Sharpening my mandarin skill
Started a new blog yesterday on wordpress.com called “Xin Vocab” (http://XinVocab.wordpress.com/). ‘Xin’ (pronounced as in “to lie is to sin“) means “new”, and ‘Vocab’, from ‘vocabularies’.
I decided to start the blog to sharpen my rusty Mandarin. I notice that my current difficulties are mostly in vocabularies. In a sense that I have a solid grasp of the grammar, but stumbled upon unfamiliar terms.
It was like this when I was watching news broadcast on a Chinese TV station: “Our president (just quoting the news, my actual president is SBY, lol), Hu Jintao held a meeting with the prime minister to discuss about blah3.. due to emerging economic crisis that has affected the People’s Republic of China. The result of the meeting will be blah3 to be discussed further on blah blah blah.”
Basically, I get the main point, the person who does the action, the action itself, and the whole structure of the news, but lose most of the meaty details.
It’s like “XXX does XXX to XXX because XXX”,
????
lol. yeah anyhow, I have made commitment to stop procrastinating and being lazy and start to grab some exceprts from news, articles, paragraphs each day and really look it up, really understand and digest the meaning. I hope I can increase my working vocabularies in Mandarin because I don’t want to let my native tongue go to waste like that.
Hope it helps you learn Mandarin too. Let’s chat! hai yaa….
My newfound motto *cough, geek, cough*
Default password for Mantis bug tracker
Tried Mantis bugtracker today, and got stuck after installation because I don’t know the default password for the ‘administrator’ account. The Mantis release did not even include an offline documentation about it. Did a little googling, found out that the default password is: “root”
All working now.
In the search, stumbled upon a security-related site, http://cirt.net. Why? Because it contains a subpage with default passwords for a pretty long list of computer product vendors (quoted:374 vendors, 1715 passwords). It also has a web scanner product, Nikto, that can scan for vulnerability etc. Will give it a try.