Well, it was easy to find the 'write in journal' link. Or is that from my slashbox? I dunno. I don't care. Second, it works better for me on IE 8.0 than it does on FF 3.6.

No FF compatibility, less readability than 2.0, inability to save preferences? Lame.

No wonder the number of comments to articles is down. Substantially by my seat of the pants estimation. Eighteen comments on a Android vs. Symbian troll article after 35 minutes? Anti-Apple troll article has 67 comments after three hours?!

They either wanted to drive down page views, will roll this back, or Netcraft will soon confirm it.

Here are six files for ya, showing a problem in 3 different scripting languages. What will they do?
--------- test1.php:
<?php
require 'test2.php';

define('SOMECONSTANT','hello world');

function foo() {
                return SOMECONSTANT;
}

echo foo(); echo "\n";

--------- test2.php:
<?php
require_once 'test1.php';

echo foo(); echo "\n";
--------- test1.py:
#!/usr/bin/python
import test2

SOMECONSTANT='hello world'

def foo():
                return SOMECONSTANT

print foo()
--------- test2.py:
#!/usr/bin/python
import test1

print test1.foo()
--------- test1.rb:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'test2.rb'

SOMECONSTANT='hello world'

def foo
                SOMECONSTANT
end

puts foo()
--------- test2.rb:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'test1.rb'

puts foo()
---------
Ok, scriptfiends, predict the output of these three commands:
php -q -f test1.php
python test1.py
ruby test1.rb

and then do some pasting and try it out. Match your predictions?

The PHP one bit me pretty hard today.

I have a password written on a post-it note underneath my keyboard. Decades went by without this ever having happened, but now I have one of these. [rationalize]And I'm keeping the post-it, because it'll probably be months or years before I ever need that password again, so there's just no chance I'll be able to remember it (it's actually a pretty well-made password).[/rationalize] OTOH, I suppose I could just throw it away and then the next time I need it, ask someone for it again. [truth]But no, it amuses me that I've entered the ranks of people with passwords on post-its at their desks, so I'm keeping it, for that reason if nothing else.[/truth]

'sup?

Yo, Tom Hudson, I'm real happy for you and I'ma let you finish, but Breitbart is the greatest troll of all TIME!

I'll never empty my list of freaks. First of all because Pudge is on there, and for him to un-freak me would require him to change his mind.

But of far more interest than that is my former brother-in-law. I hadn't forgotten that he showed up here when his crazy assed sister left me. Hadn't thought about him in a while. Was looking around some pages and saw his name on my freaks list. Then I remembered he was 'an hero'. And I laughed. I hope it hurt. It probably did, because for it to have been painless it would require him to do something right for once in his miserable life.

Cowardly chickenshit.

Everybody still having fun with APK? I notice that damned near every post I made last week has been responded to, questioning my educational bona fides. The hysterical thing is that some AC responded to his inquiries. Now, to about half of those, he responded, accusing me of being the AC. The really hysterical thing: I haven't visited /. since very early on Wednesday morning.

So APK spent a day or two running around and accusing people of sockpuppetry who had forgotten his existence hours before APK posted. Classic. How long until he goes all Hans Reiser?

FAIL! :(

Why the hell do I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of my journal page to find a button to post new content? But guess what? I have to do it fast, because the oh so helpful AJAX auto loads the next page of entries if I scroll down, so that means I have to scroll down and quick click the post button or else I have to keep scrolling down. WTF were they thinking?

Have they never seen any other social media site? That sort of basic functionality needs to be front and center at the top so you can... you know.... use the site.

I've returned to occasional /. use due to no longer working from home, and dang my user ID is low compared to a lot of the account comments I'm seeing. Did /. experience a mass exit recently and are only newbies and fresh troll accounts posting?

Anyone have any preferences for a b/g/n router? I'd like one so that I can put my nice, modern Apple stuff on the N side of things, and the shitty, legacy crap over on the b/g side. Already have an older Time Capsule that isn't full, so I'm not going that route. (Oh, and I'll probably not give my brother access to the N, cause he pisses me off too much).

Thinking to bridge the connection from that to the Time Capsule, and let the Time Capsule handle the rest of it.

I don't care about off the wall firmware. That doesn't interest me in any way, shape or form. Unless I have to deal with that kind of malarkey to get either my Time Capsule or my tons of BT stuff to work nicely.

The adjective form of Jupiter is Jovian. Does Saturn have an adjective form?

Is it safe to use the pattern that arises from the planets I know for the ones I don't? That would be:

• Mercury - Mercurial
• Venus - Venusian
• Terra - Terran
• Mars - Martian
• Jupiter - Jovian
• Saturn - Saturnian?
• Uranus - Uranian?
• Neptune - Neptunian?

Well, after no response for many months, I emailed the Red Cross again. To my surprise and joy, I got a response on the same day! Here are some clarifications I got from them.

First, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not one of the African countries which are high risk for Group O. The "Congo" they are concerned about is the Republic of the Congo (notice the lack of the "Democratic" prefix). So, suddenly I am able to donate blood.

They do anticipate having a screening test that can detect 100% of group O carrying blood as soon as the FDA approves one that matches their screening methods. The only currently FDA approved group O antibody test does not use the right kind of technology for their screening process.

Ever build an apparatus to study subatomic particles out of stuff sitting around your house? Well my friend did and this video is the result of our replication (sort of) of the Wilson Cloud Chamber. We used the updated diffusion cloud chamber design from Andy Folannd with a bit of info from Cosmicrays.org.

The apparatus is a bit finicky and prone to getting too cold, but it worked. We observed several dozen alpha particles zipping through the room interacting with the alcohol vapor. Unfortunately, no muon decays or scattering was observed. It would be interesting to try this again with a different chamber shape / height, a different temperature differential (measuring it next time), and possibly with a magnet to observe the magnetic field affects of the paths on the charged particles.

Observation notes: It greatly aided the observation to have the live video feed piped via s-video to nearby TV, so more than one person could observe the interactions. Only close proximity ~12" makes in person observation possible due to breath condensation and freezing on the cold chamber wall.

We are looking for other experiments that can be performed at home with out significant investments / highly specialized materials that exhibit the ordinarily invisible elements of our universe that also show well on video (or can be made to so so with appropriate pre-planning). Any suggestions?

Notes on the video: shot with GL2 on Matthews tripod at F1.8, 1/60th, WB to sunlight (led light source ~5400K), 0dB gain (except opening scene which had some gain) and MF locked. No specialized color / exposure profile used, no post WB. Opening text plain with background fractal keyframed movement. "Highlight" effect applied to duplicate additive track placed above source with exclusion mask applied to select sections of the video. Video trimmed to exclude empty segments. Cinescore Soundtrack. Rendered as 3Mbps Peak VBR single pass WMV.

I need to help someone get a crash course in QA work on an OSS stack, as opposed to their previous few years of QA work on a Win32 stack. We will be installing Ubuntu tomorrow for a quick and easy workstation. Then we need to find or write a series of tasks to learn the skills to help said person get a crash course in working in / with the LAMP OSS environment.

Again, not a SW dev, or admin, just a QA guy, so tasks, reference material, etc need not be super low level. I have the perl trifecta (learning Perl, Perl Cookbook, and Reg Ex with Perl), but everything else I have relating to Linux is +5yrs old.