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Personal Professional

Changing language setting on facebook

There’s been a couple folks I know who use facebook and have faced the issue of having their “language” setting changed.  There doesn’t seem to be anything they did, which makes think suspicious activity and I’d probably be changing the password used for facebook. However, before you can change the password, you need to be able to read the menus, and unless you just happen to read the language it’s been changed to, you’re between a rock and a hard place.

In an effort to help those, here’s the screenshots and where you should click in order to change your language settings in facebook.

Step one : Click on “Settings”, it’s the highlighted in the following image

Facebook language settings step one

Step two : Click on “Language”, it’s the highlighted in the following image

Facebook language settings step two

Step three : Click on “Edit”, it’s the highlighted in the following image

Facebook language settings step three

Step four : Select your “Language”, from the drop down list. Luckily all the languages are localized, so you should recognize your language’s name.

Facebook language settings step four

Step five : Last, but not least, don’t forget to click “Save Changes”, the button on the left.

Facebook language settings step five

Categories
Personal Professional

Faint praise

For my own safety and the privacy of those involved, this story may or may not have any basis in fact.  Those involved with this story have had their names changed to insure their privacy.

This morning a coworker (Bartholomew AKA Bart) had us (me and another coworker – Martin) listen to a song he and another coworker (Elizabeth AKA Beth) reworked for a project.  After listening to the song, I was duly impressed with the singing ability of Beth and said so.  Martin agreed, and continued to say that “with a little practice and the help of a voice coach” she could be really good.  I thought about what was said and I decided to point out that it could be viewed as a backhanded complement.  I continued by pointing out that if someone were to look at his code and say, “Wow, that some really nice code.  You know, with a little work and some tutoring sessions with a professor, you could be a really good.  Now how would you react to that?”.  His response was as expected, seeing the insult in what was being said, even if it started out as a compliment.

The point being that sometimes it’s best to stop at the compliment and leave off the rest of the narrative.  Normally I might now post about such things, but I saw the following story on a social media site and it made me think of the morning’s interaction and how it’s related.  That story is:

So, in a little town in Nowheresville, USA, there’s a river that’s about to flood, and needs to be quickly dammed.

The local college sends three professors: a structural engineer, a chemical engineer, and a literary critic.

The structural engineer suggests building a concrete dam to stem the river, and the mayor calls in a construction company to do the job. A week later, the dam is completed, but in a few days the river’s current becomes more intense, and the dam crumbles.

Next, the chemical engineer suggests adding a gelatin solution to the river, to solidify the whole thing. The mayor calls in a favor with a multinational chemical company, and they deliver a half ton of customized gelatinizing solution.They add it to the river near the source, and the whole river turns to gelatin. But a few days later, the current of the river becomes even stronger, and the water pressure at the source starts to break the gelatin apart

Then, out of nowhere, an awful thunderstorm appears over the town. the heavy rain starts to make the river flood.

In a last ditch attempt, the literary critic steps up to the river bank

He coughs softly, purses his lips, takes a momentary glance at his fingernails, and says “I suppose this river is… adequate.”

…and suddenly the flooding stops.

The two other professors rush to the critic’s side and ask “How the hell did you stop the river from flooding?”

And the critic replies, “Simple. I dammed it with faint praise.”

Backhanded compliments and faint praise can both have a detrimental affects on individuals.  Those that are gaining confidence and seemingly unstoppable can be brought to a stand still with such “compliments” and “praise”.  And it’s often not an intentional malicious act by the offending party, they often view it as being helpful.  So, I guess the question to ask yourself before doling out such helpful tidbits is: “How would you react if someone said something similar to you?”

Categories
Professional

The power to find what you need

As part of what I do, I often end up working in the command line in Linux.  As anyone that works in IT can tell you log files are very important.  Something that they might not mention is, they also take up a lot of space depending on the level of logging being done.  Recently I had need to free up some space for log file on the server, I didn’t want to get rid of any files, just compress the older files. Chances are I wouldn’t need them, but if I did, they would still be there.  To accomplish this, I decided to use find, a Linus command line tool that, you guessed it, finds “stuff”.  Find is useful in that the command line arguments you pass it can quickly sort through and return a very unique set of results.  Find also automatically recurses downward through the sub directories, so you get a comprehensive list, you can change that through a command line option as well.

So, the first thing I wanted to see is all files (I’m not interested in directories) in the directory designated for logging that were older than 10 days (a completely random selection of number of days, a little more than a week, less than two weeks).  That’s easy enough to do, I just enter

find -type f -mtime +10

and instantly got a whole slew of files returned.  So, let’s break down what I did, “-type f” tells it I’m looking only for file, no directories and the “-mtime +10” tell the program to only give me file that have a “last modified” date OLDER (+) that 10 days.  I notice a few files that have a .gz at the end which means they’ve already been compressed, so I don’t need them in the list.  Doing a bit of searching, I find that by adding “-not” in front of any option it return the opposite (props to http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_list_files_that_dont_match_a_pattern/).  Knowing that the “-name ” option will return files based on wild card matching I add that to the mix and end up with:

find -not -name "*.gz" -type f -mtime +10

That looks better, giving me a shorter list, and NONE of the files listed end in .gz. Now the next step is to do something with those files, and this is where the, IMHO, the true power of find comes into play.  You can pass a command line argument to find that tells it to “do something” with the files it finds.  Just to make sure I’m not making any crazy mistakes, the first thing I try is something simple and non harming, like listing the full information for the file:

find . -not -name "*.gz" -type f -mtime +10 -exec ls -alh {} \;

The -exec command line argument is great in that it will “execute” everything after “-exec” up to the “\;”.  The “{}” tells it to replace the result This means you can string along several commands, although at my level, I usually just want to do one thing at a time.  I like seeing each step and, by doing one step at a time, chances are I’ll find mistakes before it’s too late.

So, this is great, I have a listing of files, but what I really want to do is compress those files.  Now that I have a means of listing the files, and the results are what I’m expecting, I can replace the “command” with what I really want to do.  Final results are:

find . -not -name "*.gz" -type f -mtime +10 -exec gzip {} \;

The sweet part of this, I can run this command on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and it won’t attempt to recompress files that have already been compressed.  It’s really a minor thing, but why try to process files that don’t need it.

I hope you’ve found this helpful, and can build off of what I’ve shown.  The man page, if you’re so inclined to read it, for find can be read here http://linux.die.net/man/1/find.