Tavern on the Meta - 2012-02-14

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12:37 AM

@Moshe Has anyone said how many people have voted? I think there were 50 voters before the town hall chat....

1 hour later…

1:51 AM

@bmike no idea. Haven't seen any info anywhere.

But you got my vote.

2:25 AM

@Moshe Aww - thanks!

Dumb question. I voted to close a question on SO as an exact duplicate. Then I realized the question was not exactly the same. I can't find a way to undo my closure vote.

2:44 AM

309

Q: Can we have the ability to rescind a close vote before it closes?

Sometimes you vote to close something and the OP then changes it to fix the issue or issues. You can't take a close vote back though. It would be nice if you could. Jeff, any chance you changed your mind?

feature-request status-declined vote-to-close

@AaronBertrand Unfortunately, every new request for that is closed as a dupe of the above [status-declined] feature request =(

@AaronBertrand: Just hope that four other people don't agree with your mistake.

3:10 AM

Thanks guys. I don't think it's a big deal as I doubt 4 other people will make the same mistake, and I know that 99.9999% of the time once the admins have decided a feature isn't worth changing or fixing, it ain't gonna happen.

3:46 AM

yawn

Don't yawn! Don't you know that's contagious!?

Oh no! Pandemic!

yawn

reaches for the tissue box, realizes it's empty - NOW there's a pandemic.

@mootinator - So, how was you day?

Still in chi town?

Uh-oh

@Moshe Nope, came back Saturday.

Oh

Well, did you meet my contact?

3:57 AM

Nope. Didn't seem interested.

(empty tissue boxes make great receptacles for sunflower seed shells)

Oh, well.

Maybe next time.

I had some fellow students to walk around town with. =)

Nice.

How was today?

Maybe next time I'll go to NYC like I've been meaning to for the last 10 years :P

I'm going to get out my Flamin' Hot Cheetos, and my full box of tissues :)

3:58 AM

Mmmm cheeeetos.

My minivan is still in the shop.

But I'm now an official neophyte in Groovy/Grails. Woooo.

Nice.

I had a follow up interview at 350 5th ave.

I prefer to call it that than it's proper name.

HOw did that go?

Rather let people Google the addy.

Good, I think we're ready to go with that, Gd willing.

I went to see Cowboy Mouth on Friday night, which, despite having noone to go with was still quite fun.

Heh, what is a Cowboy mouth?

4:03 AM

In this case, a band.

Mmmm and RC Cherry Cola

I require a Mr. Pibb

Because my wife has never heard of it, apparently.

Sorry I only stock RC Cherry, Dr Pepper Cherry, Squirt, and Canada Dry

Squirt... Is that the Fresca variation we don't have in Canada? :P

Ya, kinda. It's made by Dr Pepper/7up

4:10 AM

I'll add that to my list.

They also make Ruby Red Squirt, but I don't care for that much.

List? Do you have some compilation of all soft drinks?

Drinks not available in Canada which are remarkably like something that is --> Sierra Mist, Squirt, Mr. Pibb, Mello Yello

It's not a very long list.

They also recently started making Sun Drop, which is like a Mountain Dew/Mello Yello equivalent basically.

Heh.

Mountain Dew is sort of pointless here.

Basically, Lemon Lime Drinks: Sprite, 7up, Sierra Mist | Citrus Drinks: Squirt, Fresca (I don't think there's a Pepsi one) | Caffeinated Citrus: Mello Yello, Mountain Dew, Sun Drop | Colas: Pepsi, RC, Coca Cola, Mr. Pibb, Dr. Pepper | Ginger Ales: Canada Dry, Schweppers, Seagrams

There's also the Crush, Fanta category that's Flavored Drinks

4:18 AM

Things are differently arranged somehow here.

Like everything is either associated with Coke or Pepsi.

There's never a third option.

I think Canada and some smaller cities in the US, Dr Pepper is a part of Coca Cola

and a lot of the Dr Pepper products never make it to shelves

Pepsi

In the area I live, Dr Pepper/7up is a separate company

Yea.

but if you go down to Kearney, for example, Dr Pepper is part of Coca Cola

which confused the hell out of me at first

4:19 AM

That confused the hell out of me.

I think Pepsi owns a lot of rights to Dr Pepper/Snapple brands outside the US.

So they only sell one or the other.

I think their products still used the Dr Pepper barcodes though, which is partly why I was confused. I used to work in retail and me being a programming nut learned the barcode system

and I identified companies by the first 5 digits of the product's barcode haha

Hehe, I used to do that a long time ago.

I had fun cracking my store's fuel discount barcodes and figured out a way to get up to $9.99/gal off on gas

Never actually did it, I'm a good hacker who just figures it out and drops it o.o

but I thought it was humorous that they only stored that a coupon has been redeemed and not actually storing all the valid coupons and removing them once they're been used

especially since they "expire" automatically after 14 days, you could just run a query to remove those older than 14 days

Indeed...

But the way they had it setup, they never actually expired because it didn't store them anywhere and their system was too primitive to calculate the date from the barcode, even though it was laid out in the format year+month+date+hours+minutes+seconds+employee-id+order-number+discount-amount

and I didnt see it a good idea to just give away all of our employee ID numbers in a conveniently easy-to-crack barcode

4:26 AM

heh

I brought it up with the tech guy when he was in fixing the self-scan machines and he just kind of stood there looking at me with that blank stare. He never did do anything about it.

The Director of Front End Operations for the company actually complained to me once because my Excel documents I was sending him with all the statistics were too advanced and he couldn't understand all the numbers that were in there. He also couldn't figure out how to switch between the different pages in the document. Biggest facepalm ever.

:/

I once complained that someone could easily cause complete chaos in my university's e-mail system by spoofing From: headers but nobody cared.

I'm still vaguely bitter about that :P

I always told my cashiers I had magical powers because I knew how to soft reboot the computers by typing in a few codes. I always hated when they'd just manually shut it down and restart it because it would take there register offline for like 2 minutes.

"Here, since we don't have anything else for you to do right now, you can come up with some proactive security measures we can take on the campus network."

I'd come over like "why are you just standing there... oh reloading sigh"

4:35 AM

later...

"We aren't actually going to implement any of these suggestions, but here; you can get laid off now and never come back since nobody wants to work with you after you picked apart the security holes in their precious work."

@animuson :/

The next job I had, I nearly got fired for opening "Help->About" in the call centre software because I wasn't permitted to use software in a way I hadn't been trained to.

Apparently a "Help" menu is potentially dangerous according to idiots.

They wouldn't fire me. They just made my life miserable until I left. :/

They were all mad because I used my free time to update all the keys on our keyboards to be correct and stop confusing the cashiers. Apparently that's not permitted. :P

lol

You changed something.

They were used to it being wrong.

They don't know how frustrating it is to be called over to registers all the time to void something out because it was typed into the wrong department, because the key was wrong!

The customers don't appreciate waiting either.

And then if we don't fix it, they yell at us anyways because the departments were off and we could've fixed it ourselves.

O_o

And as a supervisor, of course you get all the yelling at from management. Like when a coupon comes back fraudulent, they yell at me because I, personally, could have stopped its acceptance. Like I can somehow magically be next to every single cashier making sure all the coupons are valid.

This sounds very negative. I'd like to point out I loved my job, just hated the management. :) Ok.

4:45 AM

:D

Well, before I left, I flipped all the cigarettes upside down. Haha, then the store director talks to me and is all freaking serious like "Do you think stores stock things upside down?" I was trying so hard not to laugh.

Then they called the police and told them I stole keys and was making threatening remarks towards the store and its employees. As if I would ever do that. Shows how much he actually knew me.

4 hours later…

Anonymous

8:20 AM

I wish http://foo.bar.127.0.0.1/ could work.

Anonymous

I can't figure out how to create arbitrary domains that are isolated (in terms of the same-origin policy) aside from using a wildcard subdomain. It'd be nice for something that didn't rely on DNS like that. Like being able to set document.domain = "isolated". One day...

Anonymous

Ahh, data: URIs are given unique unique domains (at least for now? maybe not to be relied upon), so I just need to insert a minimal data: document into an iframe and use postMessage to set get stuff running in an isolated way. Good good.

Anonymous

4

Q: How to create Document objects with JavaScript

Basically that's the question, how is one supposed to construct a Document object dynamically in javascript?

javascript dom xmlhttprequest document spec

8:59 AM

@JeremyBanksʬʬʬ you can add a made-up domain to your hosts file (/etc/hosts on *NIX, C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows), like 127.0.0.1 foo.bar.local

Anonymous

I gave a bad example; I was trying to generate random subdomains so that they'd each be isolated from each other (more like foo-315136264262.127.0.0.1). As far as I can tell (I looked a little when I saw Pow), there's no way to handle wildcards without setting up a real DNS server. It's possible to create new local hosts thingies on-the-fly, but that feels ugly.

oic

9:48 AM

Did SO have the comment feature from the beginning, or when was it introduced?

10:00 AM

anyone feeling kind?

a colleague just plucked up the courage to ask his first question on SO (stackoverflow.com/q/9274423/11410), someone please answer it... before he concludes that it's a waste of time :)

Without mentioning me, obviously, otherwise it looks too much like cheating :D

@CodeInChaos Didn't have it from the beginning, that's for certain

10:13 AM

I just ran into this, and wondered. Is this a hostile takeover? Sock puppetry in action? The result of sublime understanding out of pure love for each other? Something planned carefully behind the scenes, using some other means of communication? I'm not sure what to make of it.

@CodeInChaos they were added in september 08, shortly before the public beta

@sbi The similar avatars make me suspect that the accounts belong to the same person.

@CodeInChaos That's certainly one of the possibilities, yes.

OTOH, it's an Android droid. They are probably not specifically rare among Android devs.

Do flags get automatically closed as helpful when a question gets closed?

10:28 AM

@CodeInChaos yes

Well, it seems the interest in my observation is, um, limited, so I'll bow outta here. See yah!

1 hour later…

11:42 AM

yawns Ugh, it is far too early..

11:59 AM

@TimStone are you east coast US?

Aye

that is quite early :)

Well, it is for me anyway, heheh. Unfortunately I couldn't force myself to stay awake last night to finish up some boring report-making, so I set an early alarm to hopefully take care of things in time for my meeting later.

3 hours later…

3:19 PM

I'mma break this thang

3:31 PM

@jadarnel27 Whatchu gonna break?

I need to work

@Moshe Haven't decided. Any suggestions?

@jadarnel27 How about his f*$%*@# face?

@mootinator Seems a bit harsh, Fred Durst.

=)

Damn, that always seems to be the first suggestion to come to mind.

I hope you know I pack a chain saw...

WHAT?

I think it would be fairly difficult to hide the truth about whether one was actually packing a chain saw.

3:38 PM

WHAT?

@mootinator I'm not sure what's worse: That you are referencing a Limp Bizkit song, or that I caught the reference and am participating.

Answer: yes.

LOL.

Hey guys - I was looking at this post dealing with the deletion of some "high profile" posts. Is there any efficient way of extracting all the info from the answers? Obviously you could go into each answer and copy the markdown - are there any userscripts perhaps that anyone has heard of?

3:55 PM

I am not a unicorn.

I am not a grue.

I am.

I am...

I... am...

I am anticlimactic sometimes.

walks away

I am immortal.

I have in me the blood of kings.

(* crickets chirping *)

@mootinator If you are immoral then you shalt be stoneth or something like that.

You have to chop my head off, then you can be struck by lightning.

Fact: Sunflower seeds make for a good snack while coding.

2

@mootinator crafts an axe

3:57 PM

@Moshe - just don't throw the shells on the floor ;)

@Lix crafts plastic cup

Right, throw them at your keyboard.

Or out the window.

@Moshe - one cup is enough? Bet its [stack]overflowing

2

@Lix I bet you're fishing for stars. :P

One cup is never enough.

I need a quad cup sunflower seed shell thingy. I could put a sticker on it that says Spittle Inside.

4:00 PM

@Moshe - fishing for stars?? Not at all!

Yea, that would be dumb. The stars you see in the water - they're reflections of the stars in the sky.

Actually i'm fishing for an SO2PDF alternative :P

Go back to fishing for fish.

@Lix SO2PDF?

Readtime Error: SO2PDF is undefined.

I want to save one of the questions talked about in the "great deletion of 2012" - I found this but it all leads to broken links :(

StackOverflow 2 PDF :P

Oh, ok.

You just gave me an idea.

/afk

4:16 PM

What about starfish?

back

Anonymous

@Lix Which one are you particularly trying to save?

4:29 PM

@JeremyBanks - the vim one...

specifically the super-aweome-all-mighty-highest-voted answer

I have already backed up that answer - but if there is a way to export it all I would prefer that. I'm sure there is loads of useful info in the other answers..

@Moshe - success? :)

Anonymous

Did you try StackPrinter? It seems to work, if suboptimally. (Luckily this question hasn't been deleted yet.)

@Lix What?

@JeremyBanks - I knew there had to be something that could help me! Thanks a million! Yes - luckily I was fast enough :P The content looks great actually - only the comments are a bit whacky to look at in that form...

I love when a client sends a bug which boils down to "I assume you implemented this spec wrong, even though I didn't bother trying it."

@Moshe - chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/868277#868277

4:35 PM

Because then I can bill for a few hours of not actually doing anything.

* not actually something I do.

But it sure is tempting.

@mootinator RAWR. that sounds frustrating.

Anonymous

@Lix I've also been looking into making something more permanent (which can use 10k credentials to save deleted threads as well), but came to agree with what Pekka said yesterday: doing it right is a lot of work, so we really should see if SEI couldn't be persuaded to handle it themselves.

@mootinator Actually, you should just respond with a message that says "RAWR". And a picture of a dinosaur.

lol

@JeremyBanks - I agree... (I seem to be agreeing to almost everything Pekka says :) Luckily there was substantial "warning" about the deletion of such high profile posts...

Anonymous

4:42 PM

Pekka's astonishingly agreeable. :P

@jadarnel27 Sort of an odd thing to think. "Last month this report printed the YTD values, which was okay for January, but this month I need monthly values."

Errr, okay.

Indeed :P

Last month was January, right?

@mootinator - January 2012...yes

;)

4:49 PM

@JeremyBanks - would you say that it would be acceptable for me to add a link to StackPrinter in the post about deletion? Something on the lines of : "For users interested in preserving the info for themselves"

Anonymous

@Lix Sure. I'm surprised somebody hasn't already.

wonders when he is going to get sick of Skrillex as shrill noises and grinding to code by.

First CW edit :P Ohh yea! :)

@Lix No need to star everything @JeremyBanks says ;-)

I mean, I like him as much as the next guy, but...

Feel free to star everything @mootinator says though. It's the only satisfaction I ever get.

4:57 PM

But its true!! :) Pekka IS agreeable and I AM surprised that no one has done that yet :P

LOL. Fair enough =)

And and and and... :P StackPrinter helped me out too :P

There's nothing wrong with the gamification of every form of social interaction.

2

NOTHING I say.

Anonymous

@mootinator I'd star that.

3

@Lix Ah, well. I went afk for something else. Turns out that my idea has been request before.

4:58 PM

@Lix There is a "two girls one cup joke here", I'm just too lazy to make it.

@jadarnel27 - its just rule #34 :P

Stop starring. I want my Fact to stay on the sidebar.

4

@Lix This will suffice for my joke.

Which is really Randall Munroe's joke.

Mmm. A domain squatter snapped up my 2unicorns1cup.com domain.

How silly.

Do I get notified when a CW edit I made gets approved?

@mootinator What the hell can anyone use that domain for???

5:01 PM

Precisely.

@Lix I used it as a joke birthday gift last year.

@mootinator - you have a very twisted bunch of friends :P

I'm not sure why anyone else thought it had value, unless they just buy everything which expires these days.

Maybe someone bought it so that no one else could EVER use it again :P

maybe your friend did't particularly enjoy your little present :P

Anonymous

@mootinator A few incoming links from chat.SO is probably high enough PR for a squatter to care. -_-

@Lix It was very similar to this:

user image

5:05 PM

@mootinator - ok... THAT.......was a lot better than I thought :P

@JeremyBanksʬʬʬ Hah.

This question is awful and off-topic and now has 5 answers. Seriously? It's also probably an egregious duplicate.

Anonymous

ohwait, they're probably nofollowed.

@JeremyBanksʬʬʬ That doesn't actually deter stupid link spammers, why would a domain squatter care :P

Anonymous

=P I was thinking the nofollowed links would prevent the doman from getting enough Google-juice to be worth buying... guess not.

Anonymous

5:08 PM

@jadarnel27 Proof of Not Constructiveness by Example: the answers. Voted.

@JeremyBanksʬʬʬ Thanks. That's a very good point, as well.

Next question: "Is there any advantage to using ?? over the ternary operator?"

I mean I just can't see why I'd use var foo = bar ?? "bar"; instead of var foo = (bar == null) ? "bar" : bar; without asking SO.

Possibly a simple question for votes - like this other one.... I can't claim to know anything about C# however... just saying :P

At least the answer with a ton of votes uses a lambda function. Which many people don't even realize C# supports.

that's like JavaScript anonymous functions correct?

5:19 PM

@Lix Correct.

Though I didn't really think of them being equivalent until recently.

Anonymous

@Lix Lambda also define anonymous functions, but they contain a single expression which is implicitly returned, rather than a list of statements.

Anonymous

var square = (x => x * x); # c#? (correct me please)

@mootinator - I hear that used in this fantastic JavaScript talk - youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook

Anonymous

oops

And you always explicitly bind arguments in C#.

Anonymous

5:24 PM

var square = function(x) x * x; // firefox only
var square = function(x) { return x * x; }; // standard, probably wouldn't be called a lambda syntax

Anonymous

@mootinator What does that mean?

Anonymous

Oh

Anonymous

Mine can't infer the types from context, so I can't define it like that? Oops.

Ehh something like that.

I'm pretending to know more than I do at this point ;)

@JeremyBanksʬʬʬ @JeremyBanks - why would you need to know this statement only works in firefox?

Anonymous

5:28 PM

Well, I like to know of it because it's cool and so if I'm ever working on something Firefox-only I can use it.

Anonymous

Maybe it'll be in Chrome within a couple years, too.

I suppose jQuery gets most of its magic variables from context.

Anonymous

Err, I mentioned it because it's most equivalent to the C# lambda.

@JeremyBanks - well thats kinda my question... what would require "firefox only"?

Anonymous

Oh, just because JavaScript originally didn't support that, and Firefox are the only ones who added support for it. Because the syntax was made to look Java-like, it only had the standard function() { ... return ...; }.

5:30 PM

Ahh - I see..

Anonymous

Err, it's never been part of the specification/the standard. Firefox includes a lot of experimental features in their engine. It's proposed for inclusion in one of the next standards, I think.

I guess i've only ever gone for stuff that works on the maximum number of platforms...

Groovy: def double = { it * 2 }

Can't be picky about your users.... umm... present company excepted ;)

Anonymous

Nice.

Anonymous

5:32 PM

Indeed. I was learning the Firefox-isms when I was planning to write a Firefox extension, where it would be reasonable to use Firefox-only syntax.

ahhhh - well there you go... :) Ok...

considers whether he really needs to define an Object which happens to currently be just an integer.

6:03 PM

Comment involving lunch plans.

Words of praise for fish food.

Riposte.

\o/ references!

Er...I mean, ADDON RIPOSTE

CCCCCOMBO BREAKER

LOL.

6:50 PM

Hey guys, I flagged my own question for migration to serverfault, but after two days it only has two votes (one of them being my own). What's your experience, should I still wait for votes or simply delete the question and repost it on serverfault?

link?

We have votes.

0

Q: What are the most commonly used FTP servers and their supported FTP extensions?

While working on a FTP synchronization project I kind of hit a wall trying to deal with differences in implementation and non standards compliant behavior (for example that some servers seem to respond with 250 Directory created to a successful MKDIR). Thus I wonder if someone knows what the mos...

ftp features ftp-server

It was a bit more suitable for stackoverflow before my last editing ^^

Only two more to go, thanks :)

There's also chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/227/posse-comitatus if anyone's around.

Tthanks for the hint

1 hour later…

7:59 PM

Ooo voting... fun. :D

1 hour later…

9:02 PM

thank you too animuson ^^

9:22 PM

@RobertHarvey The bug report is specifically about the stars archive, though, with the point that having to copy and paste when the link would otherwise be auto-linkified is somewhat annoying. :P

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