This is not mine. One day I stumpled upon Prof. Mankiw’s blog. He composed some very good writing guidelines for economic reports ( it should be applied for general writing as well ):
- Stay focused. Remember the take-away points you want the reader to remember. If some material is irrelevant to these points, it should probably be cut.
- Keep sentences short. Short words are better than long words. Monosyllabic words are best.
- The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
- Positive statements are more persuasive than normative statements.
- Use adverbs sparingly.
- Avoid jargon. Any word you don’t read regularly in a newspaper is suspect.
- Never make up your own acronyms.
- Avoid unnecessary words. For instance, in most cases, change
o “in order to” to “to”
o “whether or not” to “whether”
o “is equal to” to “equals”
- Avoid “of course, “clearly,” and “obviously.” Clearly, if something is obvious, that fact will, of course, be obvious to the reader.
- The word “very” is very often very unnecessary.
- Keep your writing self-contained. Frequent references to other works, or to things that have come before or will come later, can be distracting.
- Put details and digressions in footnotes. Then delete the footnotes.
- To mere mortals, a graphic metaphor, a compelling anecdote, or a striking fact is worth a thousand articles in Econometrica.
- Keep your writing personal. Remind readers how economics affects their lives.
- Remember two basic rules of economic usage:
o “Long run” (without a hyphen) is a noun. “Long-run” (with a hyphen) is an adjective. Same with “short(-)run.”
o “Saving” (without a terminal s) is a flow. “Savings” (with a terminal s) is a stock.
- Buy a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Also, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Read them—again and again and again.
- Keep it simple. Think of your reader as being your college roommate who majored in English literature. Assume he has never taken an economics course, or if he did, he used the wrong textbook.
I did a terrible mistake two days ago when tried to compile and install the glibc library. Of course the process failed and left me out of the cold without any option to restore back to previous state. Every commands in ssh except “cd” throwed back at me this:
relocation error: /lib/tls/libc.so.6: symbol _dl_out_of_memory, version GLIBC_PRIVATE not defined in file ld-linux.so.2 with link time reference
If I were on a dedicated server, there would be an option to reformat the disk, reinstall the os then restore the backed up databases & files (thank god i did do back up, not often but enough to save my ass some times). But that solution would take at least a day to complete: 12 hours for the support to reformat & reinstall OS plus the time you need to download the off-site backup and restoring them. And the latter is definitely not a pleasand experience.
So the fact that i’m on a VPS did save me this time: after a few click on the VPS control panel and a cup of coffe everything went back to normal. Not the state right before the glibc corrupt but 5 days before ( i should do backup more frequently ).
One of other strong points of a VPS is the scalability. No, i’m not talking about the scalability that Amazon AWS offers, it’s on a complete different level. I’m talking about the scale of the gap between a shared hosting environment and a dedicated hosting environment. The server can gradually grow with your site, although not instantly, and you can move your server image around if you want.
So what’s the point ? The point is: virtualization & cloud computing have unquestionably very bright future !
Amazon has introduced a new API for S3 to store data in it’s Europe datacenter ( with higher pricing, of course ). I decided to make a small test to see if the higher price worths the money, and here is the result:
lamnk@lamnk:~> wget http://testmeplease-eu.s3.amazonaws.com/100mb.bin
–17:28:42– http://testmeplease-eu.s3.amazonaws.com/100mb.bin
=> `100mb.bin’
Auflösen des Hostnamen »testmeplease-eu.s3.amazonaws.com«…. 87.238.86.131
Verbindungsaufbau zu
testmeplease-eu.s3.amazonaws.com|87.238.86.131|:80… verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort… 200 OK
Länge: 104.857.600 (100M)
100%(==================================>)
104.857.600 9.16M/s ETA 00:00
17:28:53 (9.93 MB/s) - »100mb.bin« gespeichert [104857600/104857600]
lamnk@lamnk:~>
lamnk@lamnk:~> wget http://testmeplease-us.s3.amazonaws.com/100mb.bin
–17:29:02– http://testmeplease-us.s3.amazonaws.com/100mb.bin
=> `100mb.bin.1′
Auflösen des Hostnamen »testmeplease-us.s3.amazonaws.com«…. 72.21.211.247
Verbindungsaufbau zu
testmeplease-us.s3.amazonaws.com|72.21.211.247|:80… verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort… 200 OK
Länge: 104.857.600 (100M)
100%(==================================>)
104.857.600 580.40K/s ETA 00:00
17:32:02 (571.80 KB/s) - »100mb.bin.1« gespeichert [104857600/104857600]
lamnk@lamnk:~>
So for almost double the price (10 cent in US versus 18 cent in Europe pro GB/month storage) it really worths considering if the target audience is in Europe
Errm … with a patch. Cisco hasn’t released a new version for Linux yet.
Quick guide: ( I assume you knew all the requirements to install the Cisco client )
- Go to the extracted vpn directory
- wget http://tuxx-home.at/projects/cisco-vpnclient/cisco_skbuff_offset.patch
- patch < cisco_skbuff_offset.patch
- sudo ./vpn_install
That’s it.
The error: “Secure VPN connection terminated locally by the Client. Reason 412. The remote peer is no longer responding” means that the software VPN Client detected that the VPN server is not responding anymore and deleted the connection. This is caused by several different issues, for example:
- The user is behind a firewall that is blocking ports UDP 4500/500 and/or ESP.
- The VPN client is using connecting on TCP and the default port 10000 is blocked.
- The internet connection is not good and some packets are not reaching the VPN concentrator/server or the replies from the server/concentrator aren’t getting to the client, hence the client thinks the server is no longer available.
- The VPN client is behind a NAT device and the VPN Server doesn’t have NAT-T enabled. In this case the user will not be able to send or receive traffic at all. It will be able to connect but that’s all. After some time the software client deletes the VPN tunnel.
Suggested solutions:
- If you are using wireless, try to connect with cable
- Turn your firewall off, then test the connection to see whether the problem still occurs. If not then you can turn your firewall back on and add exceptions for ports 500 and 4500 and the ESP protocol as well
- Turn on NAT-T/TCP in your profile ( remember to unblock port 10000 then )
- Edit your profile with your editor and change ForceKeepAlive=0 to 1
Everyone has dealed with Cisco VPN Client on Vista probably knows the notorious Error 442 - Failed to enable virtual adapter. AFAIK this is a bug from Cisco that stays unfixed for at least 5 months (from the version 5.0.00.0340 released on May 2007 uptill now). Whether it is Cisco or Microsoft to point the finger at, i really don’t know.
So … if you come to this post through google, you probably already tried this Cisco advised work-around:
Run cmd as Administrator and execute the following command:
reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters /v ArpRetryCount /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
It just doesn’t work ( at least everytimes i work with Error 442 ). What you should do is:
- Deinstall the client
- Activate the real Administrator account ( for detailed howto see this post )
- Restart, then log into the administator account
- Install the file as normal ( right-click on it, choose “Run as Administrator”)
- After the installation finishs, restart again.
The client should work now. If not try to remove the Deterministic Network Enhancer protocol first, then reinstall VPN
Some people say the removal of Microsoft SQL do the trick (strange, erh ?), or simply turn on Media Sharing in the Network and Sharing Center. I haven’t tried this, so if it fixes your problem, then good for you.
Fewww … Now i know at least a work-around for this error, it will save me from a lot of headaches later.
If you could post your result here, then i am very appreciated 
Update: Updating DNE solves the problem indeed ( uninstall VPN, get the latest DNE driver at deterministicnetworks.com, install it and then install VPN again )
This laptop has a Broadcom 4311 wireless adapter and it doesn’t work under openSUSE. An ifconfig eth1 up shows
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory
It turns out that we must patch the firmware although the bcm43xx driver is included in kernel 2.6.22:
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
wget http://linuxwireless.org/download/bcm43xx/fwcutter/bcm43xx-fwcutter.tar.bz2
tar -xzf bcm43xx-fwcutter.tar.bz2
bcm43xx-fwcutter/bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta -3.130.20.0.o
Reboot, and voila … there is wireless
More info about this problem at the linux driver homepage
I must say incredible good looking. Even better than Windows typography. Heck, if Ubuntu’s fonts were this good … Maybe because of the 19″ monitor ?
The only thing you need to do is to install MS font pack and the default dpi setting need to be tuned. But it looks so good that I’m thinking of switching to openSUSE now 
Update: I can make the fonts on Ubuntu look like in Windows now, we just need to turn anti-alias off in /etc/fonts/local.conf
Update: it seems not turning anti alias off will solve the problem …
Update: as i guessed, this appears to be a bug from revision 4.8.00.0640, the older 0490 works just fine on my Ubuntu 64 bit (with the patch of course)
Just got the new openSUSE 10.3 on my work PC with 64 bit kernel set up and like i expected, there are errors during compiling the kernel module:
Making module
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.22.5-31-default/build SUBDIRS=/home/xn1/vpnclient modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.22.5-31-obj/x86_64/default’
make -C ../../../linux-2.6.22.5-31 O=../linux-2.6.22.5-31-obj/x86_64/default modules
CC [M] /home/xn1/vpnclient/interceptor.o
In file included from /home/xn1/vpnclient/Cniapi.h:15,
from /home/xn1/vpnclient/interceptor.c:34:
/home/xn1/vpnclient/GenDefs.h:110:2: warning: #warning 64 bit
/home/xn1/vpnclient/interceptor.c: In function ‘recv_ip_packet_handler’:
/home/xn1/vpnclient/interceptor.c:639: warning: assignment makes integer from pointer without a cast
/home/xn1/vpnclient/interceptor.c:660: warning: passing argument 2 of ‘CniNewFragment’ makes pointer from integer without a cast
/home/xn1/vpnclient/interceptor.c: In function ‘do_cni_send’:
/home/xn1/vpnclient/interceptor.c:778: error: invalid operands to binary -
make[4]: *** [/home/xn1/vpnclient/interceptor.o] Fehler 1
make[3]: *** [_module_/home/xn1/vpnclient] Fehler 2
make[2]: *** [modules] Fehler 2
make[1]: *** [modules] Fehler 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.22.5-31-obj/x86_64/default’
make: *** [default] Fehler 2
Failed to make module “cisco_ipsec.ko”.
Google doesn’t help at all 
Update: not only openSUSE, the new Gutsy 64 bit falls for this too
Errm … as we already know, our admistrator account (the one that we use to log onto Vista) doesn’t really have access permission to all over the system. So when you do make install in cygwin you have permission error. The workaround is to activate the real Administrator account:
Right click on Computer and choose Manage. Select Computer Management (Local) > System Tools > Local Users and Groups > Users and double click the Administrator user. Uncheck Account is disabled. Right click on the Administrator user and choose Set password and enter a password for the Administrator user.
Now the Administrator account is activated, fire up cmd and execute the following commands:
cd c:/cygwin/bin
runas /user:Administrator bash
The last command will open up cygwin with the Administrator account. But now it’s environment is not set up properly, we still need to copy the skeleton files to proper home folder /home/Administrator/:
. /etc/profile
