Short answer: you're fine.

Long answer is really long and my apologies up front for a post that will meander along to the answer. The reason why is because it's important to clarify the principle of deleting files as there are so many myths surrounding file deletion. Everyones got some ridiculous story about a nephew who recovered data from an exploded floppy disk or that they've heard of someone who recovered data from an 2 pass overwrite. On top of this is all the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 9:02 PM on August 26, 2008

@kalessin: Yes, we're supposed to believe that there's secret government technology whose abstract scientific basis (with bearings on many fields of science) hasn't been talked about or independently rediscovered for over a decade now, and that the way that we defend against this secret technology is through 60 pass overwrites rather than 1, 2 or 3 pass overwrites.

Is that a fair assessment?

Overwriting is harmless so by all means do as many... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:21 PM on August 27, 2008

By the way I've met Guttman a few times (we're both kiwi's and computer nerds so we run in similar circles) and I didn't mean to suggest that money or products or any bias affected his research. Sorry if it came off that way.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 4:36 PM on August 27, 2008

Charging thousands for a bottle of wine is an old scam. Great wine can cost that much and so they say that's what you drank. They're professional scammers and they will almost certainly have the receipts and your signature.

That said, they are scammers so at least make it difficult for them and drag out the process. You might just win or retrieve some money by querying every part of it.
I don't care if you want to flame me for it.You're an idiot. Take cash... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:43 PM on August 27, 2008

Sure just pop down to the markets at Hoi An. They had every colour of corduroy there.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 9:57 PM on August 23, 2008

You lack evidence so start collecting it. If you have any meetings with them be sure to (secretly) tape record them incase they say anything incriminating.

One morning I woke up to find the neighbour (a friend of the landlord) had erected scaffolding in our backyard and begun construction on a house. We complained about it and the next morning we got an eviction notice saying that for unrelated reasons he wanted to move in and give us 40 days notice. We had a meeting... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 6:04 PM on August 21, 2008

(And by here, I mean my house and very tiny baking empire)

Tiny Baking Empire.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 8:21 PM on August 20, 2008 marked best answer

Well HD is at least 1280x720 which most digital picture frames won't cope with. Most picture frames are less dense than desktop monitors, so -- for 1280x720 -- you'd be looking at around 16" in size.

I've done this on the cheap before with a regular computer monitor and a portable video player (eg, Creative Vision Zen, Ipod Video) concealed at the back. It was quite cheap and the parts useful later.

monitors that can be good looking and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 8:18 PM on August 20, 2008

I'm curious... they called it korean "accupressure treatment for stress" but what was it really? Was it just massage or physiotherapy? Do you know that this accupressure treatment is better than physiotherapy or sports medicine?
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 6:21 PM on August 18, 2008

Python or Ruby.

If you choose Python you could try Panda3D (for 3D, obviously) or PyGame (or 2D). They're both simple game engines with a lot of community and support surrounding them.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 10:24 PM on August 17, 2008

You can't reasonably stop them but you can use them to rally their opponents. So yeah, lia's idea.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 5:59 PM on August 14, 2008

CSS can't do that. You'll need JavaScript or server-side scripting.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 4:29 PM on August 14, 2008

So that's a 13-14 year old? Well in a positive way tell him that most people have several girlfriends/boyfriends in their teens (the implication being that teen relationships rarely last for life -- because it can sometimes feel that way to a kid). That could take the pressure off a bit. Perhaps you could talk about yourself looking back at your teen years and how you were (presumably) experimenting with relationships in order to see what you like. Be careful not to express the idea in a way... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 4:27 PM on August 14, 2008

I thought that what people called God, was actually some form of my subconsious.
Well try not to get a big head about that, pal.

So when you call on god you will receive? Well, it sounds like there could be a test to make sure you're right. Be sure to document everything and get some skeptical science-minded friends to help you... you'll have to pay them for their time of course (I suggest $1000/hr) because doing anything else would be more interesting than... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 2:39 PM on August 11, 2008

if it makes people happy and motivates them to behave in such a way that they achieve their desired goals and it doesn't hurt anyone,
Well that's a tall order. Against that is the idea that encouraging people to cope in supernatural ways (rather than in natural ways) means they respond to problems by praying/wishing rather than by dealing with problems through getting help from the community, saving money, and taking action. You can easily imagine scenarios where responding to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 4:54 PM on August 11, 2008

If the idea is that the supernatural world affects one person more than others then this would be testable.

Sorry, just to recant and clarify: this would prove that something was happening outside of our understanding, but it wouldn't prove a deity.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 5:34 PM on August 11, 2008

I'm very familiar with the GPL and this is not a GPL violation in any sense.

The GPL is based on these four freedoms,
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:54 PM on August 7, 2008

Avoid regexs like the plague... they're the most primitive and brittle way of handling HTML. They appear simple and small and elegant but then you try and do something simple like pulling out a table from a string that looks like "<table><tr><td> <table><tr><td> </td></tr></table> </td></tr></table>" and you end up with malformed mess of "<table><tr><td> <table><tr><td>... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 4:05 PM on August 6, 2008 marked best answer

Yes, as letourneau says make assertions about the document as you would for in any programming language that takes user input. If something should be a number then assert that, and the extent to which you should assert things varies from document to document (judging how brittle to make your code will take some thought). If you're snapping off small parts of the document then you can assert nodes as integers, strings, etc. If you're wanting to assert large complex documents then it's about... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 5:40 PM on August 6, 2008

is there any way to prevent unauthorized copying and selling besides a stern warning?
You can make it difficult for non-technical users until the hacker community make point-n-click software to break as it now is with DVDs, Blu-Ray/HD-DVD ripping, e-Book/PDF ripping (Dmitri Sklyarov) etc. Highly technical users will be able to bypass your protection very quickly.

This is easily provable... name a single bit of software or media that isn't available on a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:05 PM on August 6, 2008 marked best answer

Er... just to make it clear by saying "doing what Rifftrax does" I mean have a donation box on your website for people who get your PDFs illegally and link to that in all your PDFs.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 4:11 PM on August 6, 2008

It's important to understand the difference between parsers that understand markup and those that don't. This would be based on looking at a document like <a href="http://a.com">http://b.com<a/> and seeing whether you want A) http://a.com AND/OR http://b.com or B) both.

A) If you only want http://a.com OR http://a.com then you'll need a markup based parser, either in HTML or XHTML. Use JavaScript and a browser, or Beautiful Soup, or HTML Tidy and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 8:33 PM on July 30, 2008

[@I][:+:][@I]'s answer is my favourite.. nice and robust.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 5:22 PM on July 31, 2008

It might be a bad line that occassionally gets too much noise and breaks off and so would have more chances to break off during long faxes. Try turning down the speed of the fax... to 9600bps... if that doesn't work then 7200bps... 4800bps...
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:14 PM on July 28, 2008

If the battery life is a concern you could get a dedicated portable DVD player, because many of them have USB and can play MPEG1/2. I imagine that because they're dedicated devices you'd get better battery life too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 4:21 PM on May 28, 2008

By "geared more toward writing documentation" does this mean that you'd ideally like a word processor?

Something that will understand arbitrary DTDs/Schemas and is like word processor will require a mapping in order to understand what's a block element, what's inline, what's an image, etc. Conglomerate can do this, but it's always been a bit crashy for me (on Linux).

If it's just DocBook that you want them there are... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:56 AM on May 28, 2008

Considering that a browser won't display anything more than what HTML does then, to me, it seems that putting DocBook XML in the page and styling with CSS is an unnecessary task. It would easier to transform the DocBook and bind the resulting HTML to the page.

You could transform DocBook XML nodes into div/span and @class names (perhaps prefixed with "db:" ... class attributes in HTML of course aren't just for CSS they're generic ways of marking up areas of the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 2:13 AM on May 16, 2008

I really do not understand why the W3 gurus rejected the notion of XML data islands. They're such a natural fit with the browser. It'd make so many things so much easier. Oy vey.

Probably because they're an awful idea for the web. The lack semantics, entirely, because CSSing a block at font-size:20px doesn't make it a heading. Images can't have ALT text because they're not <img>s they're blocks with background images. Forms aren't <form>s they're... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 5:10 PM on May 27, 2008

Damnit, someone's already brought up the friends of dorothy thing.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 9:31 PM on February 18, 2008

Measure the overlap, the area of the overlap?

If you've got two bitmaps (with alpha) and you're trying to see the overlap then just traverse each pixel in the image and see if there's any equivalent pixel in the image below. SVG doesn't help here but any canvas whose pixels can be queried will work.

If you're talking generally about intersection between vector shapes (which involves calculating the area accurately, including what would be... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 5:46 PM on February 18, 2008

I designed this website to churn CPUs. Flick the [+] on the top right and add a few tag clouds to the page. The more clouds, the slower, and the more CPU usage. I think that Safari has better multicore usage than Firefox or IE though, so you might wanna grab a copy of that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:26 PM on December 20, 2007

Because it's been mentioned here I'll just note that extracting overwritten zeros and ones from an HDD is almost certainly a myth.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 12:57 PM on December 20, 2007

There was some drama about NVU and who was running the project (I think it was unmaintained or something), anyway, be sure to try this newer version of NVU called Kompozer too.

Daniel Glazman has announced the announcement of a successor to NVU but there's no info on what that'll be, or when.

(I haven't really been following this NVU stuff, so don't quote me on it)... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 5:39 PM on November 14, 2007

Is it something to do with the resolution?

I don't use Windows but presumably it runs at a lower resolution until the login screen when it clocks up the res.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 5:33 PM on November 14, 2007

If you're going to be publishing it yourself then you will want the kind of structure and styling that LaTeX gives you. As others say though if you're sending it to a publisher then they'll discard that formatting, so you should only add as much structure as you'll need for your own use.

1. If you're making structured text that's getting large and unwieldy, yes. I think that this is the case as you're saying that you find styles in MSWord/OOo awkward then I suspect... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 1:11 PM on November 13, 2007 marked best answer

Apparently 5 megabytes is enough to store the works of shakespeare, so hundreds is a little overkill ;)

Pepper can open gigabytes of text.. unfortunately that software was discontinued.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 2:03 PM on November 13, 2007

It seems that the database is unnecessary, and that you could just generate this based on a naming convention of files.

Even if you have metadata (eg, the comics title) you could go a long way without needing a database for this. Just name your image files 1--my-first-comic.jpg, 2--my-second-comic.jpg and so on.

It's tempting to overengineer this but so far I haven't seen any need for a database.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 2:33 PM on November 12, 2007

Oh come on mefi, if he has to ask he's fine about sleeping on shit. Leave him be!
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 9:23 PM on November 8, 2007

"Well I might consider going to your church, that is if I had fine cutlery to complement this rather plain casserole dish set"

It's admirable, the effort you're willing to take in order to not appear rude but now that you know there's no communication your politeness has become deception and you need to speak up.

You're going to have to be clear, either in person or by letter. Threaten to take it up with his superiors, and follow through with it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 8:22 PM on November 8, 2007

Live! From Death Row ... not that it's any good.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:52 PM on November 8, 2007

WCityMike: If that chart's distinctions between therapy ("past → present") and life coaching ("present → future" !) didn't make you gag then here's a mandatory Bullshit! link.

Of course not all life coaches are full of that (an unqualified faux-psychiatrist might help some people) but good friends can do much the same and for those more focused there are almost always more appropriate organisations (for business: business mentor... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 2:44 PM on November 8, 2007

Freedom from Vendor Lock-in through Standards
or less hippy / more scary,
The Economic Dangers of Vendor Lock-in When Building Websites

We've upped our standards, so up yours

<center> the center tag isn't a good idea for headings</center>
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 2:10 PM on October 24, 2007

Just don't use Phpilfer.. it's got some good ideas but the codebase is a pain.

Hey mathowie... any time you want to ditch coldfusion for something better (python/cherrypy ...or php I guess) then let me know
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 2:56 PM on October 15, 2007

The general rule of menus is that any more than 6 categories or 6 headings at any one level and the users eyes will glaze over. Use hierarchy, or searching.

(and it's 6 so that when it stretches to a necessary 9 or 10 you can put a stop to it there)
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:53 PM on September 26, 2007

(oh, hi metafilter -- haven't been here for a while)

It's not an out of the box solution, but Xindice allows xpath searches on large XML documents. Search results can include branches of the document which you could then XSLT into HTML.
I've got some questions though,
Why does it need to pay attention to the DTD, do you have strange entities or something? If it's just characters why not replace them with NCRs and ignore the DTD while parsing?... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 8:26 PM on September 7, 2007

Emailing you off-board Mo Nickels
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:38 PM on September 9, 2007

By the way, TV's MythBusters tested electrocution via pissing on high current lines and it doesn't work because the stream breaks up into globules of urine which breaks the circuit. A person would need to be crouching and pissing at a furious pace only just above the wire for it to carry.

So you might kill a small dog but not a person.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 4:42 PM on June 11, 2007

http://forums.somethingawful.com
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:29 PM on May 4, 2006

If there's a router outside your computer with bandwidth shaping then use that. They can prioritise HTTP vs P2P traffic.

If you don't have a router/firewall outside your computer you could make a m0n0wall box.
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 3:26 PM on May 4, 2006

More searching for nutrigrain turned up watmm.com but and a thread where no one knew the source either, http://tinyurl.com/n5m8g
posted to Ask Metafilter by holloway at 10:49 PM on May 3, 2006