繪本二三事 勇敢湯

第一次讀勇敢湯給兒子聽時,我不是很肯定是哪些動物,查了Google後,才確定了臭鼬,浣熊,和松鼠.

在版權頁描繪了整個冒險旅程:從左邊的湯鍋,到右邊的森林,河,和山.講玩故事後,可以整個回顧.

怪物,不意外的,是人類! 剛好借題發揮,教導小朋友要對動物有愛心.

除了主題之外,可以教小朋友的地方有:

數數 - 幾個朋友;籃子裡有幾種水果;（有趣的是竟然有魚）;幾棵草莓;幾個碗.

觀察 - 誰吃草莓;誰吃藍莓;哪個朋友哭了;哪個朋友睡著了;誰拿什麼顏色的碗喝湯.

四歲半的YoYo聽完後，也說自己有資格喝勇敢湯！

Thunderbird: Transfer emails from Linux to Mac OS

After successfully make my work email account profile on the USB disk, I know it's time to move my personal emails, a different account of course, to that same disk.

Thanks to these two references on "transferring data to a new profile" and "manually importing and exporting" , I did it successfully at the first attempt. Let me provide what I actually did as an example:

1. Create a new email account, msa.hinet.net, on my MacBook Pro.

2. Quit Thunderbird.

3. A new directory with several files in it are created in the profile. In my case, the directory is /Volumes/name_of_usb_disk/name_of_profile/Mail/msa.hinet.net.

4. Copy the Mbox files, i.e. files without .msf or .dat extensions, from my Linux machine to this newly created directory. Don't worry about the overwriting would cause any inconsistency, Thunderbird is smart enough to take care of it, if any.

5. Start Thunderbird and all mails are there!

One thing to note is that I didn't leave emails on the email server for my personal account, so that I didn't copy popstate.dat file. Even if I did, I don't know if copy popstate.dat from one machine to the other would prevent Thunderbird on my MBP from retrieving the stale emails.

Thunderbird emails on the go

I spend quite some time checking emails at home, after work. Naturally, I have two PCs and each of them has its own Thunderbird copy and the data. In addition to the problem of having duplicate copies of incoming mails, it's also difficult to manage the replies, i.e. sent mails. Making one centralized email store is just a matter of time. Today I got some time to check how to move my Thunderbird email data from the hard drive to the USB external disk. I've followed pretty much the instructions found here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder. And for those of us who learn by example, here are my steps: 1. close Thunderbird 2. At home directory, cd .thunderbird 3. cp -a profile-name /media/usbdisk 4. cd ~/Desktop/thunderbird 5. ./thunderbird -profilemanager 6. Click on "Create Profile...". Give it a name. 7. Click on "Choose Folder..." 8. Select the folder on /media/usbdisk 9. Select the new profile and then click on "Start" 10. Check Edit/Account Settings... and voila, the folders are now from the /media/usbdisk Late that night, I did the same trick on my home PC, and it works! Now I can bring my emails with me. For some reason, when I first tried it on my MacBook Pro, it failed. Well, to be more specific, it seemed like it was trying to synchronizing with the email server and never finished.

Just when I was going to give up, I tried it once again a day after. It worked! Come to think of it, perhaps I wasn't patient enough when I first tried it. After all, MacFuse Core + NTFS-3G is not really fast for my 3.9GB Thunderbird profile, even on my 2.4GHz MBP.

MacBook Pro with VirtualBox, with USB key working

After working in China for nearly 18 months, I have moved back to Taipei. In order to do on-line banking for my accounts with China Merchants Bank (www.cmbchina.com), I need to have a simplified Chinese Windows XP running.

With my newly bought MacBook Pro and Mac OS 10.5.3, I figured that it's time to try virtual machine. 

Here are the steps:

1. Download the latest version (1.6.2 in my case) from www.virtualbox.org. Sun has acquired Innotek, the company builds VirtualBox, http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-02/sunflash.20080212.1.xml.

2. Run the installation program. Should be smooth.

3. Start VirtualBox and create a virtual machine and a virtual disk. I chose "Dynamically expanding image" in Virtual Disk Manager. The virtual disk image is created on a USB 2.0 disk. It's slow as it's aged P-ATA, not SATA. If I can do it again, I'll use a SATA one.

To make it complete, here is my VM configuration:

4. Start the virtual machine and install simplified Chinese Windows XP.

5. Install the guest additions after the installation of Windows is done. 

6. Run the Windows XP virtual machine.

7. Download on-line banking program from www.cmbchina.com. Run it.

8. Plug the USB key onto MacBook Pro.

9. Choose "STMicroelectronic Giesecke  Devrient StarKey [2005]" from the Devices/USB Devices menu.

10. Run the on-line banking software. Much to my surprise, it recognizes the USB key and works like a charm.

Next on my list is to move the virtual disk to a faster SATA disk.

浦東大驚奇之百獸王

想不到在上海浦東的萊爾富發現了紅獅王! 這可是快四歲兒子的最愛（真的,當我們問他最喜歡誰的時候,爸媽只排第二名）. 看了包裝盒的廣告,加上陪兒子看過幾集的印像,知道再湊另外四隻,就可以變身為百獸王!於是沒錢裝闊又不傻的我就託同事在掏寶網上幫我買了另外四隻：黑牛,白虎,金鷹,藍鯊. 於是就出現了: 變異人 消失吧 身在中國的台灣傻爸 2008/1/13