I am fine, thanks--a joke on China Education

Long time no blog! :)

This post is not intended to be anything serious, as it is labeled as a "scribble", but hopefully, readers may think a little on the education of China.

Recently, I heard a joke: a Chinese student was driving in the US; suddenly he fell off a cliff and got badly injured. Fortunately, there came a policeman, who said:"How are you?" Without thinking, the student responded:" I am fine, thank you!" So the policeman left, and the poor student soon died because of loss of too much blood.

This joke may not make any sense to a native speaker, but probably many English learners in China (and maybe in other countries as well) may find it funny: in junior high schools, Chinese students, me included, were required to learn and recite a list of (rigid) daily English conversation. In this list, there was a typical one--as you may guess:
  --How are you?
  --I am fine, thanks/thank you, and you?
...
As a result, it is sometimes amusing to greet a Chinese, "How are you?"--you can expect the response.

Teaching style of other classes is usually non-different. I graduated from a stereotypical senior high school, which is a so-called 省级示范学校 (Province-level Exemplar School). The head of my class teaches physics. One of his motto was "多做题，做难题，规范做题！"("Do more exercise, solve difficult questions, and answer in a standard way!"). Under his instructions, my class always got better physics grades than any other classes did, but are those differences really worth the effort? No problem should ever have to be solved twice, and study is neither all about doing exercises, nor memorizing "I'm fine, thanks". Study ought to be fun, and contents ought to be useful.

MInt 13: volume control doesn't change volume

This article involves choosing a non-default sound device.

Description:

1.When Adobe flash player 11 played online music, it went too fast. As soon as a certain point was buffered, the player jumped to it; in other word, if at this time the player was playing at 1:20, and the media was buffered till 2:30, then the player skipped the music between 1:20 and 2:30, and jumped to the 2:30 point. (I hope I have made myself understood) This is similar for local music player Banshee, though it did not buffer the music.

2. When a music or a video was played, pressing volume up/down button on the keyboard or directly using the volume control on desktop did not change the volume at all. 

Solutions: 

I first suspected that the flash player was not working properly. However, while I was re-installing the plugin, I happened to download a music, and realize that it didn't work properly in my disk as well. Then I opened the control center, and realized the cause related to the sound device. I had two listed sound device, and the default choice was the HDMI one, as shown below. I chose the built-in one, and it worked sometimes, but after reboot, the device in work became the HDMI again.

Then this thread worked out.

And here's my output

 $ sudo cat /proc/asound/modules 

[sudo] password for ao: 

 0 snd_hda_intel

 1 snd_hda_intel

Yes, there were actually no difference between these two; I believe if you get this output as well, you may refer to the index of item in your Sound Preferences in Control Center, (i.e. the first= index=0)

Follow the instructions in the link, and hopefully it will work fine.

Install MInt 13 via USB

Yes, I knew that this topic has been mentioned in many places. And here is a good example (installation along with Win7) However, maybe it does not hurt to provide some tips. So here we go!

Create a Live CD/USB

Here is a nice place to start. I have tried all three ways, but it seemed only the first one work: ImageWriter crashed in Windows XP for no good reason (I "successfully" burned the USB, but it turned out that no booting medium was found when I booted through it). In Ubuntu 11, this software caused an error when it tried to unmount USB disk before finishing all the work (I am still unable to figure out why it needs to unmount it). Then I moved on to terminal. As for this method, here is a note you may want for finding USB disk under command line: In terminal, type in sudo fdisk -l. You may get similar results like this:

Here, I got
Disk /dev/sdb: 3918 MB, 3918495744 bytes
whose size is equivalent to my USB's. And
Disk /dev/sdb1: 941 MB, 941621248 bytes
is a partition of my USB disk (since I have made it a Live CD/USB). So /dev/sdb should be used as the path, that is
sudo dd if=~/path_of_linux_mint_iso of=/dev/sdb oflag=direct bs=1M
Notice that the device is refered to as /dev/sdx instead of /media/xxx. The first one is the device node assigned for your device, the other one is where the device is actually mounted (so that you can browse your files). Also note that your USB type could be FAT if you are using Windows.

Install Mint

This step is easy yet time-consuming. Insert your USB, reboot the computer and set USB to highest priority in BIOS boot option. If all work as expected, you should see a menu asking you to choose installing Mint (which is the first choice). Press , and you will enter a desktop, in which there is an icon saying "install Linux Mint". Double click it, and you should be all set.

Two tips here:
1. If a booting medium cannot be found when you boot via a USB, the reason could be that your USB lost connection to the computer. In that case, it helps just to reboot the computer and reinsert your USB. My Kingston USB worked well that way.
2. If the estimated language package downloading appears unreasonable (e.g.several hundreds/thousands minutes), you can skip it by clicking the bottom triangle and then click the "skip" button appeared.

Keep patient, and you should be fine.

Experiencing Linux Mint 13 (Maya)

Finally I made it to complete the installation of Mint 13 with Cinnamon and done a lot of configuration.

I have to admit that Mint is quite easy to use for a CS newbie who wants to advance to Linux tech from Windows. However, there are still lots of stuff (and lots of fun too!) to do for Mint to work as you want. That said, I am going to post some of the problems I met and solutions (search, improve, and share) in the hope that I may save some efforts of the public and some of mine in case I may need to re-solve some.

Anyway, thanks to the development team of Mint!