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01:00 - 15:0015:00 - 23:00

1:21 AM
@moguzalpenel_hak Interesting. This is borderline-offtopic, but you might try asking on seasonedadvice.com
 
 
1 hour later…
@jadarnel27 heh
 
@jadarnel27 That's nothing, I flagged him on Stack Overflow because he changed his username to "Ms Dildo"
 
@animuson Wow. Just wow. What is he, like 12?
 
@jadarnel27 Don't insult 12 year olds like that.
 
Hahaha
 
2:49 AM
@animuson Apparently, that's already been acted on.
 
Obviously... :)
 
@TwilightSparkle That's classy right there.
Also, weird that the network profile doesn't onebox.
 
It's sad because he went from an awesome question with 10+ upvotes to two horrible questions with 10+ downvotes and inappropriate name changing.
 
Indeed.
 
2:57 AM
Hi
Interesting...
Check this out folks:
 
 
1 hour later…
4:10 AM
Found a new chat room, it seems.

 Game Development

Game development and other polite discussion. Game development...
Yay.
Bye empty tavern of emptiness.
I'll be around.
 
You cannot leave. It is forbidden. Rebecca will find you!!!
 
4:38 AM
You are an odd guy, @Moshe.
 
4:55 AM
How does one search for links?
As in, search for URLs in posts
The url: option, right
 
 
3 hours later…
Lix
7:30 AM
please help get rid of this far too localized question...
-2
Q: PHP notice and warning logs

Alaa BadranI have a website with custom PHP code. I noticed that log files are very huge because they contain lot of Notice and Warning errors. These errors are not shown to visitors, they are only logged. One of the most notice i get is: Undefined index:  p in /var/www/vhosts/........tpl.php on line 81 My...

 
 
1 hour later…
8:40 AM
@Lix I can't think of a better response than "Fix the bleeping errors, you $#@!!&#*!!!one-eleven!!" to that.
 
Lix
True true - but that high rep user really got under my skin with that answer...
 
Yes, he should have gone into more detail.
 
 
1 hour later…
9:52 AM
@Lix that particular user has a habit of posting smug "holier than thou" answers
I just found a user with 400 questions that don't appear to have a single capital letter in them
 
Ouch!
Fixable or deletion fodder?
 
10:07 AM
quite a few bad ones, but not all it seems (stackoverflow.com/questions/10396056/… was the first I spotted)
 
That one's pretty terrible.
 
Lix
How on earth did he get to 2K with posts like that?
 
brute force approach I think
of 11 answers 9 are accepted self-answers and 2 were plain NAA
 
@DanielFischer The flags were already dismissed :)
 
Ah, good. I don't continually refresh the page ;)
 
10:11 AM
I asked the user to post their solution, and they did
makes you hopeful that not all users are bad ;)
 
I'm not even sure it's a majority.
 
1
Q: Calculate statutory public holidays for Victoria Australia

Vivian FarrellHow can I calculate statutory public holidays for Victoria Australia using PL/SQL?

^was that action wrong?
 
@APC - possibly. I was under the impression that flagging things which are self-fixable was considered bad and given the localised nature of the underlying question I suspect most moderators would have just closed/deleted rather than making an answer. (I'm not even sure if they have a tool for this scenario or not) — awoodland 3 mins ago
mods don't, but devs do :)
I can set the answer owner to be the OP
 
Should I be flagging rather than editing in those cases?
 
Maybe just start with a comment first, explaining that self-answering is fine and encouraged, but asking to use the standard Q&A format. I don't see a huge issue with your action though
it should be mentioned that we have something in the work that's precisely made for this use case
 
10:21 AM
@balpha a tool for us motal users?
 
A special kind of "question" that's explicitly a "I already know the answer" kind of thing. Too many people think that self-answering is bad, or (as in this case) do it incorrectly
 
interesting
 
Mat
Anyone know how you can remove a tag from a "merge stub" thing like this thing ? Trying to clean up the advantage tag.
 
@Mat Don't think you can
Try flagging to ask a mod to delete it
 
I removed it
only moderators can edit those stubs (or any locked posts)
 
Mat
10:28 AM
thanks @balpha. I guess I'll just pop up here if I found more of those :)
 
in this case someone else had already flagged it, so it would have been removed sooner or later
 
11:11 AM
Whoa lost 283 meta reps yesterday (deletion)
but I'm still_ on the top of the MSO rep leagues
(even though im on vacation with little or no net access)
 
Lix
I got my fanatic badge today :P
 
strange... Sleepy week, meta?
@Lix Still a month to go for me
but 11 days on physics.SE
back to no-internet mode
 
Lix
hehe.... we'll we're both on the first page of rep by year.... sweet
 
11:42 AM
Heh, nice rep on Physics, @Manishearth.
 
Lix
give those humans repetition... humans love repetition...
 
@Lix But this one's even special, it's four fours. It's meta-repetition.
 
Lix
oh wow...
shweet :P
 
Lix
12:15 PM
Suggested edits to be approved as part of the 2012 clean up -
 
@jadarnel what makes me odd?
 
@Lix too late, he and animuson used almost all of my votes today.
 
Lix
Again? :P hehe... well... people are working hard :P
 
Yeah, but the cleanup is bad for my reject rate.
 
Lix
eh! What are the chances... Another LIX...
from iran...
 
12:27 PM
@Moshe I don't know. I'm not a psychologist.
 
It looks like users have begun making suggested edits to remove the recently added logos to tag wikis.
I'm for this, but thought I'd check here to see if there were opinions about approving them before I go and get involved in a suggested edit war.
11
A: Company logos on tag wikis; are they allowed?

Shog9Even though I love pictures, this seems sorta pointless. Since it doesn't appear on the tag page (unlike the for-pay sponsored tags), it doesn't do much for advertising, and they take the place of actual content. I guess I could sorta see iPad / iPhone since those are actual devices and... Mayb...

 
Lix
@rob - yea I've seen them too... I've been approving them - I agree with shog's post...
 
Same here.
 
Lix
looks nice - but it is a waste of space at the end of the day...
 
Yeah. And some of those logos are friggin huge.
Ok. And then what about all of these SEs that are removing the [vb] tag? There are tons of those.
 
12:38 PM
103
Q: The great Stack Overflow tag/question cleanup of 2012

casperOneIn the process of removing the discussion tag from Stack Overflow, I came across a number of other tags which I don't see much use for. They really can't stand on their own to help categorize a question and should probably be removed. Don't just remove the tag, review the question and fix anyth...

 
Ah, okay. Seemed like a more drastic change.
 
vb - 1403 (make sure to replace with the appropriate Visual Basic variant if not already on the question)
 
I've seen a lot of them being rejected. I'm not sure if some reviewers just aren't aware of the cleanup effort happening?
 
Probably.
Not a lot of people hanging out on meta.
 
I've rejected a few, but only to try to notify the editor that they should be fixing all of the problems with the post (when there are more things to fix).
 
12:40 PM
That's good.
If there's only little more to fix, 'improve' yourself.
 
Yep, done that as well.
People (especially reviewers) ought to have more participation (or at least lurking) on meta. It'd help put us on the same page. There's so much disparity right now with review decisions.
 
Very good.
 
"Your program just needs a little change. You know you will bang your table after reading the solution :D" <--- Inappropriate.
(I'm very mature)
 
Must be a pretty exciting little change?
 
Someone accidentally "head on the"
 
12:47 PM
@RobHruska Hahaha
I realize (from the rest of the answer) that it's just poor English, but I couldn't help being amused by it =)
 
Indeed
 
I have trouble with /review answers that are borderline NAA (so I don't really want to flag), but I'm also not knowledgeable enough about the subject to feel ok about downvoting. Like here and here.
What do you guys think should be done with this answer? It seems like a legit attempt to answer the question, but that random link on the first word looks like spam.
Edit out the link? Or flag for mod attention? Or both?
 
Looks like the dude's blog.
... which is full of random crap
Well, maybe not. I guess I can't tell if it's just advertising content or actual written stuff.
Its presence in the answer doesn't make any sense, though.
 
1:03 PM
Kill the link, leave the content
 
I'd edit it out for now, it's just a one-time offense.
 
@RobHruska That you cannot tell is probably not a good sign =)
 
(or potential offense)
 
Awesome. Thanks for your feedback guys. Done.
> Removed somewhat arbitrary link.
 
@TimStone @RebeccaChernoff elections.stackexchange.com has failed us yet again :P
 
1:14 PM
Yeah, I saw that. :/
I think it's still running the old code, but I'm not sure where I left off with the updates.
I'm going to try and get that taken care of this week; hopefully Rebecca can restart it in the meantime, since maths and skeptics are up at the moment.
 
I just pulled in the repo to see if I can monkey patch in some code that will allow people to link to elections for individual sites directly
 
Hi. Is it possible to send a message to "moderators" (for stackoverflow)? If so, how?
 
I've got the code running locally so I can play around with it
 
Ah, nice. No more obscure node issues?
 
No, I see that you've moved most of the dependencies to a lib folder
Stupid XSS restrictions means that I have to emulate a server using localhost instead of working with the files from the hard disk directly
var connect = require('connect');

connect()
  .use('/', connect.static(process.cwd()))
  .listen(8000);
 
1:17 PM
Yeah, I think I managed to remove all of the non-JavaScript dependencies
 
The client side code assumes it's running off stackexchange.com
 
Does it?
 
Lix
@boh - whats seeems to be the problem - we might be able to help...
 
Actually, no. Hang on, let me see...
 
Oh, well, it's just expecting there's a proxy there.
I have nginx installed on my machine, I think the live site is using Apache.
 
1:20 PM
Why does it think localhost:8000/ is part of the site name
Well, I have no idea why this code is here... great
 
I'm confused. :P
 
var requestPath = source.replace('http://', '').replace('.com/', '/'),
    electionPage = source.replace(/\?.*$/, '');
This code in the first lines of getUserInfo switches the URL from absolute to relative
But I have no idea why I did this
 
Because we have to proxy it through the current host
To avoid the XSS restrictions.
 
That, and also to conveniently add the api prefix to the site name
I remember now
 
Aye
Then it uses the absolute URL somewhere as the direct link to the elections page.
 
1:25 PM
Or some sort of proxy
 
Yeah
 
It expects some sort of proxy to be running there, right. Uh, I can set this up I think... it was only a few lines in PHP, it should be a few lines in node too
 
I've got the nginx configuration somewhere too if you give up and go that route. Doing it in node with the right modules shouldn't be too hard though.
"BREAKING NEWS - U.S. stocks open little changed as investors await domestic data on manufacturing, auto sales and earnings."
...
Really CNN?
 
var connect = require('connect'),
	request = require('request');

connect()
  .use('/', connect.static(process.cwd()))
  .use('/', function (req, res){
  	var urlParts = req.url.split('/');
  	console.log('http://' + urlParts[1] + '.com/' + urlParts[2]);

  	request({ url: 'http://' + urlParts[1] + '.com/' + urlParts[2] }, function (error, response, body) {
  		if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
		  res.end(body);
		} else {
			console.log(error);
		}
  	});
  })
  .listen(8000);
 
"BREAKING NEWS - Nothing newsworthy is happening, because people are waiting for news."
 
1:35 PM
The world's worst proxy (TM)
But hey, it works
 
:D
 
@TimStone LOL. Their definition of "Breaking news" is a bit off, I think.
 
Two things I want to add - first, a "loading" thingy that shows before the list of sites have loaded, and second, something that'll allow someone to link directly to a site's election page
I think I know how to do both
Oh, and I should have my former self to apologies to my current self for writing such shitty code back then
 
Hahah, it's not that bad.
 
It's bad not on the "hey, if I take these five lines of code I can send them to the Daily WTF" level of bad
 
1:44 PM
:P
 
It's just that this style of procedural only coding makes everything a mess for any script that is larger than 100 lines
There's no structure to speak of, it's literally one 1000 line file. (At least it's not one 1000 line function)
 
I'm sure my node code is worse
 
It's not too bad. That said, you wrote this line didn't you
        item = $('<li data-sitename="' + site.url.match(/^http:\/\/(.*?)\.com\/?/)[1]  + '">'
            + '<img src="' + site[image] + '" alt="' + site.name + ' icon" />'
            + site.name + '</li>')
 
My node code brings all the boys to the yard.
2
(maybe that's not a reference people in here would get. Or that I should get)
 
I laughed myself into coughing
 
1:47 PM
Hahaha
 
2:01 PM
I'm about to rewrite this entire freaking app in C# so that I never have to look at vb.net again.
I think that's a very worthwhile use of my time, actually.
 
I agree
 
Lix
This OP seems to be having troubles making up their mind :P
 
0
Q: Prompting for further information

user1367351Today is my first day using stackoverflow and as such I cannot yet comment - as you need 50 rep points to do so. As such adding answers is my only way to communicate, that I know of. How would you suggest I interact with the question-asker and prompt for further information without being lamba...

 
@Lix Aw, that's sweet. He was trying to accept all of the answers =P
 
@jadarnel27 I assumed it was a case of pressing the wrong damn button on a touch screen
 
2:05 PM
@awoodland Ah, that could be it too. Perhaps they were trying to upvote all of them, and kept hitting accept / unaccept.
 
Lix
Hehehe - @awo, I'm going with @jad 's option ;)
 
\o/
 
Lix
woohoo! 4K on meta... I would like to thank all of you for putting up with my ramblings and for the votes :P
2
and for those stars... ;)
 
And for all the fish?
 
Lix
2:15 PM
:P And for the fish...
 
Hey, if 5 of us downvote @Lix, we can do this again soon!
 
Hi guys
What can I do in case of a serial downvoter?
 
Lix
@jad - lets..... not do that... :P
 
@jadarnel27 Where's that from?
 
I must have p****d someone off, for the past 3 days I'm getting 10-20 downvotes per day for questions. WTH?....
 
2:17 PM
@LuchianGrigore If it's bad enough, the system will catch the serial votes and reverse them within 24 hours or so.
 
@LuchianGrigore it should get reverted automatically overnight
 
That's what happened the first time, but it's freaking frustrating
Makes me wish I had the power to punch people over TCP
4
 
@Moshe Could you be more specific?
 
Lix
@luc - Oh oh oh - I want that too!!!
 
@LuchianGrigore wow that's sneaky, it looks like they're gaming it to avoid the fraud detection
 
2:19 PM
"So long and thanks for the fish"
 
@Moshe I'm not sure which one of why messages you're referring to =)
 
Ah, Google says it's from the Hitchhiker's Guide
 
@Moshe Oh, right. Exactly!
 
There are renditions on iTunes.
Cool.
 
at least the ones yesterday and today
 
Lix
2:19 PM
LAAAGGG :P
 
Just a heads up, but I've seen http://*.fixtoolbox.com/ spamming SE sites
Saw them on SO today, and Ask Ubuntu for quite a while now
 
@LuchianGrigore the ones from 2 days ago have been reversed already
but the others look like someone who's figured out how to play it safe to avoid the filter
 
@awoodland I know
 
@Moshe Nice. Have you read the books, or seen the movie?
 
So
What to do?
 
2:21 PM
@jadarnel27 Nope.
 
I guess it's self-flag and say it looks like someone figure out how to avoid the filter
either that or meta
 
@awoodland I already posted this on meta and it got closed (too many duplicates)
 
The world's about to be destroyed. There's no point in getting all annoyed. Just lie back and let the world desolve. So long so long so long so long. And thanks for all the fiiiiiish.
 
Lix
@luc - to be fair, I don't think it'll affect you that much... even if you loose 13K you'll still be in the highest ranks of privileges...
 
Owl City is good stuff too.
 
2:23 PM
Still sucks
 
@LuchianGrigore edit that question with details of the fact that the ones you show were reverted but the sneaky ones that look like they've wised up and I'd vote to re-open
 
someone really went out of their way to systematically downvote me
 
Lix
oh yea... defiantly sucks - you have all the rights to be pissed!
 
the problem isn't serial downvoting, it's people learning to avoid being spotted
make that clearer in the question and it's not a dupe
 
Lix
We can just start deleting users and see when you get most of the rep back.... should work... close enough :P
 
2:25 PM
:)) that would work
 
if people are learning and avoiding detection that's presumably something that devs would be interested in though
 
Is a . period valid in an URL fragment?
 
People are becoming just as annoying as dogs these days.
 
@mootinator If people are chewing up your furniture and defecating on your carpet, you need to find new friends =)
 
2:30 PM
@jadarnel27 I mean, learning how to get around boundaries we set for them. The nerve.
 
@YiJiangsProble_ Why not?
 
@Lix Yup, thanks
 
Lix
Looks like it is...
 
@mootinator Oh. That makes more sense. Perhaps we should try shock collars.
 
I haven't gotten around to doing that yet :(
 
2:33 PM
"From now on, every new Stack Overflow account comes with a free shock collar decorative necklace*!" * "Decorative necklace" must be worn at all times while participating on Stack Overflow.
4
 
Ok I edited the question
4
Q: How to deal with serial downvoting?

Luchian Grigore Possible Duplicate: What is serial voting and how does it affect me? I know there should be a script running and probably I'll get my rep back eventually, but I can't help taking this personally. I mean... WTH? This seems like a petty act. Moreover, I'm going for the Legendary badge,...

Can I just flag it to be re-opened?
 
Lix
I think you have enough unicorns here to reopen it :)
Perhaps an alternative title though... something to show that they are evading the voing fraud algorithms...
 
Ok, changed title
And no, I can't even vote to re-open
 
@LuchianGrigore got my re-open and upvote though
 
Lix
well not on your own question :)
mine too
 
2:36 PM
Thanks, much appreciated
 
This... this guy scares me. He's 18, and he's running for Math.SE moderatorship
 
Lix
@luc - you do know that from those screenshots people can see where you downvoted, right? :)
 
The only downvote there is stackoverflow.com/questions/10395359/…
And it's explained
 
Lix
Just an observation :P
 
Also, pokes @RebeccaChernoff again, just for good measure - can you poke the elections server again to see what's wrong with it
 
2:42 PM
If it were up to me, downvoting wouldn't be anonymous anyway
\:)
On the plus side, since they're appearing to only vote on questions (my guess is so that their own rep doesn't take a hit), there's only so many questions to vote on.
 
Have any of you folks ever repaired a computer monitor?
 
Lix
If there is anything worse than an anonymous serial downvoter... its an anonymous serial downvoter with a brain...
 
Nope, sounds dangerous :P
 
Lix
@jad - tried to get the fish out? ^_^
 
And fun. You may even get to actually touch liquid crystal, although that probably isn't a good thing :P
 
2:46 PM
@Lix Hahaha, that was good stuff.
@YiJiangsProble_ Yeah, that doesn't seem safe at all =D
 
Lix
@luc - almost there! just....one...more....vote.....
 
Sigh... if I were to write the elections page today, I'd go and read up about state machines and URL fragments first
 
My brother's 22 inch LCD monitor abruptly stopped working yesterday. So we (being total nerds) disassembled it.
One of the capacitors on the board has clearly exploded, which I imagine is the problem. But I don't know anything about replacing one of those things.
 
@Lix done now
 
Because essentially that's what all single page web apps are
@jadarnel27 Hmmm, did a fuse not blow first?
 
Lix
2:49 PM
WE HAVE THE POWER!
 
@jadarnel27 Buy new one. Get soldering gun.
 
@jadarnel27 it's fairly straight forward if the capacitor is big enough
I had a dual processor motherboard that failed on only one socket because of a capacitor that I fixed
the bigger capacitors have larger tracks which makes the soldering easier
 
@YiJiangsProble_ I don't really know what I'm looking at in there, the capacitor with the top blown off of it was the only thing that stood out =) How could I check that?
 
@YiJiangsProble_ Time for a rewrite!
 
@mootinator Where do you get those? Radioshack?
 
2:51 PM
Use the leaded solder instead of the stupid RoHS crap they put in everything now ;)
 
@jadarnel27 it's probably that that's the problem then - on the edge it'll have either a part number or a specification, capacitance (uF) and voltage normally
 
Wohooo reopened. Faith in SO restored
:D
 
@jadarnel27 You used to. They mostly sell useless junk now though I think.
 
@jadarnel27 Can't say, just that I'd thought there should be fuses to protect the circuit. An old television broke down a few years back, the only thing that was wrong was a blown fuse.
 
@mootinator That sounds less safe than touching the liquid crystals =)
 
2:52 PM
But when we replaced the fuse it promptly blew again, so there
 
@awoodland Yes, I think I saw that. I took a picture with my phone, I'll take a look.
 
@YiJiangsProble_ when capacitors fail you normally just get a voltage slightly out of range somewhere on some signal
@jadarnel27 any local electronics place will be able to sell you one and I'd be willing to bet eBay has a few
(are you USA based?)
 
@jadarnel27 I was joking :P Unless you do something really stupid the LC in the screen shouldn't leak out
 
When you blow a fuse you generally look for how you were abusing the thing, so you can correct the behavior or a short circuit.
 
@awoodland Yep, North Carolina.
@YiJiangsProble_ Oh, I realized you were joking. I just thought it was really funny =)
 
2:55 PM
@TimStone The problem is that the second half of the script that manages the Ajax queues and processing of the results also needs to be rewritten.
See, I am my own worst enemy
 
I used to use a 100 watt amplifier to drive an old phone ringer in a theatre. Had to replace the fuse constantly.
 
And we need to upgrade to the 2.0 API
 
@jadarnel27 I only know UK ones really, but some of them have US options, I think rs does
 
Unless I did that already, but I somehow doubt it.
 
@mootinator This did happen less than a week after I installed a beefed up PSU and graphics card. Could that really have blown his old monitor?
 
2:56 PM
@TimStone I thought you did already
 
I dunno, did I? >_>
 
Yeah, you didn't
 
I did not, no.
Unless I have local changes.
 
@awoodland They prefer to be called "THE SHACK" now =P
 
I'll just go change the 1.0 in the API URL to 2.0 and see if it'll work :D
 
2:57 PM
Hahah, if only it were that easy ;)
 
@jadarnel27 possibly not same RS: uk.rs-online.com/web
 
@jadarnel27 I wouldn't think you could blow an LCD monitor easily that way.
 
Hrm, I have no local changes, that is depressing. |:
self-shames
 
503 Service Unavailable :D
Yeah, that worked alright
 
@jadarnel27 alliedelec.com is the US distributor apparently
 
2:58 PM
Well, the URLs are different now, since they all feed off of stackexchange.com
 
Is there a simple migration guide for those of us who don't need much of the shiny new API 2.0 features?
 
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