前几天与君分享了对学汉语和英语的一些看法, 纯属主观观点, 用以交流. 相对于学中文来说, 英语理应较易学, 对某些习惯于拼音的族裔(如西语裔)来说, 可能如此.  但对母语非英语某些华裔来说, 实际情况也不尽然.  我门觉得英语难学, 难懂, 难口开, 难说出象样的英文. 英语仿佛是我们的语言天敌, 还经常地给主流社会病疚. 这又是为何?  这几年来, 我也在检视和总结自己学习英语路上之得失, 尝试用自己的体检去理解这一特有现象, 以求取更利于自己的学习方法. 但多年翻来复去寻觅, 可能还未明白其中要害, 但愿将一路所思, 与君共勉.

中国长年封闭, 英语可谓外来新生事物, 起步晚, 起步难. 固国民整体英语水平低下.  这大环境是主因. 近代中国英语譜教始于我们这一代. 我们这一代之前是空白或 "洋滨英语".  一开始, 如何教, 如何学, 没有有效的教学系统, 没有规测.  教和学都是摸着石头过河. 那时英语师资奇缺且水平参差不齐, 很难实行有效的教学.  英语学习只能停留在表面行式上. 认读课本上的生词, 填充例句, 翻译造句等.  课用中文教, 口语上 , 除了照本宣科念念课文外, 几乎不说英文.  本来英语课应该属语言和文化范畴, 现在回头再看看, 上英语课觉得更象上数理化或科学课, 语言和文化因素反被抽离.  

如我上文所分析研究, 英语极有科学性和逻辑性, 其语法严紧, 句子结构有法可依, 活象自然学科中的一学科.  而国内教学着重且善于自然科学, 自然而然地, 教和学都用了这种方式.  记得那时很着眼于学习英语的语法, 有形无形之间, 英语语法就是自然科学中的定理, 可用逻辑分析等学数理化方法把她理解消化. 这招还管用, 考试可拿高分, 反正那时考试重于语法就那些东西. 那时很多学生都是着样过来的, 我也是其中之一.  来美前夕, 感觉还良好, 可看懂一点英文文章.  当踏足花旗国时, 才赫然惊醒自己在国内学的是现在国内所说的"哑吧英语".  你能看, 也能听懂, 就开不了口.  口不能开, 外族便认定你英语烂, 久而久之, 形成偏见, 而你只能是哑子吃黄莲有苦自知.  "哑吧英语"是国内早期英语教学特别产物. 源于其特有的如上文所述的教学方式, 但毕竟英语科不是自然科学, 而是语言和文化艺术的学问也是日常交流工具.  学别人的语言, 便要学人家的文化才能融会贯通.  事到如今, 感慨万分.  文行到此, 唯衷心希望国内英语教学能改弦更张, 找出适合的教学方法, 以提升我国人英语整体水平, 到时水到成渠, "洋滨英语" 及 "哑吧英语" 则可休尔, 外族偏见亦可止尔.

听不少有中文底子的华人同胞常诉说英文难学, 外族反而学好, 我时想这是否跟我们的中文语言背景有关.  如上文我所提, 中文句子结构比较松散, 不一定按主谓宾结构, 诺定熟成的东西太多.  这与英语文理有着千渊之别.  须知语言思维一旦成系统, 便难再更动.  看一看我们的洋浜英语如"long time no see", 便知鸿沟多深, 前路甚远. 于慨叹之余, 也百般无奈.  若汉语能进行变革, 规范句子结构使其有法侧, 使其具科学及逻缉性, 便于与外语文接轨, 或有利于外人学汉语, 更利于国人研习英语等外语.  

一丝暇想, 也自知难成气侯, 不求共鸣, 唯盼勿作痴人说梦则幸甚尔.

Presumably, we are different from each other in different ways.  Besides different appearances,  people also have different personalities. Some appear to be friendly and talkative; whereas some are shy and clumsy.  Often making such comparison with folks around me, I sometimes wonder why I am what I am.   It's said that we are what we eat.  I mean we have the same kind of food available in the supermarket, yet the proteins getting into our brain function quite differently.  The reason is surely out of the scope of this discussion.  However, my wonder of why I didn't have a personality like Jane, or John, who all have 'better' personalities than mine, lingers in my mind from time to time.

Through the years, I realize that one's personality can affect one's life or career tremendously.  Individuals with "nicer" personality tend to be more successful. Yet others are lusterless even if they are very professional in their fields.  It's true that individuals live in society, and one can't survive alone. Thus, communication between people is essential. There is no doubt that if an individual's personality tends to be communication-friendly, the individual has the first advantage of appealing to others, either in promoting him/herself or letting others to know about him/herself. Unlike machines, we, human beings have feelings and affections toward others.  To establish and maintain the bonding with others, one must talk to each other, work together, etc. If you can build and keep such connection, then you all have pleasant relations with other people. If an individual lacks such trait, the individual won't achieve the individual’s maximum potential despite that he or she is  technically capable.  I have seen well enough examples of that.  I am not surprised to see that someone is always getting her job offer from time to time if she is given a chance to a job interview.  Someone is always doing well in her workplace and loved by her colleagues, friends and family members.  At the same time, it will be uneasy for someone else to do well in job interviews and has to continue to stick to his banal job, without a chance of promotion.  

With all the things being said, the worse thing is that one's personality is born with the person from the beginning. It's irresistible and helpless for those less unfortunate.  But before a future medical miracle helps us to refine our imperfect personality, which I believe will come true in future,  please be considerable and be open-minded to those with flaws in their personalities.

不知不觉地, 我们在美国生活已几十年了.   大家中国人之间还是会用中文交流.  我们平时也看看中文报章, 看中文电视,但是这只局限于说和看.  要动手写中文的机会不是很多, 除非你是从事中文工作的人.  问题这就来了, 在这样的环景下, 如果某天我要用中文写点东西, 我会惊觉字写不出来了.  就算写出来了, 我也会觉得那字写的怪怪的, 不确定写得对不对.  现在还好, 我可用计算机帮我选字.  但总的来说写得还是比较费勁, 且常被某君拿我的中文国学冷嘲热讽的, 什为烦恼.  这也难怪, 我当年在国内没把中国语文学好这也是事实.  至于英语水平, 只能算是半路出家, 冲其量, 仅能混口饭吃, 也惨变被嘲讽之列. 今仅以我平常之心, 论一论学两语之心得, 以君共勉.

中国文字有悠久的历史, 是中华文明的载体, 有其深度和广度.  她记载中华上下几千年兴衰, 文人轶事.  她体现着咱世界四分一人口所蕴藏的巨大能量.  我虽不是文字专家, 但我的感觉是, 如从语义(semantic)来看, 中文语义宽广且繁覆, 千变万化.  从语法(grammar)来看, 比较松散且多变.  诺定熟成的东西可任意破坏句子的结构, 甚至于使句子毫无语法结构可言.  而文字是象型符号, 难写易忘, 单音多字, 同字多音, 同字多义, 句子结构及标点纷乱, 互相混淆.  如不是生于华夏, 活在中原, 相信很难活学活用.  君不见我在美华裔莘莘学子, 虽有汉语拼音相助, 也叫苦连天, 学得死去活来, 片言只语, 只是一知半解.  中文想冲出东亚, 影响天下, 简直是痴人作梦.  我相信华夏文字很难成就世界之语, 尽管越来越多外人为某些目的而学习她, 接受她的洗礼.

如上文所说, 英语我只是半路出家, 那敢再现丑.  但深耕细作之下也有所领会.  虽说拉丁二十六字母变化无穷, 但穷中有节, 变中有理.  君不见硕大字典, 前后有序, 井井有条, 精确无比.  再看汉语字典, 虽有百家争鸣, 却是杂乱无章.  再看英语语义, 一是一, 二便是二, 童叟无欺.  细读其文理语法, 主谓宾三分天下, 相互配合, 互有法则. 主句从句, 层次分明, 共容和谐.  句子结构可谓有法可依, 违法必究, 以力求精确, 极其科学及逻辑性.  世界科学文献皆用英语莫过于其精密属性也.  但其也有不足, 宇宙无穷, 其词汇势必也无尽.  中文字则可延伸造新词, 其字量则相对稳定, 其新词汇也可趋无穷, 词汇虽新, 字依旧,  便能望字生义而自解, 有其优势.  读书人竟必不能穷尽宇宙万物于一时.

若将两者再比较.  我觉得中文在表达较为抽象概念的时候, 由于她的模糊(fuzzy)特性, 汉语有其优势.  所以我们从古到今能不乏意景优美的诗词歌赋.  "花非花, 雾非雾" 如说白了,  意景就没了.  然而正是这种模糊特性, 欠缺准确的科学性,  阻碍古代科技发展.  中国古代的科学也只能停留在"勾三股四弦五" 的水平了.  再看看今天, 这个坏影响还在.  君不见中国学生的文理分科还长期存在, 且越演越裂.  人文科的不喜欢科学, 理工科的不喜欢文学.  我想是汉语没有把他们有机得结合起来.  国内能文通理的人才可能不多. 可在欧美, 这样的人才多的很. 很多人是工程师也是企管家, 律师或政客.  他们都有比较科学的语言为载体, 可兼顾不同学科, 以达个人的全面发展.

中国是否可考虑语言改革, 完善一下汉语呢?

* Qibei Elemantry School(旗北小学)  I stayed in that school with my father. I didn't have any pleasant experiences there. It's located in a hill. I had my early elemantry school years there. I remeber that this was the school where I learned a quite a lot of things, reciting the multiplication table, practising Chinese calligraphy, abacus and having some sport trainning for young kids including ping-pong trainning. Looking back now, it would be the period of time when China and the US initiated the 'ping pong' diplomacy. It's surely a period of time when schools strangely had the so called 'labor lesson', where teachers and students in school, led by the local peasants, would work on the field. We would plan all kinds of produce and vegitable, sweet potato, peanut, sugar-cane, corn, wheat, rice and even castor-oil plant(蓖麻). We would make compost out of grass and weed collected in the hill, and we would aslo raise pigs in school, all in an organic way. It seemed as if we all knew the future trend of being organic in advance that time.....

* Qinan Elemantry School(旗南小学)  This was the school that I finished all my elemantry schooling. I swithched to this school becase my father switched work in the same region. Nothing out of extraordinary happened as I remembered. We would walk to school and would have normal classes. It's the peroid of time I didn't spend enough time studying because we started to some sort of entertainment. We would listen to those long story series on radio, classic masterpiece such as Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh and Journey to the West. We would never miss an episode because the story was so attractive and the story-teller was so professional and skillful that we would literally stick our ears next to the radio. At the same peroid of time, we would also listen to RTHK's(香港电台) radio programs. Their radio series was very professional and their music program was crystal-clear because they were the leader in high quality of FM stereo broadcasting at the time. In later years in the peroid, we started to have televisions. We would also watch TV channels from Hong Kong. We watched a few dramas such as IQ成熟时,骤雨中的阳光, 大地恩情, 天龙决, 天蠢变, 武侠帝女花.  It's interesting that the first westen TV series that I watched from CCTV was Man From Atlantis(大西洋海底来的人), a science fiction, by Patrick Duffy and Belinda Montgomery. Although it's a fiction, I was enchanted by it. It might be the first scientific encounter that enlightened me and help me to cultivate my insterest or potential in scientific and engineering field.....

* Zhuoshan Middle School(桌山中学)  This middle school had a long history of being the best in the region in history . I was placed one of the advanced classes, in which students were specially trained to be better prepared for college. In spite of it, I didn't feel anything special except that we would have better teachers for us this the class.....

* Oversea Chinese High School(華僑中學)  I finished my high school in this school. This was the school which I would need to learn how to take care of myself and be more independent. I would need to leave home and would live in the dormitory in school's campus. This school is established and supported by many people living oversea. It's a modern school in terms of its hardware at that time. It had very good teaching facility, such as standard classrooms, advanced labortaries, a sport stadium, a swiming pool, and a nice dormintory. I was moved to see that so many people living oversea made donation to support education back in their hometown. These people loved their hometown although they were living oversea..... After visiting all web sites of my old schools, my first impression was that the educational system there has been excelled to a level that I counldn't believe. Not only do they have the state of the art facility, but also the mentality they have toward education. They understand that education is key to their future. They put all necessary resources to vitalize the schools. The teachers are now all college graduates with teaching credential, which was very desirable back on the day when I attended these schools. To my astonishment, all schools have their IT department and IT classes to promote science and technology. That is awesome.

It's been decades since my last visit to my hometown after my family came to America. Living here these years, we learned, worked and survived in this part of our world. What happened in our howtown has basically become sort of 'out of sight and out of mind' things. Somehow, the rainy days this week reminded the rainy season back in my hometown, humid and wet verywhere including the floor inside the house when it's severe. Driven by this impulse,I searched 百度(www.baidu.com), the predominate search engin in the country, trying to learn something from it. It's pretty cool that it returned many information. I could look at the map of the town in its satellite images. I could browse all kinds of the web sites, from the local government, commercial business and local schools. What I was interested in was those local schools' web sites. I attended several schools through my childhood. It's amazing that they all have their web sites, primary school to high school.

Here are the schools that are still in my memory.

* Nanwen Elemantry School(南文小学)

I wasn't old enough to remenber clearly if I attended the kindergarten at this school at that time when I stayed in this school with my mother. My memory about it gradually has faded away. However, I still have a vague memory of one incident that I ran few miles from our home to this school alone after I got upset that I was ordered to stay home and couldn't follow my mother to the school. The school as I rembmer now had some traditional Chinese-style buildings with red walls and green decorative elements on roof-top. Particularly, its main building was tall and splendid-- a big oval-shape stair leading to the first floor and a fancy balcony with hand-crafted fence on the top level with a big bell, as seem in the church, that served as timer to signal the beginning and ending of the class. It's said that the big bell, if struck in certain patten, was also served as an alarm of all kinds of emergency because the sound could be heard within a few miles...

I am fond of watching CSI(Crime Scene Investigation)-type of show on TV.  Not long ago, I watched a TV serial related to that theme in Chinese.  A policeman was stabbed to death while he was trying to stop a criminal committing a crime.   The criminal escaped.  All other officers in the the police department were very sad and vowed to catch the criminal.  It was a reasonable reaction given the situation.  However,  something started to irk me when I tried to digest the phrase, "avenge the murder of their colleague", coming out from one of the officers.  Would it be more appropriate if he said they would catch the criminal and bring the criminal to justice for the victim instead?

http://blog.csdn.net/mzqali1/archive/2009/01/09/3739824.aspx

http://dotnet.sys-con.com/node/38864#

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20040311.asp

http://www.cnblogs.com/yefanqiu/archive/2009/10/04/1577854.html

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/windows/odpnet/faq.html

http://www.chrissearle.org/blog/technical/installing_ca_signed_certificate_glassfish

http://fixunix.com/solaris-rss/567421-http-bc-ssl-non-default-glassfish-server-certificates.html

keytool -genkey -noprompt -trustcacerts -keyalg RSA -sigalg SHA1withRSA -alias s1as -dname "CN=www.fshell.com,OU=fshell,O=fshell.com,L=San Francisco,S=Ca,C=US"  -keystore keystore.jks -keypass changeit -storepass changeit -validity 3650

keytool -list -keystore keystore.jks -storepass changeit -alias s1as -v

keytool -export -alias s1as -storepass changeit -file server.cer -keystore keystore.jks

keytool -import -v -trustcacerts -alias s1as -file server.cer -keystore cacerts.jks -keypass changeit -storepass changeit

http://inetjava.sourceforge.net/lectures/part2_applets/InetJava-2.1-2.2-Introduction-to-AWT-and-Applets.html

It seems that the past weeks were our special spending weeks after our one-week long summer vacation back in July, which we visited Disneyland down in LA and Vegas, where our sizzling feelings cooled down abruptly when a California Highway Patrol officer ran after our vehicle on our way home.

I got a phone call from our handyman that he would like to collect the remainder of the service charge of our home project.  He came to our palce and collected the check and promised to help us with our project.  That remains to be seen and we will wait and see what he can do for us.  We have waited so long that hopefully he can do something positive for us. We were puzzled when one of our neighbors would suspect the identity and credential of a cable guy who was installing our cable TV from our local cable company.  A white female in her 50's came forward with a notebook and a pen.  She asked the credential of the guy and wrote down his number and his truck's license plate number.  What really was in her mind?  What did she think her neighbors were?

No one likes red tape.  However, we have to deal with it when it comes to you.  That was what happened to us when we tried to enroll SC to a swimming class in Saint Ignatius College Preparatory(SI) in San Francisco.  The staff told me to wait when I went there the first time.  I waited half an hour in rain and nobody seemed to care until I gave up.  FShell called them up as we would think that our information about enrollment was incorrect, but it seemed hard to get a good response.   I myself finally had to take a half day off from work on Friday to register the class after FShell's failed attempt to register it on Thursday, when she took her time off from work for that too.  They looked like a governmental bureaucrat to me.

We re-registered one of our cars,  idle and parked in the garage for more than three years.  This time we paid a much higher DMV registration fee than before due to the fee increase because of the financial meltdown in the California government.   In addition to that, we also need to pay for its insurance policy because automobile insurance is a must in California to register a car.  Since the car has not been driven for a long time, we need to purchase a battery charger to recharge the dead car battery.  Hope there isn't any problem restarting the car.  Otherwise, it will cost us more.

Our SUV has been driven for seven years.  Some parts started to wear out.  The tires and the battery were replaced last year.  Now it was the front brakes.  I had them done in a local shop that charged it for $200.  It was worked on for about an hour, the brake disks repolished, brake shoes replaced.  The rear brakes were about 30% left and didn't need to be replaced yet this time.  I thought the brake service was a little expensive.  I felt a little bit better that our car didn't have a serious problem like one of the customers I saw there, whose car, with check-engine light on, failed to pass smog-check and was estimated $1500 for repair.

FShell was upset when she received a reminder-call from her dentist that she was alway late for her dental appointments.  FShell said that she was never late for her appointments and the fact of the matter was that she would need to wait half an hour or more before she was seen by her dentist.  She was furious that she canceled her appointment this time.  I did go to see the dentist and have my teeth cleaned and paid the remainder of service charge from our last dental care that our dental insurance didn't cover. 

SC's summer school  will come to an end soon this summer.  It is also time to pay the tuition for his last session of summer school.  All these put an extra burden to our this month's budget.  Hope something positive will come out soon.

I learned about the concept of the Object-oriented programming(OOP) when I was attending college some years ago.  The professor introduced the concepts of common objects such as a stack, a queue and dequeue frequently used in computer programming.  He also talked about advantage of programming in objects in general.   I still remember vividly the example he used in his lecture to illustrate the concepts, a solitaire game: The deck of cards can be thought of a stack. The up-pile can be thought of a stack. The down-pile can be thought of a queue/dequeue. A poker card can be thought of an object that has the following properties:

Value(Ace,Two,Three,Four,Six,Seven,Eight,Nine,Ten,Jack,Queen,King) Color (Red,Black) Suite (Heart,Diamond,Club,Spade) Face (Front,Back)

• A poker card in the solitaire game can be checked if it has a move to other piles according to the game's rule. These checking correspond to its methods. * To check if the card can move to a up-pile, we use the function CanGoUpPile as follow:

  Public Function CanGoUpPile(UpPile As Deck) As Boolean    

      If UpPile.Size > 0 Then        

          If UpPile.Top.Color = Me.Color And UpPile.Top.Value + 1 = Me.Value And UpPile.Top.Suit = Me.Suit Then            

                  CanGoUpPile = True        

          Else            

                   CanGoUpPile = False             

          End If    

      ElseIf Me.Value = ACE Then        

          CanGoUpPile = True    

      Else        

          CanGoUpPile = False    

      End If

  End Function

• To check if the card can move to a down-pile, we use the function CanGoDownPile as follow:

  Public Function CanGoDownPile(DownPile As Deck) As Boolean    

      If DownPile.Size > 0 Then

            If DownPile.Front.CardImage = DownPile.Front.FaceImage Then            

                  If DownPile.Front.Color <> Me.Color And DownPile.Front.Value - 1 =    Me.Value Then

                       CanGoDownPile = True            

                  Else                

                        CanGoDownPile = False            

                  End If        

          Else            

                  CanGoDownPile = False        

          End If    

      ElseIf Me.Value = KING Then        

          CanGoDownPile = True    

      Else        

          CanGoDownPile = False    

      End If

  End Function

  The entire card object class written in vb can be read here. With these abstractions, it's easier to write the solitaire game.  Here is my first solitaire game that you can download and play. The entire solitaire project's source code in vb can be downloaded here.

If we run your Glassfish application server in your local network and you want your applications to serve your internet users, we may run our Apache server in front with reverse proxy.  Apache can pass the requests to our Glassfish application server through its connector.  Glassfish supports the standard http connector and the AJP connector.  Personally, I like to to use the AJP connector because it maintains the original IP address from the client.  To use the connectors, we need to load the needed Apache modules and configure Apache and Glassfish if necessary as follow:

* HTTP connector

modules: proxy, proxy_http ProxyRequests Off <Proxy *>  Order deny,allow  Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyPass /app http://localhostname:8080/app ProxyPassReverse /app http://localhostname:8080/app

* AJP connector

modules: proxy, proxy_ajp ProxyRequests Off <Proxy *>  Order deny,allow  Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyPass /app ajp://localhostname:8009/app ProxyPassReverse /app ajp://localhostname:8009/app

If we use AJP connector, we need to copy the following jar files to the lib sub directory of our Glassfish installation directory.

* commons-logging-api.jar  * commons-modeler-2.0.jar  * tomcat-ajp.jar

For AJP to work properly for Glassfish v2, these files must come from Tomcat 5.5.23.  Files from other Tomcat versions may not work and may give
you an error: java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: USE_CUSTOM_STATUS_MSG_IN_HEADER.

To configure the Glassfish AJP connector:

From the console: $GLASSFISH_HOME/bin/asadmin create-jvm-options -Dcom.sun.enterprise.web.connector.enableJK=8009

From the console:
sudo ./asadmin create-jvm-options -Dcom.sun.enterprise.web.connector.enableJK.propertyFile = /path/glassfish/domains/domain1/config/glassfish-jk.properties