Tavern on the Meta

The Unhandled Exception

12:48 AM

Wow, quiet in here on a Sunday evening!

Yi Jiang

2:00 AM

@TheUnhandledException It is, isn't it!

drachenstern

@YiJiang no, ... er yes ... er ... ouch, my head

Just for ya'll, I'm gonna make a photo montage of something ... bbiab

Yi Jiang

@drachenstern Yes it isn't, and no it is!

drachenstern

@YiJiang tehehehe ;)

The Unhandled Exception

@YiJiang I guess most people have "things" to do on a Sunday evening, whatever that may be. There's this thing going around, I hear it's called a "life". I don't know where to get one, but it seems like people who have one aren't online as much as those without one ;-)

Sorry, no autocomplete via XMPP @YiJiang ;-)

Yi Jiang

@TheUnhandledException It's Monday morning here, FYI :P

The Unhandled Exception

2:13 AM

@YiJiang It's 9:13PM Sunday here :-) How's Monday so far?

drachenstern

I think you can catch a life by going out and being around a regular group of people on a semi-regular basis. I guess that makes it communicable

Yi Jiang

@TheUnhandledException Asked a question on MSO complaining about the number of HTML5 attribute questions that have been appearing on SO lately

The Unhandled Exception

I've considered setting my computer clock to UTC and seeing if I can adjust, but haven't gotten the nerve up to do that yet ;-)

Yi Jiang

0

Q: Large number of HTML5 attribute questions?

I've noticed a recent uptick in the number of HTML5 questions about HTML5 attributes: 14th November What is html5 aria attribute used for? What is the definition of the HTML5 aria-* attribute in laymans terms? Can someone explain the HTML5 aria-* attribute? 13th November What values can t...

@TheUnhandledException Nah, I just add a clock for San Fran, New York and London. Seems to do the job

The Unhandled Exception

@drachenstern hahaha. Makes me glad I don't have one!!! ;-)

@YiJiang When I work with contractors in different time zones I add clocks for their local region to my OS X Dashboard

@YiJiang Sorry, had a few too many drinks to answer serious questions right now ;-)

drachenstern

2:20 AM

@TheUnhandledException I've done that too

The Unhandled Exception

I was working almost all weekend, save for Saturday night and tonight. And a few breaks today for XMPP bridge coding... I hate that!

wants my weekends back...

haha. sending messages via XMPP and then editing via web interface + @rchern 's userscript produces unusual, unexpected, undesirable effects :-)

heh, just checked and the Tunes room is frozen, that sucks! Maybe @balpha can unfreeze it?

chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/251/tunes

rchern

2:37 AM

@TheUnhandledException My script causes nothing of the sort. Blasphemy!!

drachenstern

The Queen has spoken. Long live the Queen. ;)

rchern

o:

Yi Jiang

@rchern You're right! The userscript is never wrong

That's why it isn't on the Wheel of Blame

@rchern on the other hand, is, so.... (hint hint) :)

rchern

|:

drachenstern

3:24 AM

my collage took long enough, I shouldn't chat so much, or watch movies :p

rchern

oy.

drachenstern

what I don't get is why my transparent background became black

drachenstern

3:50 AM

@rchern you don't like my picture I take it? I thought it ended quite well ;)

Chacha102

oy.

drachenstern

lol, three of you? ;) [yay edits!]

Yi Jiang

oy.

Chacha102

Lock up your house! Hide your families! It is here! It Is The Infamous: TRIPLE OY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2

drachenstern

lol

Chacha102

4:09 AM

> “Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.” (Jeff Pesis)

> “Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare.” (Blair Houghton)

> “The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.” (Henry Petroski)

> “There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” (C.A.R. Hoare)

rchern

@drachenstern I have no desire to look at pictures of bugs. (:

drachenstern

@rchern but it had a happy ending :p ... however you have my apologies, I didn't intend to make anyone feel uncomfortable

Chacha102

> “For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.” (Bill Bryson)

George Edison

4:35 AM

I've been busy!

This time, I've been working with the data dumps.

I'm making a tool that will allow you to view the dumps offline.

Currently, it's designed for AskUbuntu, but could easily be made to work with any other StackExchange site.

...and it's cross-platform.

rchern

Cool.

I found an import utility to dump it into a local sql instance on my computer and just query that generally.

drachenstern

@rchern did you ever determine how big it is deflated?

George Edison

For AskUbuntu, the posts take up about 9MB.

rchern

Cooking - 26.04546
Game Development - 17.63125
Gaming - 33.59988
Mathematics - 37.31009
Photography - 16.44743
Server Fault - 490.8481
Stack Apps - 12.79138
Stack Overflow - 11383.73
Statistical Analysis - 18.30191
Super User - 464.9769
Ubuntu - 30.62409
Web Applications - 22.93601
Webmasters - 15.20423

in megabytes, though I should differentiate between parent and meta

Michael Mrozek

4:52 AM

SO appears to be winning

...for now

rchern

FC - 21.93309  MFC - 4.11237
Game Development - 16.59937  Game Development Meta - 1.03188
Gaming - 28.70583  Gaming Meta - 4.894053
Mathematics - 32.9336  Mathematics Meta - 4.376493
Photography - 15.05525  Photography Meta - 1.392183
Meta Server Fault - 3.007199  Server Fault - 487.8409
Stack Apps - 12.79138
MSO - 203.9239  SO - 11179.81
Statistical Analysis - 16.4283  Statistical Analysis Meta - 1.873616
Meta Super User - 5.014089  Super User - 459.9628
AU - 28.0979  MAU - 2.526186
MWA - 2.597086  WA - 20.33892

drachenstern

wow, thems interesting numbers

George Edison

What about StackOverflow? :)

That would bring my browser to its knees... though it is amazingly fast at parsing the XML. (It's written in C++.)

drachenstern

SO - 11179.81

George Edison

Wow.

rchern

4:57 AM

5.33gb of that is post history though.

drachenstern

That leads me to believe that there's nearly as much history as there is content then?

George Edison

No wonder they upgraded their database server :P

drachenstern

what for 11GB of data?

George Edison

With that much data, yes - it's no surprise.

rchern

2

A: How much disk space does SO take up?

It was 12gigs compressed a few months ago, probably up to about 15gigs compressed (50 gigs uncompressed) It is not a particularly huge database, most of the storage we have is taken up by history and indexes. Fitting most of our data in RAM is one of the reasons our performance is so awesome (t...

drachenstern

5:03 AM

I remember the question but the answer I don't seem to have seen before now

hmmmm

rchern

Now you have. (:

drachenstern

:)

you almost had me posting a backwards smiley ... I had the ( but I put it on the wrong side of the :

Then I fixed it ;)

rchern

You broke it ):

drachenstern

I broke what? the backwards smiley?

Yi Jiang

@rchern Nay, you fix your smiley, then we can be friends again :)

Chacha102

5:08 AM

d:

rchern

@YiJiang My smilies aren't broken!

George Edison

Now I'm all mixed up!!!

Is it :) or (: ????

Yi Jiang

@rchern Humph... what do you know about smiles?

Chacha102

:)(:

drachenstern

@GeorgeEdison or is it (:)

I think I shall adopt the doublesmile

George Edison

5:10 AM

That's the middle section of a snowman!

drachenstern

or is it a universalsmile?

George Edison

Ya... maybe.

drachenstern

(:)

Chacha102

( . )

drachenstern

( : )

hmm, something to that idea maybe

sandbox!

Chacha102

5:11 AM

  _[]
  (.)
 ( : )
(     )

Yi Jiang

@drachenstern It's what O'Brien would want you to do in 1984

drachenstern

@Chacha102

ya ya

Yi Jiang

Everybody else who don't adopt the doublesmile is a smilecriminal!

drachenstern

> We've always been at war with Eurasia

Chacha102

@YiJiang I'm just going to stick with my snowman

rchern

5:26 AM

heh

Yi Jiang

@rchern Smilecriminal! You shall be sent to the Ministry of Love for some simlecorrection, unless you repent for the smilecrimes you have committed!

(Right clicks, adds "smilecrime" to Firefox's dictionary)

drachenstern

·) cyclops smile

Yi Jiang

@drachenstern -)

drachenstern

I liked it

Yi Jiang

Hmmm... stupid markdownmini

Chacha102

5:30 AM

( - )

Universal Cyclops Smile

rchern

@YiJiang ...

Yi Jiang

@rchern No hesitation! Or else we'll just vaporize you on the spot!

rchern

Riiiight.

|:

drachenstern

oh dear, what do we call this? |:|?

robot chest?

Yi Jiang

@drachenstern The sandwich

drachenstern

5:33 AM

lol

night all, time for boring forum time ...

Tim Stone

reappears

Yi Jiang

5:49 AM

@TimStone with a pop

Tim Stone

Err. :P

Tim Stone

6:00 AM

lmfao

The secret bit at the end of Black Ops is....interesting.

rchern

Does interesting happen to mean boring?

Tim Stone

More like "Who comes up with this stuff?"

Yi Jiang

@rchern Of course. rchern('interesting') === 'boring'

rchern

oy.

Yi Jiang

oy.

Yi Jiang

6:45 AM

0

Q: html in email using php is recieved as pure html code.

This is what i have so far <?php $_SESSION['name'] = $_POST['name']; $_SESSION['topic'] = $_POST['topic']; $_SESSION['message'] = $_POST['message']; $_SESSION['size'] = $_POST['size']; $_SESSION['deadline'] = $_POST['deadline']; $_SESSION['typeformat'] = $_POST['typeformat']; $_SESSION['style...

html html-email

pucks

Tim Stone

...

Is this question asking what I think it's asking?

o_o

Yi Jiang

@TimStone I don't know, I'm too busy trying to forget the code there

Tim Stone

@YiJiang Yeah, now I am as well.

shudders

radp

7:06 AM

<_<

>_>

Tim Stone

'Ello

radp

Hey.

Tim Stone

What are you being shifty-eyed about? :P

radp

7:40 AM

looking around if anybody is in the whereabouts here

radp

8:23 AM

ruby-forum.com/topic/174983

uninstall mysql following these steps:

1.   Open Terminal
2.   sudo nano /etc/hostconfig
3.   Delete the following line: "MYSQLCOM=-YES-"
4.   CTRL+x
5.   y
6.   CTRL+m
7.   Make sure MySQL is not running
8.   Open Terminal
9.   sudo rm /usr/local/mysql
10. sudo rm -rf /usr/local/mysql *
11. sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
12. sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/My*
13. sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/mysql*
14. sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MySQL*

You can guess how this ended.

Yi Jiang

The [holywar] tag still exists on SO.... X|

0

Q: HTML/CSS font color vs span style

What should I use? <span style="color:red">test</span> or <font color="red">test</font> and why?

html css holywar

radp

@YiJiang The what?

I think you're seeing tags, man.

Yi Jiang

@radp Yeah, must have been my fault

radp

I'm instead disappointed that the oy tag hasn't been made yet.

Let's keep the spoiler within the same screenful of that command list: step 10 has an excess space.

Yi Jiang

@radp Oh... man. /facepalm

The humanity. Looks from the replies on that thread it looks like some unfortunate souls have already done it

radp

8:36 AM

And this is why widespread edit powers are a good thing

Yi Jiang

WTH... *blink blink* percentDiscount = eval((sale/original)*100);

Brilliant. eval used for Math...

radp

eval(x) == rchern(rchern(x))

Yi Jiang

9:41 AM

▶ Watch Hi by Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo

radp

11:15 AM

So I attempted to compile a program on battery power from my arch USB

it was amusing watching powertop change from '20W (1.0h left)' to '181W (0.0h left)' in the space of three minutes.

it was less amusing, however, to learn that the remaining time estimation was correct.

w. t. f.

Yi Jiang

@radp Wait, so how long did it actually took to drain the batter? 5 min?

radp

I hope the battery wasn't fully charged...

Yi Jiang

So what were you trying to compile?

radp

4 mins of make + gcc. I've done this.before from ubuntu on battery power...

I guess arch didn't know how to downclock the cpu.

Yi Jiang

I wonder if there's a specific datatype for SQL tables to store ranges, like say [12, 14] or [100, 120], instead of storing it in two different columns

radp

11:23 AM

I was compiling my uni proj-- oh, who am I kidding, I was compiling crawl :D

@yij Even if there was it'd be stored as two vals anyway.

Yi Jiang

@radp Of course, but I'm kind of annoyed that I'll have to create *_max and *_min for every one of these range I'm storing

radp

you can't sanely map NxN to N.

You could store *_desired and *_tolerance if *_max and *_min bother you :P

Yi Jiang

@radp Uh... no thanks

radp

you're welcome anyway

can't you hide the column overflow with an ORM?

...heh, it'd prolly default to make a separate table with all possible ranges, all a join away!!

Yi Jiang

@radp ? I've erm... never used an ORM before

radp

11:34 AM

it's serialization to a db, with some fancy mapper-specific query system.

I only really used one with GAE.

django brings the specific query system fanciness to 11. Dunno about rails.

like, dynamically interpreted method names.

radp

12:08 PM

Heh, the battery now claims 7.5% capacity.

I'll call BS on that.

(and cross my fingers.)

radp

12:27 PM

   ╶─╮╶─╮▢ ╱       ╶╮ ╶─╮╭─╮
    ─┤ ─┤ ╱         │ ╭─╯├─┤mAh
   ╶─╯╶─╯╱ ▢       ╶┴╴└─╴╰─╯/384
↑ Charging  08% capacity

hrm.

Must be a bad reading.

radp

1:11 PM

arr

┌─╴╭─╮╶─╮▢ ╱    ╶─╮╶╮ ╶─╮╭─╮
╰─╮├─╮  │ ╱     ╭─╯ │   │├─╮mAh
╶─╯╰─╯  ╵╱ ▢    └─╴╶┴╴  ╵╰─╯/384
✓ Charged  08% capacity

right after I plugged the battery in and out

It's still a far cry of the original capacity, still :(

I wonder if I put a check to not show percentages larger than 999.

Benjol

Dupe for your consideration:

0

Q: Is it still worth obfuscating email-addresses to prevent harvesting?

I was wondering, is it really worth the trouble to implement email-obfuscation techniques in order to prevent emails from being harvested these days? My initial thought is no but i might be wrong. My (possibly inaccurate) arguments: spam filtering and detection is superior these days (when look...

email spam-prevention spam

radp

1:30 PM

Do you have the interesting person badge? Well do ya, punk?

radp

3:11 PM

@YiJiang add the NSA to the blame list :P

If a MessageBox Shows and no user is there to click it, does it still appear?

rchern

3:24 PM

g'morning.

Yi Jiang

@rchern ''morning

rchern

(:

The Unhandled Exception

Good morning everyone!

Popular Demand

Hi.

Yi Jiang

Great! The whole crew is here. (or thereabout)

rchern

3:36 PM

There's a crew?

The Unhandled Exception

@rchern what I meant by my comments regarding the userscript last night was, I was trying to post a "/me" message via XMPP, and because of my fat fingers (or maybe multiple drinks) I mistyped "/me" as ".me". Then I had to edit via the web interface because I can't edit via XMPP, and when I did your userscript stripped the "/me" which I was trying to put in :-)

rchern

status-bydesign

The Unhandled Exception

and that reminds me, there's a major bug in XMPP write support, it looks for slash commands anywhere in the message not just at the start. grrr.

er

rchern

does too (:

The Unhandled Exception

ok. I now have a problem :-)

> (10:37:56 AM) The_tavern: Unknown Command "/me wants real me support"

rchern

3:38 PM

):

The Unhandled Exception

My XMPP bridge parses messages with "/me" as commands to the XMPP bridge! Meaning you can't send "/me" via XMPP at all! LOL

OK, time for a few quick fixes :-)

The Unhandled Exception

3:52 PM

@rchern or anyone else: If you're using the XMPP bridge, I am about to apply some changes so it will be up and down for a few minutes

I can't tell who's using it anymore because the users in the SO chat room now show up as XMPP users as well

rchern

I don't have it on now.

or up, or logged in, or whatever verb is appropriate there.

The Unhandled Exception

@rchern "logged in" would be best :-)

and actually, re "I can't tell who's using it anymore because the users in the SO chat room now show up as XMPP users as well" I just found out why, bug in my code

After the restart, hopefully XMPP users will show up as room moderators, and SO Chat suers will show up as normal users. We'll see...

rchern

Logging in feels weird when I'm not putting in a password (;

The Unhandled Exception

Good point. But you can, just use /fkey <blah> and /cookie <blah>

Assuming you trust me with your mso auth details, that is... ;-)

OK. "/me" support fixed and slash commands are now only interpreted at the start of a message, as they should be.

/me is happy

Popular Demand

4:11 PM

@rchern No password? Ooh, another way for me to impersonate you!

rchern

oy

@PopularDemand, I know that you think I'm so epic that you want to be me, but really, control yourself!

3

(:

Popular Demand

@rchern oy.

Tim Stone

Hahah. :P

radp

rchern

@PopularDemand q:

Popular Demand

4:23 PM

Whoa. You have to be a ninja to find the inline retagging button.

Michael Mrozek

I think most people probably know about it before hitting 10k

radp

@PopularDemand nah, I found it by accident.

Popular Demand

@MichaelMrozek I did, but forgot about it.

@radp Irrelevant, you are a ninja.

Anyone know of a tool to sort bookmarks with labels (like GMail) instead of with a folder structure?

Yi Jiang

@PopularDemand Firefox's bookmarks have a tag system, if that's what you're looking for

Popular Demand

@YiJiang Oh, wow. I never even saw that.

Firefox it is.

Tim Stone

4:36 PM

@YiJiang I remember there being great debate on how they should separate multiple tags, heh.

Yi Jiang

5:08 PM

Stars Wars weather — Kit·blog — Cristian 'Kit' Paul

5K degrees for Wednesday, then nothing else for the rest of the week. Hmm... Also, Death Star is now a weather, eh? :P

> Unfortunately there seems to be a glitch about Tuesday's high temperature and no readings from Wednesday on for some reason—we apologize for the technical difficulty. On the bright side, we have a new artificial moon called The Death Star and it's crescent is clearly visible and awesome. Enjoy.

Popular Demand

@YiJiang Oh, quit your worrying, it's just a moon with a big ol' crater in it.

rchern

Heh. That's a smart weather gadget. It knows the world is ending. |:

Popular Demand

@YiJiang Wow, you put a lot of effort into that HTML5 attribute question.

Yi Jiang

What is with Apple and their hugely exaggerated claims that makes you want to scream O RLY at them?

Michael Mrozek

@YiJiang Because their userbase flips out every time

Whatever happened with this?

Nov 5 at 2:41, by Jeff Atwood

question: do you think we should merge chat.serverfault, chat.meta.so, and chat.superuser into chat.stackexchange.com ?

Did they decide not to do it?

Popular Demand

5:25 PM

in Thoughts on merging on Super User Chat, 1 hour ago, by Ivo Flipse

roll up this joint and move us to SE

radp

I wish SE didn't have the HTML5 dependency.

--sent from my html5 uncapable mobile

Popular Demand

The discussion on Chat.SF seems even less active.

in Thoughts on merging on Super User Chat, Nov 12 at 12:26, by Marc Gravell

we're working on the localstorage issue - as discussed above

Yi Jiang

@radp Yeah... I'd think that maybe creating a separate account, then doing the association thingy would work

Popular Demand

I believe "above" refers to this:

in Thoughts on merging on Super User Chat, Nov 12 at 10:19, by Marc Gravell

@DMA57361 - there are no promises etc, but that is something we are giving serious thought to, i.e. enabling chat.SE on IE7. Watch this space...

So, there may not be a HTML5 dependency permanently.

radp

Any news about askubuntu's chat?

Michael Mrozek

5:30 PM

I thought they were staying separate because they have high traffic

Popular Demand

@MichaelMrozek What about Unix?

Michael Mrozek

Unix never had a separate chat

radp

Gaming has higher traffic.

Popular Demand

@MichaelMrozek So, then, AU is the superior site?

Michael Mrozek

Precisely

@radp Not sure then

Popular Demand

5:32 PM

@MichaelMrozek What have you done with Michael Mrozek?

radp

Do we have to sell our souls to VALVe to get the goodies?

Yi Jiang

@radp Probably :P A Valve branded SE site doesn't sound tooooo bad, heee

radp

Except one can't start now. Area51 and dupes, yknow.

I hope the team is as annoyed as we are by the special casing :P

I blame @rchern for not creating enough trouble with web apps.

Yi Jiang

@radp Yeah, she should have screamed and shouted and cursed and swore when they took the NTI domain away from her

radp

5:47 PM

she should've started googleoverflow, facebookexchange and asktwitter in concurrence with webapps

Yi Jiang

"Over my dead body, Atwood!" I would imagine her shouting, but noooo... she just gave up without a fight!

Okay, so maybe not. My imagination is slightly overblown today.

radp

To be fair, Jeff might have read her complaints

then noticed they were ended with ):

and Jeff misread that as :)

and decided she was cool with it anyway

WHY? OH GOD WHY DID WHY TRUST @RCHERN?!!

rchern

@YiJiang She pretty much did. >_<

radp

The bit I loved the most is how Joel said "one domain per site!" then gave the name to webapps then 180 degreed on the issue all on his own

with Robert having to handle and defend the change.

I guess I'm colouring this

rchern

I blame gaming.

If gaming had just come up with a name. q:

radp

5:54 PM

I do trust everybody involved to do their best

Yi Jiang

The fact is, that the "Elevator Pitch" questions just doesn't seem very inspired to me

8

Q: Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline

We closed the domain naming thread (click for details). Instead, let's start with a killer "elevator pitch!" Joel will be blogging about the elevator pitch approach to naming, but to get you started: The Elevator Pitch This isn't as easy as it sounds. Imagine the user who will never read your...

discussion featured elevator-pitch tagline

Generated 4 answers, none of which are anything more than slightly generic taglines copied and pasted from elsewhere

radp

The question on Gaming isn't much better.

Popular Demand

To be fair, I'm no good at generating elevator pitches, but now that that's said, I can't think of any effective elevator pitch I've ever heard.

Yi Jiang

And I've seen meta's that have been actively hostile to that idea

I think it was... Math? Where it got downvoted to -8

Popular Demand

@YiJiang No, Math's is at 0.

I'd be interested in seeing the -8 one, though.

radp

5:57 PM

StackOverflow isn't ExpertsExchangeMeetsWikipediaMeetsXBox.com

Yi Jiang

No, it was definitely Math. It might have gotten +8 after I read it a very long time ago though

0

Q: Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline

We closed the domain naming thread (click for details). Instead, let's start with a killer "elevator pitch!" Joel will be blogging about the elevator pitch approach to naming, but to get you started: The Elevator Pitch This isn't as easy as it sounds. Imagine the user who will never read you...

discussion featured elevator-pitch tagline

Read the comments, they don't seem very friendly to the elevator pitch idea

The first comment says it all:

> 18 All these examples are awful; why do we need such a thing? – Robin Chapman Oct 9 at 15:24

Transcript for