play a computer game on Sunday and ride bike on the path of fields in the countryside.

Life becomes coloful when we are getting rich and have more time to travel. My friends and I are planning to hava a trip on Sunday to TianTai mountain after the offical holidays for at that time it will not be very crowded. I'm thinking about what I will do these days and perhaps I will study something. But first of all, I'll have my hair cut. ^_^

At last, happy Dragon Boat Festival and enjoy your rice dumpling!

搬新校区都是上个星期的事情了，这个星期才有空写写。我的感觉是：终于搬了。都说了很久很久了，我记得大三的时候就开始说要搬新校区了，然后又说大四，大四说读研肯定在新校区，然后上了研一我们学院都还在老校区。研一上学期说期末搬，到了期末又说下学期搬，到了下学期又说不搬了。然后又说暑假搬，暑假又没有搬成，传闻又是研二下学期刚开学搬。开学了还是这么回事，最后终于越来越密集的谣言，还是最终搬了。

搬东西那是一个累人。我的东西又是一大摞，之前我就搬了大半回去，搬家那天又把车开过去，装了慢慢的一备箱。离开时也没有太多的留念，也就这样吧，麻木了。

把东西搬到下面以后，大家都坐着聊天，等“蚂蚁搬家”过来搬。学院也是，那么多东西就派了3个车，“蚂蚁搬家”的车那简直和蚂蚁差不多大，三个车要跑两三趟才能装完，每次都是2个小时。钱没有出够就是不一样。

吃了中午饭，我载着寝室哥们儿一同奔向新校区。新旧校区一个多小时的车程，30多公里，经过高新西区，从成灌高速入口网上转一圈就到了。进了大门，寝室还要走很长路程才能走到，新校区确实是很大的。寝室很偏远，旁边有一条小河，我们称之为“清水河”。到寝室楼下办好了手续，就开始搬东西了。东西那是一个多啊，特别是书，最重的东西，6楼没有电梯，只要背上去。

寝室比较小，两人间，目前无网络无电话无热水，似乎到了农村一样。洗热水澡都是在外面的集中地方洗澡，听说只有三个喷头，看来冬天洗澡都要抢了。还好，唯一的好处就是空气质量尚可，风很大。

我严重质疑这里的工程问题，我们寝室的门关不了，使劲一拉，差点把拉手拉断了；其他两个哥们儿的寝室门开不开；旁边一哥们儿的寝室一关门门上的门牌掉了下来。哇，好久都没有写所谓的排比句了，竟然是写道这样的地方。不知道俺们的可爱ZSB（拼音缩写，确实是这样，还带SB两字）校长是不是想我们帮他一起搬了，这样给我们的工程！幸好地震的时候还没有房子塌下来哦。

在食堂办饭卡也很造孽，必须要交100块钱，更搞笑的是之前的通知上面写的“请准备零钞100”。是说准备100*1元的小抄呢还是说100元是小抄呢？搞不清楚。拿了张一卡通“临时卡”，哦，看来我们是临时的……无语中。食堂有几个笔记本电脑正在享受免费的无线网络，学校的无线网络也就这儿比较灵。永远不要听领导所谓的“笔记本校园”，“无线上网anywhere”，那就是骗小孩子的。ZSB给我们寝室安装个固话我就谢天谢地了。

好吧，我忍了。

去取钱室友买东西，停在广场上。待会儿一个保安跑过来，说“要停好久？”，我说就几分钟，他说这里不能停车的。最后雷人了一句“在这儿停车怕把地砖压坏了”。1.4吨的小轿车能把坚硬的地砖压坏了？~！看来这里的工程确实有问题，算了，以后不敢停车了，怕待会儿出来一看车陷到地里面去了我还懒得请吊车。

送完同学我就走了，从宿舍到主楼好远的路程啊，开车都要两三分钟，走路恐怕要半个多小时。食堂离主楼那是一个远啊，没有自行车怎么能行？我还怀疑有了自行车能不能骑上几天？算了，这些都不要想了，反正我也不在这边住。

从主楼正门出去，走西芯大道，IT大道，全程飚车（小声点我开得100，给警察叔叔只能说70哟~）回家，15分钟到，很快。

后来同学都没有上网，更搞笑的是上网回老校区实验室上网，哎，造孽。听说寝室楼的交换机都没有装，莫非真要台式机都用WiFi？！

I encourted a problem that I couldn't see the dialog for my password protected pages. The problem was caused by Wordpress default .htaccess file which redirect 401 page to 404 page. The more detail can be found here (http://www.andrewrollins.com/2008/01/22/wordpress-and-htaccess-password-protected-directories/)

I've tried three methods the article said and only found the last one is OK. I created a 401 page and put this line into .htaccess and every went well.

ErrorDocument 401 /401.shtml

I didn't know the reason for the failure of another two failed because my new hosting server is LiteSpee which may not fully compatible with Apache.

After nearly half an year of disappointing at Godaddy, I decided to move my site to somewhere else.

Economy Hosting of Godaddy is attractive by its large disk space (150G) and nearly unlimited bandwith (1500G) . I brought Godaddy in November last year at about 250 yuan  and spent nearly 10 days to setup my space. That's quite terrible.

The first is that China Telecom did something to the line, so the ping is very high and lost a lot of packages. Lots of my visitors are from China, so they may wait and wait and end up leaving my site.

The second is that the service at Godaddy was quite slow and you might spend a lot of time on it and have to wait for really long time.

The only good news for me was that Godaddy provides SSH support. With this support I wrote some programs to download something periodly. But besides this, the whole user experience was bad for any visitor from China.  I was even annoyed by the slow connection speed that I can't post a new post sometimes.

Though it is not completely Godaddy's mistake, I had to change.

I searched the Internet and saw the 10-Top Web Hosting provides. But when I saw the price and the comments, I lost my mind. I needed low-price but great quality hosting. After longing and comparing for couples of days, I found HawkHost(http://www.hawkhost.com).

Although the space is only 3G and bandwith is only limited 30G, it is enough for my site and the price is low, at $3.29/mo (plus 45% discount when select Seattle server). The server provides many features (SVN, SSH) that others do not have. I was satisfied with its speed by by downloading the test file. Even I downloaded the file by single thread using IE, it got the maximum speed.

Maybe it was the best place I could put my site on and immediately I chated with the salesman online. After I was sure it was OK for me, I paied the bill. I chose Basic hosting and it costed 21$ the first year after the discount.

Now, my site have a new server. Enjoy the speed!

My English teacher Leign told us a hot phenomenon on Internet especially on Facebook that many person wrote their "Top xx things". In recent days, I found some English learning sites for me and I want to write a list of these site. I recommend these to you. Just look at them and you may find it would be a huge treasure.

1st: ESL Podcast (http://www.eslpod.com)

You may heard about the word "Podcast". Accoding to wikipedia, "Podcast" means:

A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually digital, audio, or video, that is made available for download via web syndication.

In Chinese, we translate it to "播客" which means a blog that has sound or video to broadcast. ESL Podcast is a site for "English as Second Language" learners. It provides podcasts and transcripts for many topics covering nearly every aspect of our daily life. You will hear a slow dialog at first, then explanation and after all comes with normal speed. Its material comes from our life, and thank Dr. Lucy Tse who writes the dialog with a lot of useful words.

I liked this podcast very much when I first listened to it and started to download them into my phone. I learned from this podcast by listening to it when I was on the bus or riding a bike, or sometimes did a dictation first, then compared it to the script. And with the words I learned, I tried to use them in my conversation with my English teachers and partners. By doing this persistently, I felt my English was proving magically. Hope this site help you too.

2st: CRI English (http://english.cri.cn)

When I was in high school, my teacher told us to listen to BBC or VOA Special English everyday to improve our listening. But just listened to them in a short period of time, I gave up. This was not because I was lazy but the material was too far away from my life and I felt very boring. I googled and found the site -- "CRI English". "CRI" means Chinese Radio Internation, which is a official radio station reports news and life in China to the world.

You can listen to the boardcast "Round the clock" at mms://livexwb.cri.com.cn/clock. And I also perfer the "Webcast". In this subject, we have news near us, interesting stories about people, and aha please visit and find the rest. Most of the stories have scripts, so you can listen to it and then compare. The most important thing is you will not feel boring but exciting to hear what is going on besides you, that is better than BBC or VOA in my opinion.

3st: Quick and Dirty tips (http://www.quickanddirtytips.com)

I found this site only in a few days ago by searching "Grammar Girl". "Grammar Girl" is a podcast program on this site talking about English grammar. I subscribed mail from this site and it sends me a short mail about grammar daily. To join this, click "Sign up for the grammar girl tip of the day".

Besides "Grammar Girl", it is a good practice to listen to other programs on this site. Every podcast has a script but the speaker uses native speed, so if you can't catch up with him, you can read it while listening.

To the last two podcast, I wrote two programs to download them. Check it out at Grammer Girl podcast downloader and ESL podcast downloader

So this is all my recent discovery, if any good opinions or good sites, please leave me a comment!

Same as ESL podcast downloader, a simple tool to fetch all the podcast and descriptions from Grammer Girl. Use at your own risk!

  GGDownloader.py (1.6 KiB, 368 hits)

When I first met ESL podcast, I found it was very useful for your listening and it expanded your vocabulary and your communicate skills. On the website, you can download all of the podcasts and read the scripts online by free. There are now 670-odd podcasts on the website, so it is a huge treasure for English learners.

I was wondering if I could create a tool and download them all at once including the audio index and the script and then convert them to a plain text form in order that I can listen to the podcast and read the script on my phone. To realize my idea, I wrote a small program by python under Linux.

Download it:

  eslDownloader.py (2.8 KiB, 486 hits)

How to steps:

1. Be sure you are using Linux or Unix system or Cygwin system.
2. Make sure you have installed Python 2.x
3. Copy the script to any folder you like.
4. Make sure you have right to create a sub-directory under this folder. My script will create a folder called "eslpod" to store the content.
5. Run this script.

You will see the script start to fetch the pages and download the podcasts. Downloaded files will store under "eslpod" folder and grouping by the tag. Under every tag, you could see the script with .html suffix and podcast with .mp3 suffix.

You can interrupt the downloading process by kill the process.

DISCLAIMER:

• Use this script at your own risk.
• This program may fail if the site was changed.
• Respect the authors' work and do not distribute without their permission.

And at last, be happy and confidence to study English!