Friday, September 13, 2013

OpenTeacher: Improve Your Foreign Language Vocabulary Skills

OpenTeacher is an opensource application that helps you learn a foreign language vocabulary. Just enter some answers and questions in your native and foreign language or download them from internet, and OpenTeacher will test and let you know your vocabulary test result.
OpenTeacher will help you to learn what you need to know for your next test. Also it allows you to make use of a lesson type where you are being teached in small parts. Once you know one part, OpenTeacher moves on to the next. This should help you remember large doses of information without being overwhelmed by it’s size.
You can also be tested by OpenTeacher. It will test you and keep track of your progress and tells you how much you know. By this way you can make sure yourself that you know enough to pass your next test.
OpenTeacher has integrated with the online language tutor Wrds. So that you can access, edit and learn all your Wrts lists directly from OpenTeacher, or add new lists that you’ve created in OpenTeacher. This way you can use the same lists wherever you go.
OpenTeacher not only focused on students, also helps teachers to give their students the right education. While teachers still provide the information, OpenTeacher can help the students learn this information by themselves. It improves the student’s results and saves the teacher time.
Features
- You can view both recent and past results of tests with graphs.
- It offers read support for more than 29 file formats and write support for over 14 file formats.
- You can learn typing with Typing Tutor provided by OpenTeacher which adapts itself to your skills.
- Smart question asking and interval training.
- Think answer, shuffle answer and repeat answer input modes.
- Easy symbol, Greek and Cyrillic input.
- Read and write T2K (Teach2000), wrts and read ABBYY Lingvo Tutor files.
- Save and open your online WRTS lists.
- Print your word lists, media items and topography maps.
- Available in Arabic, Trad. Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
Install OpenTeacher On Ubuntu/Linux Mint
OpenTeacher is found in the Ubuntu official repositories. So install it using the following command.
$ sudo apt-get install openteacher espeak
Launch OpenTeacher
Open it up either from your Menu or Dash. The default interface will look like below.
OpenTeacher_001From here, you can create new words, media, topography lessons or you can directly import from WRDS or from your local disk.
Create Sample Lesson
Click on the “New Words lesson” button. Enter the title for your lesson. Enter the source language in the Question language column, in my case it’s English and enter destination language (foreign language) in the Answer language column, in my case it’s Spanish. And enter all the words that you want to learn from the right side word table. You can switch to next question or answer column by pressing tab key or “=” symbol from your keyboard. For testing purpose, I’ve given two words “Hello” and “Welcome”.
OpenTeacher_003Now Click on the “Teach me” button. In the next window Click “I’m ready, start the lesson” button.
OpenTeacher_004Now OpenTeacher will ask you the questions one by one that you’ve entered in the first step. Enter the answer in the “Type answer” column and Click Check.
OpenTeacher_006If your answer is correct, it will ask you the next question, else OpenTeacher will show you the correct answer or the difference from the correct answer. Once the test is completed. The OpenTeacher will display the result and let you know how did you perform in the test.
OpenTeacher_007By this way, enter complex words in your native and foreign languages and start learning! Note that OpenTeacher is not a language converter and translator.
- See more at: http://www.unixmen.com/openteacher-improve-foreign-language-vocabulary-skills/#sthash.NWWmp7IC.dpuf

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Setup mibew-messenger

Mibew Messenger, also known as Open Web Messenger, is an open-source live/chat support application written in PHP and MySQL. It enables one-on-one chat assistance in real-time directly from your website. Just place the Mibew Messenger button at your site, the visitors of your site will be able to get assistance from your operators, technical support executives and customer support executives who help them by clicking on the chat button.
Features
- Visitors can do real-time chat without page refresh.
- Unlimited operators, chats, and users.
- Unlimited departments (groups of operators).
- Priority queue of visitors.
- Localized to 10+ languages, unicode support.
- Runs on your server and domain.
- Complete free and Open source.
For complete feature list visit here.
Prerequisites
Your server should have installed with following prerequisites.
- Apache webserver
- PHP (5.x and above) with MySQL support
- MySQL 5.0 and above
First you have to install and configure LAMP server. Visit any one of the following links to setup LAMP server.
Create Database and User for Mibew
For instance, here i am going to create a database called “mibewdb” and database user called “mibewuser” with password “centos” for ProcessWire. You can define database and user as per your liking.
# mysql -u root -p
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 3
Server version: 5.5.31-MariaDB MariaDB Server

Copyright (c) 2000, 2013, Oracle, Monty Program Ab and others.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

MariaDB [(none)]> create database mibewdb;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)

MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON mibewdb.* TO mibewuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'centos';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [(none)]> exit
Bye
Adjust Firewall/Router Settings
Allow the apache default port “80″ through iptables/router. Edit file /etc/sysconfig/iptables,
# vi /etc/sysconfig/iptables
Add the following line.
-A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
Now restart the iptables service.
# /etc/init.d/iptables restart
Getting Mibew
Download the latest version here or just enter the following command to download it from your terminal.
# wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/webim/files/Mibew%20Messenger/1.6.5/mibew165.zip --no-check-certificate
Create a directory called “mibew” under web root folder i.e /var/www/html/.
# mkdir /var/www/html/mibew
Copy and unzip the mibew installation file in /var/www/html/mibew/ folder.
# cp mibew165.zip /var/www/html/mibew/
# cd /var/www/html/mibew/
# unzip mibew165.zip
Configuration
Set privileges to mibew directory with command:
# chown -R root:apache /var/www/html/mibew/
Edit file config.php file,
 # nano /var/www/html/mibew/libs/config.php
Set your mibew application path i.e the folder name under web root directory. In my case it is /var/www/html/mibew.
So my configuration will be:
$webimroot = "/mibew";
Enter the MySQL details as shown below.
 *  MySQL Database parameters
 */
$mysqlhost = "localhost";
$mysqldb = "mibewdb";
$mysqllogin = "mibewuser";
$mysqlpass = "centos";
$mysqlprefix = "";
Save and exit the file.
Begin Installation
Open up browser and go to to URL http://domain-name/mibew/install or http://ip-address/mibew/install.
If everything seems ok, the following screen should appear. Click Create required tables link.
Installation - Mibew Messenger - Mozilla Firefox_001After successful installation, the following screen will appear.
Installation - Mibew Messenger - Mozilla Firefox_002Now you will be able login to chat as user admin with empty password. For security reason set the password immediately and remove the /mibew/install/ folder.
# rm -fr /var/www/html/mibew/install/
Now click on the Proceed to Login page and login as admin with empty password.
Login - Mibew Messenger - Mozilla Firefox_003In the next page you will be asked to create your administrator login password and email as shown below.
Operator details - Mibew Messenger - Mozilla Firefox_004Finally, this is how your administration console page looks.
Home - Mibew Messenger - Mozilla Firefox_005From here, you can
- create/delete operators,
- find the waiting users,
- Search chat history,
- View the chat statistics,
- Setup common system behavior and chat options,
- Change administrator profile details and so on.
How do i add the chat button on my website?
It’s very simple. Go to the Mibew admin console. You will see a link called button code in the middle of the admin console window. Open the link in the new window and copy the HTML code and you can paste them in your website at any place.
Button HTML code generation - Mibew Messenger - Mozilla Firefox_006You can change the chat image using Choose image button and can change the chat window style as well.
- See more at: http://www.unixmen.com/setup-one-one-chat-directly-website-mibew-messenger/#sthash.u6ijnA0M.dpuf