Imagine you want to open up a port range to your host ($FW) in your shorewall’s ‘rules’ file. So let’s say we run an Asterisk machine and we want to open RTP ports 10000 to 20000 to your machine, you would have to do something like:
ACCEPT net $FW udp 10000:20000
For more reference on Asterisk’s firewall rules, click here.
I’m always surprised by people saying that they don’t “understand” a problem. I always ask them ‘what don’t you understand?’ Most of the times the answer is, ‘the complete picture.’ It left me wondering a bit on the reasons and possible solutions.
The first action I take when I get such a response, is to ask what part of the problem they don’t understand. Most of the times I then get an answer like, ‘I can’t see how I would be able to solve the entire problem.’ Which still is not an answer to my question.
It looks like we are stuck. However, we are not. Those people just don’t like “the” high level problem description. So that implicitly means that they have some trouble with the basics of the problem. Basics are mandatory requirements for finishing a high level assignment.
How do we find out the missing basics? Well, in my experience these can be found out, just by asking questions. There are several possible ways to come up with these questions. An approach could be to do a top-down search for questions and answers. Basically this means you divide the high-level problem into subsets and possibly subsets of those subsets and make up questions for those subsets. However this scatters the problem into small problems, which will become unclear to the person having difficulties. Possibly you are missing things which are mandatory in the process of understanding the problem. Always wise to keep pen and papers near you.
What I prefer instead, is to use a bottom-top approach. You’ll need to find the core elements of the problem, which doesn’t seem easy. However most problems have some predecessors. Understand those predecessors and you most probably know the basics of the current problem. Once you have found those basics, you are able to get a level higher, until finally you have made your way to the top, the high level problem, which hopefully you understand now.
Basics are very important to understand before undertaking a new endeavor to find a solution for your problem. Understanding them makes the process to solve the issue more easy. If a problem looks to big to be solved, divide it into basics.
I have no intention to say that this is the best way to solve problems. My thoughts are based on my personal best practices. I could probably go a lot more in-depth by providing examples, however this article is meant to be a reminder to me and anyone else interested. Sometimes we just forget how we solved problems in the past. This way of doing things helped me fixing problems in the past and present, so can it do the same thing for you?!
This time I would like to talk about something else than computer-related stuff. I have some pictures to show of the car I bought a week ago. This is why the time between this and the previous post seems a little bit long. Meanwhile my internship started as well, as mentioned before, so it have been busy weeks for me. I think I will soon be able to write some more interesting stuff.
Enough talking, let’s see some pictures:
Front side of my car
Side view of my car
Rear side of my car
I have sent an email to the maintainer of the plugin and he very kindly replied. Actually I have been a dummy and I could have known, because here it says what I’d had to do. Ah well everything is ok now. More writing to follow.
Today I installed the WP-syntax plugin for wordpress, but it seems it messes up my code a little bit, ormal behaviour for wordpress is to replace < > & by > < & Normally speaking this should be fine, but because I’m using the WP-syntax plugin for code the > < & are between a <pre> tag, so that’s why you don’t see a < > or & but instead > < & I’m hoping to have this fixed soon.
