stoney

These projects are still extremely awesome for those of us running older CPUs!

As they are being featured their promo art is shown to users before they get to the page for that particular app (see the screenshots for their new and old images - you can see it is part of a scrolling bar of promo images).

If they weren't being featured, the promo art would only be seen by users that clicked through to the app's page - users would only have seen the app's icon before getting the app's landing page.

So I think featured vs not featured makes a big difference to the importance of the promo art.

I was thinking that I would be reluctant too, but then I realised that I have given plenty of SaaS companys my CC up front - sometimes not even for a free trial (but usually with a moneyback guarantee). E.g Linode and JungleDisk.

I wouldn't have called it poor English! I wouldn't have guessed from the text that you aren't a native English speaker - I had to check your About page to be sure.

Your writing isn't as polished as, say, Paul Graham's writing, but then very few people can write at that standard.

Australia has a long history of making bad decisions involving the local wildlife, which is why they are now super-cautious when it comes to things like this.

Take advantage of what you've paid for, but be aware that what you have paid for is far more than just access to educators and educational resources.

Make connections with as many people as you can: fellow students, grad students, professors, everyone. That guy who sits next to you in class might turn out to be in a position to help you out in 5 years (and you might be in a position to help him).

Take advantage of extra curricula activities, clubs, interest groups, etc. Is there something you're kind of maybe interested in? It's going to be much easier to find a group of like minded people at college than it is in the "real world".

It's not okay to plagiarise someone else's thesis paper, because the entire point of a thesis paper is to demonstrate your own ability to think/research/etc. If you plagiarise a paper you can fully expect your university/college/school to reject the paper, and you suffer the consequences.

I don't think the same set of moral constraints apply in Zynga's case. They aren't trying to prove themselves to some 3rd party. The whole point of Zynga is to make money for the people who own and work at Zynga. And apparently duplicating other people's games is working pretty well as a way of meeting that objective. There's definitely nothing noble about what they're doing. And I don't know how much effort they are putting in, but certainly seem to be doing what they are doing (which is distributing games, not producing innovative games) better than everyone else.

Not sure why this is downvoted. I think it's probably right.

I get randomly selected for the bomb test almost 100% of the time in Australia. I don't think there is anything about me that is being discriminated against (typical white male).

I think they just screen a high percentage of people. Also, I think the longer you hang around after the x-ray (repacking your bag, getting dressed, etc), the more likely they are to approach you.

There is an unstable mode in some aircraft (maybe only small aircraft?) where it enters into a kind of spiral dive. When you are sat in a plane where that is happening (I have done this in a training exercise) you really cannot feel anything unusual at first - the forces you experience from the different accelerations cancel out. Until all of a sudden you do feel it - at that point you are pitched with the wings at about 45 degrees and the nose pointing about 45 degrees towards the ground. Suddenly you feel it a lot. That is a very scary experience, and one of the reasons to ignore your body if you are a pilot.

When I experienced it it was in clear skies, so it would be rather obvious that it was happening just by looking out of the window, but apparently this can happen to inexperienced pilots in clouds.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_spiral

If everyone used UTC you'd still have many of the same problems, just in reverse. For example, you can reasonably guess that in any country, an office will be staffed on weekdays from roughly 9-5 local time. If we all operated on UTC, then you'd need to look up in a big table what times the Sydney office operated.

It is useful to have a shared understanding of where in the day you expect an event to happen. E.g. 1pm is going to be around lunchtime whether you are in Sydney or New York.

Also, dates have exactly the same problems as time zones - the date starts at midnight local time. If lcoal time changes, then for part of the day, so does the date.

I found it very straightforward finding a partner to climb with when I started. Rock climbing gyms are very friendly places in my experience, and as others have said, most will have some kind of system for pairing up people who are looking for partners.

I'd suggest dragging a friend along to your local climbing place so you can try it out a couple of times and see if you like it. Then if your friend doesn't want to keep going, either speak to the staff at the gym, or if they can't pair you up with someone put an advert on craigslist/gumtree/similar (I got 3 responses to a gumtree ad when I started, which gave me an instant group of people to go with).

As long as you can commit to a regular time once or twice a week, you shouldn't have a problem finding someone to climb with. Once you start going regularly you'll meet other people at the gym, which gives you more pairing options if your normal partner is away or ill or whatever.

Try it. I'm glad I did. I've made some new friends from it and gained a lot of strength.

I use installers for things I deem to be key packages (numpy, scipy, stuff like that) and use virtualenv and pip to set up project specific sets of packages. I really don't know what to do with egg files, I've never had to use one directly.

virtualenv really is the key to getting this working well.

I use Python on Windows for various things, primarily number crunching. Mostly I use it as a better (for me) Matlab, but it's also handy for random scripting tasks.

And why do I use Windows? Excel.

As a data point for your London vs not London question - if you work for a university in London (vs a university outside of London) you normally get something like an extra £2.5k per year as a "London allowance". I think public service type jobs get an extra payment too (teachers, police, etc) but I don't know how much.

It's not a perfect comparison, I agree. Probably I shouldn't have mentioned your house. It's more like the police getting a warrant to search a company's premises.

My thought process went a little like this...

Presumably the police could apply for a warrant to search RIM's premises for something along the lines of "records of messages used to organise a riot"? If they got that warrant, then they could go to the physical servers and search for the relevant data on site? AFAIK that's a perfectly feasible scenario and completely within the law - even though RIM haven't committed any crimes, I think they can still be the subject of a warrant. I'd guess something similar would happen in cases of fraud.

And if they can do that, then they could also ask RIM for permission to do it without a warrant. Which RIM might agree to if they believe that the police would get the warrant anyway.

And if they can do that, then it doesn't sound much worse to give the records to the police for them to search through using their own computer systems instead of going and searching directly on RIM's servers.

Is this all that different than the police entering your house (with a warrant) to look for evidence?

I'd say they have reasonable cause to believe that they will find evidence in the messages.

The British government often comes up with poorly thought out policy ideas, but in fairness, these ideas rarely end up as actual laws - the obvious logic flaws are picked up on sooner or later. I suspect it's just a case that they needed give out some policy ideas to keep the journalists happy and this is the first thing they came up with.

Anyway, I can't see how removing access to social media would have had much influence on the riots - seems like SMS messages would be just as effective, for organising a riot. Social media just happens to be a cheaper option.

> your choice in email host is a reflection on you

Actually my choice to use hotmail is a reflection of me X years ago when I created the account. It is also a reflection of the state of free web based providers X years ago. You don't know the value of X, which makes it difficult to draw any conclusions from my email address.

I guess it's also a reflection of the current me in that I don't see the point of going through the hassle of ditching an email address just to have something slightly more trendy (and slightly more usable).

I think that's pretty hard to do in these post-concord days?

Though if you lived close to a time zone border it could be a problem. There are towns straddling the Queensland-New South Wales border in Australia. There is a one hour time difference between the states for half of the year (NSW does daylight saving, QLD does not). I've always wondered how local businesses deal with that.

Yes, very true. Doesn't work very well for events where people are attending from multiple time zones. I was thinking more of events that I attend in person.

But I'll use the paper diary example again - if I was in Mombassa and was due to have a phone conference at 10am Montreal time, I would write "6pm - Phone conference" in my diary (assuming that is indeed the correct local time).

And in your example, yes, it would be easier for me if I could tell my calendar that it is "10am, montreal time, please adjust that to mombassa time". So I guess my ideal solution would be a calendar app that works the way I described unless I specifically override it.

Anyway, I think this proves the point that time is hard.

> You have to tell it a time zone or else the calendar app will not know what time you mean

It seems logical to me that whatever time I write in my calendar app is the time that I expect something to happen. I.e. it is the local time at wherever I happen to be. If I put in a meeting at 4pm on 8/7/2011, then I expect an alarm to sound whenever the local time is 4pm on 8/7/2011.

That's how my paper diary works (or used to work when I had one) - if I am planning for a future event where I will be in a different time zone, I simply write down the local time of the event.

> I run http://whirlpool.net.au

An excellent and very useful forum! It seems like whatever topic I'm searching for, google(.com.au) returns a useful result on your site.

That's assuming that people's choice of bookstore is influenced by links. When I buy a book from a website (or pretty much anything from a website) I always check the price on Amazon. So the only way the affiliate program helps them to sell to me is by encouraging bloggers to write reviews. I'd guess that's true for a lot of people.

I wouldn't focus on technologies if you are interested in doing this - focus on the types of work/projects you can do. What job could you do from home? If you can do it from home you can do it from anywhere.

For example, I am a researcher at a university (an employee, not a grad student). I don't want to go into details, but basically I do a lot of numerical modelling-type work and model development. I use lots of different technologies to do it (including C++ at times). I work on the opposite side of the planet to where my university is located and it works well.

Meetings are the only slightly problematic area. Skype is ok, but really not ideal for more than one on one meetings.

I went through a phase of copy/pasting double inputs. That phase ended when I copy/pasted a mistake from the first input and it caused a whole lot of hassle sorting it out.

Now I just make myself type it twice. I tell myself it's for my own protection.

Exactly. I didn't mean to imply that pointers are evil or should be avoided. That was supposed to be the point of my dynamite analogy, but I guess the comment made elsewhere on this topic about the inadequacies of analogies holds true here.

So, for the avoidance of doubt, I believe: pointers are awesome, powerful tools and you can do some great things in C/C++ using them and I sometimes miss them (a little bit) when using other languages. But you can also do some terrible things with them - and I have done some spectacularly bad things with them in the past. But that doesn't mean they are bad - it just means that I am reckless.

When I used to work in building design, I used to create lots of charts of various climate data for projects in new regions where I didn't know much about the climate (and also for eye candy in presentations). One of those charts was very similar to what you suggested. Basically a 2D array of coloured squares, with hour of the day along one axis and month of the year along the other. Then each square would be coloured according to the average solar radiation falling at that time of day in that month (using a blue-green-red type scale usually, but you can do grey scale or anything else you can think of). It was a useful way of visualising lots of stuff - variation in day length, strength of the sun, summer/winter variations, etc.

You can plot other variables like this too - temperature, humidity, ...

I think he means that pointers are unsafe in the same way that dynamite is unsafe. They both have legitimate uses, but you need to be very careful when you are using them. (Rather than unsafe in the sense of don't use them at all).

I like your box analogy, but I don't think it goes far enough - with C++ pointers it is not always ok to put something in the box. If the pointer is out of date or invalid there is a chance that writing to it will make the OS kill the entire process.

Languages with garbage collection don't tend to have that kind of problem, since whatever is at the memory location will stay at that location until everyone surrenders their pointers.

I got around the problem of needing to show data from a non-SSL map server on an https site by using reverse proxying. So my javascript requests the map tiles from a URL on my site (over https), the server then forwards the request to the real map server. That should work for Cloudmade's map server. Not sure if you could do that with Olark.

And even those who are in there primarily because they want to learn will be very aware that getting a good grade in the exam will most likely improve their job prospects on graduating.

Learning to ace an exam in the minimum time possible frees up the rest of your time to do some actually useful learning.