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• Error: You need to load the kernel first in Grub

  - by Exeleration-G

  I have Lubuntu 11.10 installed on /dev/sda3, and Xubuntu 11.10 on /dev/sda5. A while ago, while being on Lubuntu, I made a mistake somewhere in creating a Live USB: by mistake, I installed a Live USB bootloader into /dev/sda3. This didn't result in any problem at that time. Today, I updated the kernel. I had to restart Lubuntu. In Grub, Lubuntu suddenly didn't appear anymore, and I booted automatically in Xubuntu. I tried to run update-grub and tried to use grub-customizer to get Lubuntu back in Grub, but this didn't work. I ran os-prober, but it doesn't show me Lubuntu. Then, I tried to add a new entry to /etc/grub.d/ on /dev/sda5 called 12_lubuntu. It contained the following: #!/bin/sh -e echo "Lubuntu" cat << EOF menuentry "Lubuntu" { set root=(hd0,3) linux /boot/vmlinuz initrd /boot/initrd.img } EOF After doing that, I ran update-grub and with grub-customizer, I wrote the Grub-configuration to MBR, that is: /dev/sda. Suddenly, Lubuntu appeared in Grub. I tried to launch it, but when doing this, the following message appeared: Error: You need to load the kernel first How can I make Grub start Lubuntu again?

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• Unit testing statically typed functional code

  - by back2dos

  I wanted to ask you people, in which cases it makes sense to unit test statically typed functional code, as written in haskell, scala, ocaml, nemerle, f# or haXe (the last is what I am really interested in, but I wanted to tap into the knowledge of the bigger communities). I ask this because from my understanding: One aspect of unit tests is to have the specs in runnable form. However when employing a declarative style, that directly maps the formalized specs to language semantics, is it even actually possible to express the specs in runnable form in a separate way, that adds value? The more obvious aspect of unit tests is to track down errors that cannot be revealed through static analysis. Given that type safe functional code is a good tool to code extremely close to what your static analyzer understands. However a simple mistake like using x instead of y (both being coordinates) in your code cannot be covered. However such a mistake could also arise while writing the test code, so I am not sure whether its worth the effort. Unit tests do introduce redundancy, which means that when requirements change, the code implementing them and the tests covering this code must both be changed. This overhead of course is about constant, so one could argue, that it doesn't really matter. In fact, in languages like Ruby it really doesn't compared to the benefits, but given how statically typed functional programming covers a lot of the ground unit tests are intended for, it feels like it's a constant overhead one can simply reduce without penalty. From this I'd deduce that unit tests are somewhat obsolete in this programming style. Of course such a claim can only lead to religious wars, so let me boil this down to a simple question: When you use such a programming style, to which extents do you use unit tests and why (what quality is it you hope to gain for your code)? Or the other way round: do you have criteria by which you can qualify a unit of statically typed functional code as covered by the static analyzer and hence needs no unit test coverage?

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• Naming your website longname.com vs shortcatchy.net vs shortcatchy.info

  - by jskye

  I'm designing a website that will basically be a social network for sharing information. I have the domain $$$$d.net and the same domain $$$$d.info where $$$$ is a word (that runs into the d) pertaining to the purpose of the site . The .com of this domain was already taken, but they've got nothing showing. They only have a not reached google error showing ie. dont seem to be trying to sell it either. I also have the long name of the site $$$$------&&&&&&&&&.com where the words $$$$ and &&&&&&&&& would contribute relevant seo to the site. In fact the word $$$$------ would also if a one letter spelling mistake is recognised at all by google, which i doubt but am unsure about. But as a brandname the $$$$------ word still works relevantly. Which do you think is a better choice to use? The short catchy name with the .info for relevance to information The .net which is more familiar than .info but slightly less relevant maybe. (But i think net as in network still works cos as i said it will be a social networking site). The long, .com domain which has more SEO plus a pun albeit on a spelling mistake. I know its kind of a subjective question and also hard to answer without knowing the name (which I've obfuscated because I'm only in initial design stage) but nevertheless im interested in what some of you guys think.

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• PASS: Budget Status

  - by Bill Graziano

  Our budget situation is a little different this year than in years past.  We were late getting an initial budget approved.  There are a number of different reasons this occurred.  We had different competing priorities and the budget got pushed down the list.  And that’s completely my fault for not making the budget a higher priority and getting it completed on time. That left us with initial budget approval in early August rather than prior to June 30th.  Even after that there were a number of small adjustments that needed to be made.  And one large glaring mistake that needed to be fixed.  We had a typo in the budget that made it through twelve versions of review.  In my defense I can only say that the cell was red so of course it had to be negative!  And that’s one more mistake I can add to my long and growing list of Mistakes I’ll Never Make Again. Last week we passed a revised budget (version 17) with this corrected.  This is the version we’re cleaning up and posting to the web site this week or next.

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• a c++ program for task scheduling [closed]

  - by scheduling

  This is the code which I made but I am not able to correct the mistake in the code. Please correct the mistake in my code. #include<unistd.h> #include<stdio.h> #include<stdlib.h> #include<time.h> #include<string.h> int main() { char *timetoken; char currtime[7]; char schedtime[7]; int i; struct tm *localtimeptr; strcpy(schedtime,"15:25:00"); while(6!=9) { time_t lt; sleep(1); lt = time(NULL); localtimeptr = localtime(<); timetoken=strtok(asctime(localtimeptr)," "); for(i=1;i<5;i++) timetoken=strtok('\0'," "); if(i==3) { strcpy(currtime,timetoken); } } printf("The current time is: %s\n",currtime); printf("We are waiting for: %s\n",schedtime); if(!strcmp(currtime,schedtime)) { printf("Time to do stuff \n"); system("C:\PROJECT X"); } getch(); return 0; }

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• What Counts for a DBA: Humility

  - by drsql

  In football (the American sort, naturally,) there are a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do hear their name called, it is usually because they made a mistake and the player that they were supposed to protect ended up flat on his back admiring the clouds in the sky instead of advancing towards the goal to scoring point. Even on the rare occasion their name is called for a good reason, it is usually because they were making up for a teammate who had made a mistake and they covered up for them. The role of offensive lineman is a very good analogy for the role of the admin DBA. As a DBA, you are called on to be barely visible and rarely heard, protecting the company data assets tenaciously, even though the enemies to our craft surround us on all sides:. Developers: Cries of ‘foul!’ often ensue when the DBA says that they want data integrity to be stringently enforced and that documentation is needed so they can support systems, mostly because every error occurrence in the enterprise will be initially blamed on the database and fall to the DBA to troubleshoot. Insisting too loudly may bring those cries of ‘foul’ that somewhat remind you of when your 2 year old daughter didn't want to go to bed. The result of this petulance is that the next "enemy" gets involved. Managers: The concerns that motivate DBAs to argue will not excite the kind of manager who gets his technical knowledge from a glossy magazine filled with buzzwords, charts, and pretty pictures. However, the other programmers in the organization will tickle the buzzword void with a stream of new-sounding ideas and technologies constantly, along with warnings that if we did care about data integrity and document things, the budget would explode! In contrast, the arguments for integrity of data and supportability tend to be about as exciting as watching grass grow, and far too many manager types seem to prefer to smoke it than watch it. Packaged Applications: The DBA is rarely given a chance to review a new application that is being demonstrated for the enterprise, and rarer still is the DBA that gets a veto of an application because the database it uses has clearly been created by an architect that won't read a data modeling book because he is already married. More often than not this leads to hours of work for the DBA trying to performance-tune a database with a menagerie of rules that must be followed to stay within the  application support agreement, such as no changing indexes on a third party schema even though there are 10 billion rows instead of the 10 thousand when the system was last optimized. Hardware Failures: Physical disks, networking devices, memory, and backup devices all come with a measure known as ‘mean time before failure’ and it is never listed in centuries or eons. More like years, and the term ‘mean’ indicates that half of the devices are expected to fail before that, which by my calendar means any hour of any day that it wants to fail it will. But the DBA sucks it up and does the task at hand with a humility that makes them nearly invisible to all but the most observant person in the organization. The best DBAs I know are so proactive in their relentless pursuit of perfection that they detect many of the bugs (which they seldom caused) in the system well before they become a problem. In the end the DBA gets noticed for one of same two reasons as the offensive lineman. You make a mistake, like dropping a critical production database that had never been backed up; or when a system crashes for any reason whatsoever and they are on the spot with troubleshooting and system restoration plans that have been well thought out, tested, and tested again. Not because there is any glory in it, but because it is what they do.   Note: The characteristics of the professions referred to in this blog are meant to be overstated stereotypes for humorous effect, and even some DBAs aren't quite this perfect. If you are reading this far and haven’t hand written a 10 page flaming comment about how you are a _______ and you aren’t like this, that is awesome. Not every situation applies to everyone, but if you have never worked with a bad packaged app, a magazine trained manager, programmers that aren’t team players, or hardware that occasionally failed, relax and go have a unicorn sandwich before you wake up.

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• Plagued by multithreaded bugs

  - by koncurrency

  On my new team that I manage, the majority of our code is platform, TCP socket, and http networking code. All C++. Most of it originated from other developers that have left the team. The current developers on the team are very smart, but mostly junior in terms of experience. Our biggest problem: multi-threaded concurrency bugs. Most of our class libraries are written to be asynchronous by use of some thread pool classes. Methods on the class libraries often enqueue long running taks onto the thread pool from one thread and then the callback methods of that class get invoked on a different thread. As a result, we have a lot of edge case bugs involving incorrect threading assumptions. This results in subtle bugs that go beyond just having critical sections and locks to guard against concurrency issues. What makes these problems even harder is that the attempts to fix are often incorrect. Some mistakes I've observed the team attempting (or within the legacy code itself) includes something like the following: Common mistake #1 - Fixing concurrency issue by just put a lock around the shared data, but forgetting about what happens when methods don't get called in an expected order. Here's a very simple example: void Foo::OnHttpRequestComplete(statuscode status) { m_pBar->DoSomethingImportant(status); } void Foo::Shutdown() { m_pBar->Cleanup(); delete m_pBar; m_pBar=nullptr; } So now we have a bug in which Shutdown could get called while OnHttpNetworkRequestComplete is occuring on. A tester finds the bug, captures the crash dump, and assigns the bug to a developer. He in turn fixes the bug like this. void Foo::OnHttpRequestComplete(statuscode status) { AutoLock lock(m_cs); m_pBar->DoSomethingImportant(status); } void Foo::Shutdown() { AutoLock lock(m_cs); m_pBar->Cleanup(); delete m_pBar; m_pBar=nullptr; } The above fix looks good until you realize there's an even more subtle edge case. What happens if Shutdown gets called before OnHttpRequestComplete gets called back? The real world examples my team has are even more complex, and the edge cases are even harder to spot during the code review process. Common Mistake #2 - fixing deadlock issues by blindly exiting the lock, wait for the other thread to finish, then re-enter the lock - but without handling the case that the object just got updated by the other thread! Common Mistake #3 - Even though the objects are reference counted, the shutdown sequence "releases" it's pointer. But forgets to wait for the thread that is still running to release it's instance. As such, components are shutdown cleanly, then spurious or late callbacks are invoked on an object in an state not expecting any more calls. There are other edge cases, but the bottom line is this: Multithreaded programming is just plain hard, even for smart people. As I catch these mistakes, I spend time discussing the errors with each developer on developing a more appropriate fix. But I suspect they are often confused on how to solve each issue because of the enormous amount of legacy code that the "right" fix will involve touching. We're going to be shipping soon, and I'm sure the patches we're applying will hold for the upcoming release. Afterwards, we're going to have some time to improve the code base and refactor where needed. We won't have time to just re-write everything. And the majority of the code isn't all that bad. But I'm looking to refactor code such that threading issues can be avoided altogether. One approach I am considering is this. For each significant platform feature, have a dedicated single thread where all events and network callbacks get marshalled onto. Similar to COM apartment threading in Windows with use of a message loop. Long blocking operations could still get dispatched to a work pool thread, but the completion callback is invoked on on the component's thread. Components could possibly even share the same thread. Then all the class libraries running inside the thread can be written under the assumption of a single threaded world. Before I go down that path, I am also very interested if there are other standard techniques or design patterns for dealing with multithreaded issues. And I have to emphasize - something beyond a book that describes the basics of mutexes and semaphores. What do you think? I am also interested in any other approaches to take towards a refactoring process. Including any of the following: Literature or papers on design patterns around threads. Something beyond an introduction to mutexes and semaphores. We don't need massive parallelism either, just ways to design an object model so as to handle asynchronous events from other threads correctly. Ways to diagram the threading of various components, so that it will be easy to study and evolve solutions for. (That is, a UML equivalent for discussing threads across objects and classes) Educating your development team on the issues with multithreaded code. What would you do?

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• Compressibility Example

  - by user285726

  From my algorithms textbook: The annual county horse race is bringing in three thoroughbreds who have never competed against one another. Excited, you study their past 200 races and summarize these as prob- ability distributions over four outcomes: first (“first place”), second, third, and other. Outcome Aurora Whirlwind Phantasm 0.15 0.30 0.20 first 0.10 0.05 0.30 second 0.70 0.25 0.30 third 0.05 0.40 0.20 other Which horse is the most predictable? One quantitative approach to this question is to look at compressibility. Write down the history of each horse as a string of 200 values (first, second, third, other). The total number of bits needed to encode these track- record strings can then be computed using Huffman’s algorithm. This works out to 290 bits for Aurora, 380 for Whirlwind, and 420 for Phantasm (check it!). Aurora has the shortest encoding and is therefore in a strong sense the most predictable. How did they get 420 for Phantasm? I keep getting 400 bytes, as so: Combine first, other = 0.4, combine second, third = 0.6. End up with 2 bits encoding each position. Is there something I've misunderstood about the Huffman encoding algorithm? Textbook available here: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html (page 156).

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• When does an ARM7 processor increase its PC register?

  - by Summer_More_More_Tea

  Hi everyone: I'm thinking about this question for a time: when does an ARM7(with 3 pipelines) processor increase its PC register. I originally thought that after an instruction has been executed, the processor first check is there any exception in the last execution, then increase PC by 2 or 4 depending on current state. If an exception occur, ARM7 will change its running mode, store PC in the LR of current mode and begin to process current exception without modifying the PC register. But it make no sense when analyzing returning instructions. I can not work out why PC will be assigned LR when returning from an undefined-instruction-exception while LR-4 from prefetch-abort-exception, don't both of these exceptions happened at the decoding state? What's more, according to my textbook, PC will always be assigned LR-4 when returning from prefetch-abort-exception no matter what state the processor is(ARM or Thumb) before exception occurs. However, I think PC should be assigned LR-2 if the original state is Thumb, since a Thumb-instruction is 2 bytes long instead of 4 bytes which an ARM-instruction holds, and we just wanna roll-back an instruction in current state. Is there any flaws in my reasoning or something wrong with the textbook. Seems a long question. I really hope anyone can help me get the right answer. Thanks in advance.

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• How can I superimpose modified loess lines on a ggplot2 qplot?

  - by briandk

  Background Right now, I'm creating a multiple-predictor linear model and generating diagnostic plots to assess regression assumptions. (It's for a multiple regression analysis stats class that I'm loving at the moment :-) My textbook (Cohen, Cohen, West, and Aiken 2003) recommends plotting each predictor against the residuals to make sure that: The residuals don't systematically covary with the predictor The residuals are homoscedastic with respect to each predictor in the model On point (2), my textbook has this to say: Some statistical packages allow the analyst to plot lowess fit lines at the mean of the residuals (0-line), 1 standard deviation above the mean, and 1 standard deviation below the mean of the residuals....In the present case {their example}, the two lines {mean + 1sd and mean - 1sd} remain roughly parallel to the lowess {0} line, consistent with the interpretation that the variance of the residuals does not change as a function of X. (p. 131) How can I modify loess lines? I know how to generate a scatterplot with a "0-line,": # First, I'll make a simple linear model and get its diagnostic stats library(ggplot2) data(cars) mod <- fortify(lm(speed ~ dist, data = cars)) attach(mod) str(mod) # Now I want to make sure the residuals are homoscedastic qplot (x = dist, y = .resid, data = mod) + geom_smooth(se = FALSE) # "se = FALSE" Removes the standard error bands But does anyone know how I can use ggplot2 and qplot to generate plots where the 0-line, "mean + 1sd" AND "mean - 1sd" lines would be superimposed? Is that a weird/complex question to be asking?

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• How Expedia Made My New Bride Cry

  - by Lance Robinson

  Tweet this? Email Expedia and ask them to give me and my new wife our honeymoon? When Expedia followed up their failure with our honeymoon trip with a complete and total lack of acknowledgement of any responsibility for the problem and endless loops of explaining the issue over and over again - I swore that they would make it right. When they brought my new bride to tears, I got an immediate and endless supply of motivation. I hope you will help me make them make it right by posting our story on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, on Expedia itself, and when talking to your friends in person about their own travel plans.   If you are considering using them now for an important trip - reconsider. Short summary: We arrived early for a flight - but Expedia had made a mistake with the data they supplied to JetBlue and Emirates, which resulted in us not being able to check in (one leg of our trip was missing)!  At the time of this post, three people (myself, my wife, and an exceptionally patient JetBlue employee named Mary) each spent hours on the phone with Expedia.  I myself spent right at 3 hours (according to iPhone records), Lauren spent an hour and a half or so, and poor Mary was probably on the phone for a good 3.5 hours.  This is after 5 hours total at the airport.  If you add up our phone time, that is nearly 8 hours of phone time over a 5 hour period with little or no help, stall tactics (?), run-around, denial, shifting of blame, and holding. Details below (times are approximate): First, my wife and I were married yesterday - June 18th, the 3 year anniversary of our first date. She is awesome. She is the nicest person I have ever known, a ton of fun, absolutely beautiful in every way. Ok enough mushy - here are the dirty details. 2:30 AM - Early Check-in Attempt - we attempted to check-in for our flight online. Some sort of technology error on website, instructed to checkin at desk. 4:30 AM - Arrive at airport. Try to check-in at kiosk, get the same error. We got to the JetBlue desk at RDU International Airport, where Mary helped us. Mary discovered that the Expedia provided itinerary does not match the Expedia provided tickets. We are informed that when that happens American, JetBlue, and others that use the same software cannot check you in for the flight because. Why? Because the itinerary was missing a leg of our flight! Basically we were not shown in the system as definitely being able to make it home. Mary called Expedia and was put on hold by their automated system. 4:55 AM - Mary, myself, and my brand new bride all waited for about 25 minutes when finally I decided I would make a call myself on my iPhone while Mary was on the airport phone. In their automated system, I chose "make a new reservation", thinking they might answer a little more quickly than "customer service". Not surprisingly I was connected to an Expedia person within 1 minute. They informed me that they would have to forward me to a customer service specialist. I explained to them that we were already on hold for that and had been for nearly half an hour, that we were going on our honeymoon and that our flight would be leaving soon - could they please help us. "Yes, I will help you". I hand the phone to JetBlue Mary who explains the situation 3 or 4 times. Obviously I couldn't hear both ends of the conversation at this point, but the Expedia person explained what the problem was by stating exactly what Mary had just spent 15 minutes explaining. Mary calmly confirms that this is the problem, and asks Expedia to re-issue the itinerary. Expedia tells Mary that they'll have to transfer her to customer service. Mary asks for someone specific so that we get an answer this time, and goes on hold. Mary get's connected, explains the situation, and then Mary's connection gets terminated. 5:10 AM - Mary calls back to the Expedia automated system again, and we wait for about 5 minutes on hold this time before I pick up my iPhone and call Expedia again myself. Again I go to sales, a person picks up the phone in less than a minute. I explain the situation and let them know that we are now very close to missing our flight for our honeymoon, could they please help us. "Yes, I will help you". Again I give the phone to Mary who provides them with a call back number in case we get disconnected again and explains the situation again. More back and forth with Expedia doing nothing but repeating the same questions, Mary answering the questions with the same information she provided in the original explanation, and Expedia simply restating the problem. Mary again asks them to re-issue the itinerary, and explains that doing so will fix the problem. Expedia again repeats the problem instead of fixing it, and Mary's connection gets terminated. 5:20 AM - Mary again calls back to Expedia. My beautiful bride also calls on her own phone. At this point she is struggling to hold back her tears, stumbling through an explanation of all that has happened and that we are about to miss our flight. Please help us. "Yes, I will help". My beautiful bride's connection gets terminated. Ok, maybe this disconnection isn't an accident. We've now been disconnected 3 times on two different phones. 5:45 AM - I walk away and pleadingly beg a person to help me. They "escalate" the issue to "Rosy" (sp?) at Expedia. I go through the whole song and dance again with Rosy, who gives me the same treatment Mary was given. Rosy blames JetBlue for now having the correct data. Meanwhile Mary is on the phone with Emirates Air (the airline for the second leg of our trip), who agrees with JetBlue that Expedia's data isn't up to date. We are informed by two airport employees that issues like this with Expedia are not uncommon, and that the fix is simple. On the phone iwth Rosy, I ask her to re-issue the itinerary because we are about to miss our flight. She again explains the problem to me. At this point, I am standing at the window, pleading with Rosy to help us get to our honeymoon, watching our airplane. Then our airplane leaves without us. 6:03 AM - At this point we have missed our flight. Re-issuing the itinerary is no longer a solution. I ask Rosy to start from the beginning and work us up a new trip. She says that she cannot do that. She says that she needs to talk to JetBlue and Emirates and find out why we cannot check-in for our flight. I remind Rosy that our flight has already left - I just watched it taxi away - it no longer matters why (not to mention the fact that we already knew why, and have known why since 4:30 AM), and have known the solution since 4:30 AM. Rosy, can you please book a new trip? Yes, but it will cost $400. Excuse me? Now you can, but it will cost ME to fix your mistake? Rosy says that she can escalate the situation to her supervisor but that will take 1.5 hours. 6:15 AM - I told Rosy that if they had re-issued the itinerary as JetBlue asked (at 4:30 AM), my new wife and I might be on the airplane now instead of dealing with this on the phone and missing the beginning (and how much more?) of our honeymoon. Rosy said that it was not necessary to re-issue the itinerary. Out of curiosity, i asked Rosy if there was some financial burden on them to re-issue the itinerary. "No", said Rosy. I asked her if it was a large time burden on Expedia to re-issue the itinerary. "No", said Rosy. I directly asked Rosy: Why wouldn't Expedia have re-issued the itinerary when JetBlue asked? No answer. I asked Rosy: If you had re-issued the itinerary at 4:30, isn't it possible that I would be on that flight right now? She actually surprised me by answering "Yes" to that question. So I pointed out that it followed that Expedia was responsible for the fact that we missed out flight, and she immediately went into more about how the problem was with JetBlue - but now it was ALSO an Emirates Air problem as well. I tell Rosy to go ahead and escalate the issue again, and please call me back in that 1.5 hours (which how is about 1 hour and 10 minutes away). 6:30 AM - I start tweeting my frustration with iPhone. It's now pretty much impossible for us to make it to The Maldives by 3pm, which is the time at which we would need to arrive in order to be allowed service to the actual island where we are staying. Expedia has now given me the run-around for 2 hours, caused me to miss my flight, and worst of all caused my amazing new wife Lauren to miss our honeymoon. You think I was mad? No. Furious. Its ok to make mistakes - but to refuse to fix them and to ruin our honeymoon? No, not ok, Expedia. I swore right then that Expedia would make this right. 7:45 AM - JetBlue mary is still talking her tail off to other people in JetBlue and Emirates Air. Mary works it out so that if Expedia simply books a new trip, JetBlue and Emirates will both waive all the fees. Now we just have to convince Expedia to fix their mistake and get us on our way! Around this time Expedia Rosy calls me back! I inform her of the excellent work of JetBlue Mary - that JetBlue and Emirates both will waive the fees so Expedia can fix their mistake and get us going on our way. She says that she sees documentation of this in her system and that she needs to put me on hold "for 1 to 10 minutes" to talk to Emirates Air (why I'm not exactly sure). I say ok. 8:45 AM - After an hour on hold, Rosy comes on the line and asks me to hold more. I ask her to call me back. 9:35 AM - I put down the iPhone Twitter app and picks up the laptop. You think I made some noise with my iPhone? Heh 11:25 AM - Expedia follows me and sends a canned "We're sorry, DM us the details".  If you look at their Twitter feed, 16 out of the most recent 20 tweets are exactly the same canned response.  The other 4?  Ads.  Um - #MultiFAIL? To Expedia:  You now have had (as explained above) 8 hours of 3 different people explaining our situation, you know the email address of our Expedia account, you know my web blog, you know my Twitter address, you know my phone number.  You also know how upset you have made both me and my new bride by treating us with such a ... non caring, scripted, uncooperative, argumentative, and possibly even deceitful manner.  In the wise words of the great Kenan Thompson of SNL: "FIX IT!".  And no, I'm NOT going away until you make this right. Period. 11:45 AM - Expedia corporate office called.  The woman I spoke to was very nice and apologetic.  She listened to me tell the story again, she says she understands the problem and she is going to work to resolve it.  I don't have any details on what exactly that resolution might me, she said she will call me back in 20 minutes.  She found out about the problem via Twitter.  Thank you Twitter, and all of you who helped.  Hopefully social media will win my wife and I our honeymoon, and hopefully Expedia will encourage their customer service teams treat their customers properly. 12:22 PM - Spoke to Fran again from Expedia corporate office.  She has a flight for us tonight.  She is booking it now.  We will arrive at our honeymoon destination of beautiful Veligandu Island Resort only 1 day late.  She cannot confirm today, but she expects that Expedia will pay for the lost honeymoon night.  Thank you everyone for your help.  I will reflect more on this whole situation and confirm its resolution after our flight is 100% confirmed.  For now, I'm going to take a breather and go kiss my wonderful wife! 1:50 PM - Have not yet received the promised phone call.  We did receive an email with a new itinerary for a flight but the booking is not for specific seats, so there is no guarantee that my wife and I will be able to sit together.  With the original booking I carefully selected our seats for every segment of our trip.  I decided to call into the phone number that Fran from the Expedia corporate office gave me.  Its automated voice system identified itself as "Tier 3 Support".  I am currently still on hold with them, I have not gotten through to a human yet. 1:55 PM - Fran from Expedia called me back.  She confirmed us as booked.  She called the airlines to confirm.  Unfortunately, Expedia was unwilling or unable to allow us any type of seat selection.  It is possible that i won't get to sit next to the woman I married less than a day ago on our 40 total hours of flight time (there and back).  In addition, our seats could be the worst seats on the planes, with no reclining seat back or right next to the restroom.  Despite this fact (which in my opinion is huge), the horrible inconvenience, the hours at the airport, and the negative Internet publicity that Expedia is receiving, Expedia declined to offer us any kind of upgrade or to mark us as SFU (suitable for upgrade).  Since they didn't offer - I asked, and was rejected.  I am grateful to finally be heading in the right direction, but not only did Expedia horribly botch this job from the very beginning, they followed that botch job with near zero customer service, followed by a verbally apologetic but otherwise half-hearted resolution.  If this works out favorably for us, great.  If not - I'm not done making noise, Expedia.  You owe us, and I expect you to make it right.  You haven't quite done that yet. Thanks - Thank you to Twitter.  Thanks to all those who sympathize with us and helped us get the attention of Expedia, since three people (one of them an airline employee) using Expedia's normal channels of communication for many hours didn't help.  Thanks especially to my PowerShell and Sharepoint friends, my local friends, and those connectors who encouraged me and spread my story. 5:15 PM - Love Wins - After all this, Lauren and I are exhausted.  We both took a short nap, and when we woke up we talked about the last 24 hours.  It was a big, amazing, story-filled 24 hours.  I said that Expedia won, but Lauren said no.  She pointed out how lucky we are.  We are in love and married.  We have wonderful family and friends.  We are both hard-working successful people who love what they do.  We get to go to an amazing exotic destination for our honeymoon like Veligandu in The Maldives...  That's a lot of good.  Expedia didn't win.  This was (is) a big loss for Expedia.  It is a public blemish for all to see.  But Lauren and I did win, big time.  Expedia may not have made things right - but things are right for us.  Post in progress... I will relay any further comments (or lack of) from Expedia soon, as well as an update on confirmation of their repayment of our lost resort room rates.  I'll also post a picture of us on our honeymoon as soon as I can!

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• When running Adobe Acrobat's OCR on a PDF document, which downsampling produces a higher quality: 600 dpi or 72 dpi?

  - by Ricardo Altamirano

  I have a large PDF document that consists of scanned pages of a textbook. I want to run Adobe Acrobat 9's text recognition function on it, but I'm presented with this menu when I do. I'm confused by the options in the highlighted menu. What option will produce the highest quality/most readable text? I thought 600 dpi implies a higher quality image than 72 dpi, so I'm confused by "High (72 dpi)" and "Lowest (600 dpi)."

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• MVC2 Ajax Form does unwanted page refresh

  - by Kay

  Hi, I am pretty new to MVC. I have my first Ajax Form here: <div id="test"></div> <div id="MainChatMenu"> <% using (Ajax.BeginForm("SendMessage", "MainChat", new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId="test"})) { %> <input id="chatMessageText" type="text" maxlength="200" /> <input type="submit" value="Go"/> <% } %> Now, if I click the submit button, the page is reloading, goint to mysite/controller/action. I thought that the default behaviour of the Ajax.BeginForm was exactly not to do that? Where's my newbie mistake? My Controller is called correctly, but data passing also doesn't work. Probably because of the same mistake? Here's the code: public class MainChatController : Controller { [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] public EmptyResult SendMessage(FormCollection formValues) { return new EmptyResult(); } }

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• difference between a lexical, morphological and semantic mistakes?

  - by AnH

  Hi there, I just want to make sure that I understood the differences between a lexical, morphological and semantic mistakes correctly. If am not mistaken semantic mistakes deal with problems concerning meanings, for example writing a sentence that is correct grammar wise but doesn't make any sense is a semantic mistake, morphological mistakes deals more or less on how the word should look like, for example childrenS is a morphological mistake, so that leaves lexical mistakes, what are those exactly?? can someone sum up the differences between those 3 mistakes please so that I may know for sure that I got them down correctly? Thank you in advance

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• Is it acceptable to email an Interviewer after the interview?

  - by djhworld

  Yesterday I took part in an interview for a Java position in a company and one of the questions was Does Java pass by reference or by value? In the heat of the moment I (mistakenly) confidently said it passed by reference, possibly because I come from a C/C++ background. Unfortunately after the interview I'd realised my terrible mistake to my horror. So my question is this, is it acceptable for me to wait a few days and drop a quick email to recognise my mistake? Or should I just let this one lie?

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• Common Programming mistakes for WPF developers to avoid?

  - by Kishore Kumar

  what are the common mistake can be avoided by a WPF developer?

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• question on loop in java

  - by davit-datuashvili

  can anybody tell me what is mistake here? while ((char t==(char) System.in.read())!='0') ?

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• Confessions of your worst WTF moment

  - by DrFloyd5

  What is your worst WTF moment, and what can we learn from that mistake?

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• can't save form content to database, help plsss!!

  - by dana

  i'm trying to save 100 caracters form user in a 'microblog' minimal application. my code seems to not have any mystakes, but doesn't work. the mistake is in views.py, i can't save the foreign key to user table models.py looks like this: class NewManager(models.Manager): def create_post(self, post, username): new = self.model(post=post, created_by=username) new.save() return new class New(models.Model): post = models.CharField(max_length=120) date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) created_by = models.ForeignKey(User, blank=True) objects = NewManager() class NewForm(ModelForm): class Meta: model = New fields = ['post'] # widgets = {'post': Textarea(attrs={'cols': 80, 'rows': 20}) def save_new(request): if request.method == 'POST': created_by = User.objects.get(created_by = user) date = request.POST.get('date', '') post = request.POST.get('post', '') new_obj = New(post=post, date=date, created_by=created_by) new_obj.save() return HttpResponseRedirect('/') else: form = NewForm() return render_to_response('news/new_form.html', {'form': form},context_instance=RequestContext(request)) i didn't mention imports here - they're done right, anyway. my mistake is in views.py, when i try to save it says: local variable 'created_by' referenced before assignment it i put created_py as a parameter, the save needs more parameters... it is really weird help please!!

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• Python design mistakes

  - by Andrea

  A while ago, when I was learning Javascript, I studied Javascript: the good parts, and I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the bad and the ugly parts. Of course, I did not agree with everything, as summing up the design defects of a programming language is to a certain extent subjective - although, for instance, I guess everyone would agree that the keyword with was a mistake in Javascript. Nevertheless, I find it useful to read such reviews: even if one does not agree, there is a lot to learn. Is there a blog entry or some book describing design mistakes for Python? For instance I guess some people would count the lack of tail call optimization a mistake; there may be other issues (or non-issues) which are worth learning about.

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• rake test fails

  - by Pavel K.

  i have a model (simplified) class Myfile < ActiveRecord::Base validates_attachment_size :body, :less_than => AdminOptions.first.max_file_size.megabytes end max_file_size is defined in AdminOptions fixture, but when i try to run "rake test", i get: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/whiny_nil.rb:52:in `method_missing': undefined method `max_file_size' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError) from /myapp/app/models/myfile.rb:1 if i run ruby test/unit/myfile_test.rb i get same mistake. if i run: RAILS_ENV=test rake db:load:fixtures ruby test/unit/myfile_test.rb tests execute properly. if i try to RAILS_ENV=test rake db:load:fixtures rake test it fails with same mistake. does anyone know how to fix that?

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• haskell. words into binary numbers

  - by Katja

  I need to convert words into binary numbers. With a bit help of yours I got this blCo::String -> Integer blCo x = num2bin(lett2num x) blCo (x:xs) | x:xs = num2bin(lett2num x):blCo xs num2lett :: Int -> Char num2lett n | (n <= ord 'A') && (n <= ord 'Z') = chr(ord 'A'+ n - 1) | (n <= ord 'a') && (n <= ord 'Z') = chr(ord 'A'+ n - 1) num2bin :: Integer -> String num2bin n | n >= 0 = concatMap show (reverse ( n2b n)) | otherwise = error "num2bin: negative number" where n2b 0 = [] n2b n = n `mod` 2 : n2b (n `div` 2) he tells me a mistake.I dont undertsand it mistake: Couldn't match expected type `Char' against inferred type `String' In the first argument of `lett2num', namely `x' In the first argument of `num2bin', namely `(lett2num x)' In the expression: num2bin (lett2num x)

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• An XEvent a Day (18 of 31) – A Look at Backup Internals and How to Track Backup and Restore Throughput (Part 2)

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  In yesterday’s blog post A Look at Backup Internals and How to Track Backup and Restore Throughput (Part 1) , we looked at what happens when we Backup a database in SQL Server.  Today, we are going to use the information we captured to perform some analysis of the Backup information in an attempt to find ways to decrease the time it takes to backup a database.  When I began reviewing the data from the Backup in yesterdays post, I realized that I had made a mistake in the process and left...(read more)

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• Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs &amp; Regular Expressions

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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• Google CDN - using http vs https

  - by HorusKol

  All the examples of accessing google's CDN use https:// in the URL (including on Google itself) - but this has caused a problem when testing in Safari (certificate problem and also different domain). <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script> I have switched to calling it over http instead, but just wondering if this is a mistake or security issue?

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