Keep some vitamin K handy for dogs, just in case. Rat poisons (all I know of) work by thinning blood and causing them to bleed to death internally. Vitamin K counteracts the thinning agent directly, and while a rat-sized dose probably would make a 50 pound dog only feel very bad, it's best to keep some nearby.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 9:31 AM on July 3, 2008

Call your carrier. They'll probably want your phone's IMEI (or whatever the non-GSM equivalent is -- serial number?) and they can tell you how to override it.

Most phone have two or three levels of security. The PIN is personal. Then, the others are hardware-specific and are permanent, and only your carrier has those.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 9:34 AM on June 27, 2008

In the programming world, experience matters more than a degree. What matters most of all is clarity of thought and ability to break problems into smaller problems, but those are orthogonal to both degreefulness and experience.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 11:11 AM on June 25, 2008

I bet that they can't easily embed two locations, on the picture and outside it. I'll also bet the answer to your second question is no, the subtitle rendering filter doesn't have any idea what display you're using to view the movie.

Having a display that speaks back to the signal provider ("hi! I can take WidthxHeight, KTHXBYE!") is a relatively recent invention in the computer world. Television specs are much more conservative and sluggish to change.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 11:44 AM on June 17, 2008

I'd think it's fun to make a at-a-glance network health-o-meter. Two versions:

A port-by-port cumulative line graph. Port 80 it taking x% of traffic, bittorrent is taking y%, nntp is z% ..., smtp is..., update it every minute.

Or, count packet flags. So many TCP with SYN, so many with SYN+ACK, so many ACK, so many RST or FIN. Or count average duration of TCP sessions.

Neither tells you anything exactly useful, but... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 9:52 PM on June 10, 2008

Hmm, guessing: Make a script that runs init within a chroot, and tell the kernel to run that instead of init.

Make an executable script at /usr/local/bin/chrootinit and put in it

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/sbin/chroot /path/to/root /sbin/init $*
And then at boot time, stop the boot loader and send the kernel the additional parameters "init=/usr/local/bin/chrootinit"

The first process is in... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 8:58 PM on June 5, 2008 marked best answer

There are probably guides for this online. Here are my two ideas, which both come down to "compare to known good bills."

Tear around and pull on the little polyurethane strip inside most bills these days. Test on known good bills of your own so you know what they're like.

Use a magnifying glass to see the tiny lines that make up the markings on bills. Those were hard to recreate, though not impossible.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 1:59 PM on June 2, 2008 marked best answer

As has been said of musicians and book authors: Your biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. I say you should worry less about people reading your source code, and more about what the best tool will be to get the job done so people will be happy enough to pay for it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 2:26 PM on May 31, 2008

It's not a site about how people are good, but Wikipedia itself is evidence of it. It's a pretty amazing piece of work, and its (to some, bewilderingly) high quality gives me a good sense of how most everyone is beneficent.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 4:52 PM on May 30, 2008

"Bother me, and I vote /against/ your politician."
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 4:32 PM on May 30, 2008

Hmm, two questions:

Is the original preserved, if you go look at it, outside the rendering?

Suppose you insert text before the first demarcation, "this is outside the MIME tree, and should not be displayed." What does that do?
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 9:48 AM on May 29, 2008

Is it a grain aliasing problem?
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 7:53 PM on May 26, 2008

Basically, how can I have people generate the keys at my house?

What a terrible idea. Anyone who is willing to make a key in an untrusted environment is not worthy of trusting to keep their key safe in other ways. In fact, this is a good way of finding people you should never trust with cryptography. Black-list everyone who does that.

I'm a huge fan of Doctorow, but the scheme in the book is bogus. No one at the party knew... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 4:29 PM on May 26, 2008 marked best answer

The desert dwellers agree to kill /someone/ in exchange for something -- probably weapons. When they discover that it's a guy who can make weapons, they decide they're better off having him make stuff than killing him immediately.

Tony Stark is a golden goose. Only idiots kill those.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 1:29 PM on May 24, 2008

Could it be the lens? Chromatic abberation, perhaps? (I'm a still-photo guy, so I may be way off.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 11:33 AM on May 24, 2008

I know something of them both, I guess you could say.

MySQL version 5.0 is stable -- there is no 5.2. It goes 5.0, 5.1 (frozen), 6.0 (active devel).

You don't find very much since 2003 because there's no good reason to choose one over the other these days, except your other 3rd-party software and perhaps your preference for the other very-minor variation and which community you like more.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 4:51 PM on May 22, 2008

Oh, and this goes for everyone: If you're starting a new MySQL instance, please for the love of all that's good, turn on strict "sql_mode". Please. Think of the children!
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 3:52 PM on May 23, 2008

Puerto Rico. It's somewhat exotic, it's cheap (its active season is winter), it's part of the United States, and it's close.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 1:01 PM on May 23, 2008

Harbison and Steele's "C: A Reference Manual" is the best reference there is. It is not a tutorial, but when you have a question about some facet, this is The Book to pick up.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 6:07 AM on May 22, 2008

:) http://xkcd.com/181/
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 1:29 PM on May 21, 2008

A spreadsheet is not the right tool for the job, often. Dump it into Access (or MySQL, natch) and "SELECT AVG(age) FROM (SELECT age FROM t ORDER BY price DESC LIMIT 10)".
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 5:53 AM on May 21, 2008

Drives don't (almost ever) go just a-little-bit bad.

I'd tell your friend "Sorry, Ubuntu is really great, but it refuses to use your disc because it thinks it's going to fail. For now, either use Windows or buy a new disc and we'll put Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu could be wrong about your disc failing in weeks or months, but just in case it's not, you should make rolling copies of your data while you continue to use Windows."
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 5:00 AM on May 21, 2008

(I don't know a thing about blackberry and little about Y!, and this doesn't address your questions at all, but you mention something wrong that I do know about. Read-receipts are a function of the mail user agent, which can choose to implement it or not, not some http-retrieval trigger on display of an HTML document.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 10:32 AM on May 19, 2008

This is a remarkably small window in which it matters. You're on the trailing slope of credibility of photos. Even now, it takes minimal effort to manufacture any image at all, and in the next five years, everyday people with everyday technology will be able to fake any image at all. We've come a long way since Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of "Fairies Photographed. An Epoch-Making Event" in the Dec 1920 "The Strand Magazine". Today, one can buy photo... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 8:07 AM on May 18, 2008

If your heaphones are stereo (== not wired in series), then it won't stop working when you snip off one side.

It's also not likely that your player is too fragile to break at the change in impedence. If you can take the headphones out at all, then the engineer wasn't that much of an idiot.

The amperage isn't enough to hurt you, either, if you touch the wires. It would be pretty hard to even tell that there's electricity at all, using meat.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 7:52 AM on May 18, 2008

I get the same results with Firefox and IE, and I have tried friends' computers and have the same problem.

What is common between the failures? Your account? Your network?
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 5:33 AM on May 18, 2008

On a related note, I want to say that the Irish rules of citizenship have changed lately. If you're not living inside .ie for a few years, you may have to send their department of state a letter every year or so saying "yes, I still want to be a citizen".

(I was moving US -> Galway this last year, so I researched such things, but my recollection is notoriously faulty.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 2:35 PM on May 15, 2008

My APs have always been open. About 10% of the time, someone nearby is using it.

Your region may have laws that make it illegal to use other people's networks -- that's at least selectively prosecuted in my state, Florida. I know of only one case in the past 5 years though.

For providing Wifi, it could be a violation of your ISP TOS contract, but it's not likely that there's a legal statute about that in particular. In the EU, some ISPs are... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 2:31 PM on May 15, 2008

IANAD.

Do you have ambulance services there? If so, I'd chance it to wait until morning. 102 isn't an emergency, but you should see a doctor soon.

You must keep the fever below 105F. If you can do that where you are, with cold baths and plenty of cold drink, then you can put off the trek for a few hours.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 12:19 PM on May 14, 2008

IANAL, but I am a user.

Here's my interpretation: "If you send us ideas we like, we might use them. We won't pay you if we do."
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 6:17 PM on May 9, 2008

MICROS~1 Active Directory is an LDAP server, yesno? That seems like the perfect place, an LDAP server.

I'm sure there are dozens of web interfaces for LDAP servers. Some will even cost money.

Additional LDAP configuration is the only tricky part. You need an LDAP expert to set up hierarchical permissions.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 3:11 PM on May 8, 2008

LDAP already has the facility for most of what you mentioned. You just need a web interface to show it to people, and to have someone configure it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 6:42 PM on May 8, 2008

Just to be clear, by "vintage" you mean the colloquial meaning of "old", and not the literal vintner meaning, yes?
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 3:16 PM on May 8, 2008

Audacity, perhaps?

Really, you'll be much happier if you have an itch to scratch. Find something that you use that doesn't do what you want, and then fix it. You have motivation and reward, that way.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 2:07 PM on May 5, 2008 marked best answer

Yeah, Netzapper, I don't expect to expand the sentiment into a full sentence or anything. My sole complaint is with using any form of the word "congratulate" to actually congratulate someone. It seems like there's a big hole in my language, and I'm trying to plumb it and figure out why. Your "speech acts" link may help.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 7:05 AM on May 4, 2008

OP here:

Thanks all. I admit my examples are terrible. I should have waited to think of better ones. Sorry.

I was (and still am) perplexed by the fact that the word "thanks" is a thanking. "Greetings" is a greeting. "Congratulations" congratulates. "Curses!" is a curse.

I'm happy with self-reference and games with levels of meanings, but this weekend I was startled to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 1:36 PM on May 5, 2008

I think you want the "coalesce" function.

SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM people
ORDER BY COALESCE(last_name, firstname), firstname
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 9:01 PM on May 2, 2008

Every minute, in a SQL database, "SELECT id, message, recipient FROM scheduled WHERE due < now() AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM sent_record WHERE sent.id=scheduled.id)".

Then, when you send each, add it to the sent_record table.


Alternatively, just use I Want Sandy.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 6:52 AM on May 1, 2008

You have two problems.

Yeah, you're mixing up the X server and X clients. The server is your display (&c). You already have one of those running, on your Mac. The 'startx' advice above is spot on. You don't want that.

The next problem is that you can have only one program managing "the root window". Another way to say this is that you can have only one "window manager" -- the program that handles decorating windows... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 10:51 AM on April 25, 2008

Oh, I didn't mention it, but I should: XFCE is (probably) two distinct parts, and just because you can't run the window-manager part, doesn't mean you can't run the other menu-and-stuff facility.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 10:55 AM on April 25, 2008 marked best answer

North east corner, from Fajardo, take the ferry to Vieques for a night. Go kayak or swim in Mosquito Bay at after dark (some guides will take you), where the dinoflagellates glow when you disturb them. It's amazing.

If you know what SETI is, take a gander at the Arecibo Observatory. It takes some imagination and sense of history to appreciate it, though.

Drive a car through the mountainous center, if you like *ahem* adventure. Be sure your... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 7:01 AM on April 23, 2008

*sigh* I hate to be the voice of reason in a sea of mystics.

You'll be happier if you throw away all the preconceptions about relationships that you got from watching and reading fiction and from listening to pop radio. The only place those domains intersect reality is that the author knows what we like to hear.

It's entirely possible your aims at some Platonic ideal of love is hampering your advancement toward the only kind we ever find. You... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 5:13 AM on April 22, 2008

Also use the "grep" command in /Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Preferences . Search case-insensitively for "mouse", "mice", and "pointer".
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 5:34 PM on April 20, 2008

"/not/ necessary for my survival", I suppose you meant.

It doesn't really matter. It's up to you. What permissions do you want to give people?

I use "by-sa" a lot, but not "nc". As a result, I've been published a few times -- the most recently in a how-to book published by O'Reilly & Assoc., which I received a free copy of this week. It's fun, I think.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 6:09 AM on April 19, 2008 marked best answer

You can license any way you want, I think. (IANAL.) But, Creative-Commons licenses don't cover resizing (except as perhaps no-derivitives(?)), so you can't easily cram your round peg into a square C-C box, which is not necessarily bad. Make up your own license, if you want.

Also, take note of the new extra-info flag on the C-C web site. You can add information (and additional restrictions, maybe) to a C-C license you use. You won't find that noted on the Flickr... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 5:37 AM on April 20, 2008

Yeah, you need your signal to put a new point /not/ come from your list of values in the table.

I'd SELECT from the database, ordering by date.

Then, make a for loop over the periods you want to plot: { If the row on the front of the selected list is in that period, then pop it off and plot it. Else, plot zero. }
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 5:09 AM on April 20, 2008

winston is on to something. The win is infinite, though secondhand. For a person who thinks that, the only reason to not proselytize all the time is they think that proselytizing will irrevocably turn some people away.

That's your wedge point. So, if they are ever not actively trying to convert other people, ask why. They could have saved a soul in the last 20 seconds! They're either being irrational or they secretly agree with you to some... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 2:18 PM on April 19, 2008 marked best answer

Red rope licorice dispenser! (Party time! Excellent!)
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 12:05 PM on April 17, 2008

Ah, that's not a radio show. Sorry. That's the general term, though.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 6:00 PM on April 16, 2008

Ah, that was the problem. Public radio is a bigger ecosystem than NPR™.
posted to Ask Metafilter by cmiller at 9:06 AM on April 17, 2008