I don't know about OSX's sort, but on some unix systems I've used, the sort command will sort smaller files in-core and will do a disk-based mergesort for larger files (presumably doing the first pass in-core).
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 11:36 PM on October 8, 2008

Maybe it's a local custom command? Try "which dt" and look at the file (ownership, timestamp, run "strings" on it, etc).
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:18 AM on October 6, 2008

(Note to self: use the "preview" button.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:19 AM on October 6, 2008

Other than (possibly) the Parental Controls setup, none of these approaches will keep someone from just downloading a new copy of Adium (or plugging in a usb drive, etc) and running that copy, or running another app with similar functionality. The OP really, really needs to be clearer about what they actually want here; I'm guessing the solution will need them to take another step back and think about what problem they're trying to solve by restricting adium and firefox.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 1:47 AM on October 5, 2008

I'm not sure what you mean by "identify as a computer rather than as a cell phone". Maybe because the iPhone talks real IP+HTTP instead of WAP?
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 12:15 PM on October 4, 2008

Sunshine Cafe on Roosevelt is vegetarian, probably has decent vegan options.

Wayward Cafe is vegan, and quite good imho, if you want a more bicycle-punk vegan atmosphere.

I'm a meat-eater but at neither of those places have I missed having meat available.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 12:13 PM on October 4, 2008

GuyZero, there is probably some residual charge in an erased FLASH cell. These slides [pdf] seem to confirm. Programming the cell to 0 and then erasing it again should eliminate any residual charge, though. And modern multilevel memories probably add another level of complexity. I've heard speculation that memory cells which have the same state for a long time might cause detectable physical changes in the chip (like electromigration, though probably not that exact effect). This is all... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 8:41 PM on October 2, 2008

Wait, are you looking to press or to burn your CDs/DVDs? The economics of those are very different.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 1:10 AM on October 2, 2008

The elevation might be a Southwest thing; I don't remember seeing it on town-limits signs very much here in Washington, even in the mountains.

There are a surprising number of signs indicating that the local girls' softball team was state champions in such-and-such a year, though.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 9:54 AM on October 1, 2008

They're not necessarily skeleton keys (read the rest of the wikipedia section you linked to).
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 12:44 AM on October 1, 2008

Big ships are (as Class Goat implies) usually diesels, burning fairly heavy petroleum fractions.

But there are small ocean-going ships too, and for that matter there are ocean-going ships that burn no fuel at all; trivially, their fuel needs could be met with syngas. I think you need to ask a more specific question.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 11:22 PM on September 28, 2008

There are various cakes and breads (like Belgian waffles, as mmascolino says) which are leavened only by foam. Pound cakes too. I suppose you could flip through a cookbook looking for instances of beaten eggwhite.

Foams and emulsions and colloids are so widely used in cooking I don't think there's an answer to "what is it for" unless you can be more specific about what dishes you're thinking of.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:49 PM on September 27, 2008

Very similar if not the same for me, too, in the PNW US.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 1:48 PM on September 26, 2008

Given rokusan's post, I wonder if it's actually "Halusian Gulf" (an eggcorn or a play on words or something)? No Google hits for that phrase either, though.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 11:25 PM on September 25, 2008

JP2 is probably the teeny SMD connector needed to talk to the GM862. You're probably going to have to make a circuit board to put everything on— you can do it in your basement, if you want to DIY (assuming the pins on that connector aren't too fine a pitch for homemade boards; haven't checked), or you could order one made. Though if you order one made, your total price is probably going to exceed sparkfun's price for a preassembled port-o-rotary.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 11:27 PM on September 24, 2008 marked best answer

Yeah, I've always kind of assumed it was rude to stay through the mealtime rushes. But as long as there are tables free, I'm not costing the cafe anything, and odds are I'll keep buying the occasional drink or bagel.

(The rise of wifi and laptops in coffeeshops has altered the dynamic a little, though. A few years ago, after coffeeshop wifi had become more or less an established thing, a local coffeeshop started turning it off on weekends in order to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 8:05 PM on September 23, 2008

Googling "adhesive mouse pads" returns pagesful of things that sound like what you're looking for.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 8:18 PM on September 18, 2008

To elaborate obliquely on toomuchpete's and krautland's answers — if you were to "force" the employees go sign something, and they refused to sign, what would you do? Fire them? Sue them for failing to resign?
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:00 PM on September 17, 2008

Combinations of random variables? The probability that X1 <> 0.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:06 PM on September 14, 2008

Er ... I meant to post, "The probability that X1 < X2 is the same as the probability that (-1*X1 + X2) > 0.".
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:06 PM on September 14, 2008

Hazards: unlikely. Getting worse with time: very possible. I've had a number of LCD devices which got cracked and for most of them the dead area near the crack slowly increased.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 11:34 AM on September 14, 2008

Maybe you could build some linkfarms or spamblogs to promote it, and wait for google's anti-SEO algorithms to notice? I don't know if that would lower the page's ranking below what it would be without the linkfarms, though. (If it does, then you'd expect there to be a black-hat SEO industry out there, offering to reduce one's competitors' visibility, and I haven't heard of one...)
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 12:33 AM on September 14, 2008

What KirkJobSluder said about vacuum. Most of your body is surprisingly capable of standing up to vacuum with only minor injury.

I actually wonder if the beam would cause your hand to explode either. For one thing, it's narrow (16mm at the focus points, apparently?). For another thing, I'm guessing the protons will mostly go straight through your hand, dissipating a whack of their energy electromagnetically and a smaller whack in (rarer) nuclear interactions, but not... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 8:56 AM on September 10, 2008

You might be thinking of anglerfish. The male attaches to the female and most of it atrophies away. I think Gould talks about it in one of his books.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 8:19 AM on September 10, 2008 marked best answer

On the Mac you might be able to use Applescript to glue the standard screen capture functionality to a web browser to send something to gmail.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 7:56 AM on September 9, 2008

I hardly remember Latin either, but I think "defendo" is in the wrong person— should be "defendemus" or something.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 6:39 PM on September 8, 2008

Is there a reason not to try the same technique people use for carpet — press the stuff between some layers of paper towel and apply a clothes iron, maybe with a sheet of paper to protect the iron from the wax? The wax should get wicked off of the oregano by the towel. Though, even a small amount of remaining wax might be of concern if the oregano were to, somehow, catch fire in the future. Dunno.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 4:36 PM on September 6, 2008

Arduino plus SCR dimmer would be an easy-ish way to make one, for the electronically inclined, but I doubt you'd come in much under $50 (and that's not including the lamp).
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 7:41 PM on September 2, 2008

This is similar to a pretty well-studied problem, the problem of "I have a thumbnail, is it from any of these 100,000 images and if so what part?". Your problem is much easier since you know what the source image is, you just need to find the source rectangle. But there might be research code for the first problem available somewhere which you can throw at your problem. Something along the lines of pyramidal image indexing or multiresolution/multiscale wavelet stuff.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 7:13 PM on September 1, 2008

IANAL, but this seems obvious to me— in order to change the lease, everyone who signed the soon-to-be-superseded lease will need to agree to supersede it. Presumably that's you three plus the landlord, and a new lease will need to be signed by you two, the landlord, and the new guy. (Or an amendment could be signed by all 5 of you, I assume; again IANAL.) You all have veto power, unless there's some language in the lease you signed saying otherwise.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 5:55 PM on September 1, 2008

The phone company will charge you for any problem-solving on your side of the demarc, though, so if you get them to do some work be sure you know how much they're going to charge for it.

A high-resistance short seems like it could lead to exactly what you describe. I'd think a dead short would kill the DSL also, but if it's only drawing enough current to make the telco think your phone is off the hook, that shouldn't bother the DSL.

I recommend... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 11:42 PM on August 31, 2008

Do you have any particular books you'd recommend on the subject, Forktine? I've always found it interesting.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 12:05 PM on August 30, 2008

Mark242, I'm not sure what you mean by "NS entries are valid only at the domain level". It's perfectly valid, and quite common, for subdomains to be in different zones. OTOH, NS records are supposed to have domain names, not IP addresses, in them, so maybe that's what you meant?

If you have an NS record that lists a name inside the zone that it's a server for, the solution is for the containing zone to contain "glue records" (basically, put a copy of... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 3:17 PM on August 29, 2008

majick: "forum.example.com" is a subdomain of "example.com". It may also name an individual host. "example.com" is a subdomain of "com", which is a subdomain of the root domain (".").

qvantamon: the technical name for the "chunk" you're talking about is "zone" (a collection of RRs, with an SOA at the top, originating from the same place, etc.).

It is true... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 11:55 AM on August 30, 2008

Yeah, this seems safe to me too (FWIW), for the reasons everyone else has said. If you were drawing a lot of current (vacuum cleaners, microwaves, halogen torchieres) then maybe it'd be more of a worry. I'd put this at a 3 or even a 2 on jessamyn's danger scale.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 5:57 PM on August 23, 2008

Depends on what OSX features you're using.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 3:29 PM on August 22, 2008

Nthing the sealed-lead-acid approach.

You could also use a stack of NiCd cells, say 10 AA or C cells to give you roughly 12v. NiCds can supply huge surge currents for brief periods. (In most other ways though they're inferior to NiMHs etc.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:50 AM on August 21, 2008

"As cheap as apossible" and not needing amazing photo quality suggests to me something like the Aiptek PenCam (or competitors' products in that niche; I think there are a couple). $30, tiny, shoots brief video if you want. Not too many pixels, but the photo quality is OK regardless. I have one rattling around somewhere and my only gripe is it runs down its batteries even when you're not actively using it (the video storage is RAM-based)— this makes it less suitable for a casual... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:34 AM on August 21, 2008

If you're doing random Unixy stuff on your Mac, I highly recommend installing macports to deal with the boring prerequisites. Then it's just "sudo port install mysql5" or whatever. (The only thing I don't like about it is it insists on installing its own copies of open-source packages that are also on the Mac— so you end up with a Macports-built perl *and* the system perl, for example. Doesn't cause real problems for me but is a mild annoyance.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 9:29 PM on August 20, 2008

I think most of the preceding calculations are incorrect. People float, so our displacement is only a function of our weight, not our volume.

70kg standard human, times 6e9 humans, divided by one kg per liter, gives us 4.2e11 liters total displacement; that's 4.2e8 cubic meters; the surface area of the oceans is very roughly 75% of the earth's surface or 3.8e14 square meters; so that much additional volume spread over the surface of the oceans is 1.1e-6 meter, that is,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 12:00 AM on August 19, 2008

"Architecture" probably refers to ppc versus intel. Is there a "universal" (both architectures) version of the driver available?
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 2:24 PM on August 17, 2008

A failing hard disk could conceivably make your computer behave like that, too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 9:59 PM on August 15, 2008

Satellites should generally move in pretty straight lines or gentle curves. (Unless you were seeing something in, say, a Molniya orbit.)

My guess would be an airplane; airplanes moving almost directly towards or away from you appear to move oddly.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 8:29 PM on August 15, 2008

As I understand it, this is how the "message waiting" indicator is always controlled on cellphones — it uses the same mechanism as SMS. What's supposed to happen is your phone recognizes this as a status message and updates its indicator. But the phone can be set to interpret those messages or not, and for some reason, third-party unlocked phones are often sold in the "not" state.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 7:37 PM on August 15, 2008 marked best answer

HTTP itself refers to the verbs GET, PUT, HEAD, etc., as methods, and the item being referred to by the URI as an object. So HTTP itself is arguably viewed as an object oriented RPC mechanism.

XMLRPC is the first widespread standardized generic RPC over HTTP implementation I encountered (it having the advantage, or disadvantage, that since it ran over port 80 it was invisible to firewalls); I'm sure there were many earlier ad-hoc implementations,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 9:19 AM on August 14, 2008

You could write a regexp that selects only the files of interest — something like var/www/dev(|/includes|/css)/[^/]+$ — and then use that in an awk or perl script to select the lines, sum the file sizes into a variable, and print out the value of that variable at the end (e.g. in an END block). Pipe the output of tar tzvf into said script, and you have an uncle Robert.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:33 PM on August 13, 2008

timebomb, I think the reason is that some of your filenames have characters in them that tar is interpreting as meaning to retrieve a file from a remote host (hence the messages about rsh).

I'd just do it this way:

for file in *.tgz
do
echo "Summing $file ..."
cat "$file" | tar tzvf - | awk ' /crazyregexp/ { SUM += $3 }; END { print "Total size is is ",SUM... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 12:11 AM on August 14, 2008

(from the gnu tar man page:

-f [hostname:]file
Read or write the specified file […] If a hostname is specified, tar will use rmt(8) to read or write the specified file on a remote machine. “-” may be used as a filename, for reading or writing to/from stdin/stdout.

)
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 12:16 AM on August 14, 2008

I had receding gums (they bothered me a little when drinking cold water), and my dentist mentioned the possibility of gum grafts or fillings, but started with fluoride and teaching me how to brush my teeth (you might think that by one's 30s one will have this kind of thing down pat, but I was doing it all wrong). Anyway, that was a few years ago and my gums have stopped bothering me without any more drastic treatment.

Anecdotal, etc., but there you go. And of course, it... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 9:13 AM on August 13, 2008

I'm with Tomorrowful; if the .int domain is actually registered, I don't see why it wouldn't work. bartieby, can you elaborate on what you mean by "won't work"?

There is some stupidly-written software out there that contains lists of TLDs that it likes (and some stupidly written specs, like HTTP cookies). But I'd kind of expect those to include .int along with com/org/net/mil/gov/edu.
posted to Ask Metafilter by hattifattener at 10:02 AM on August 11, 2008