@acl I suppose it's the same for many neighboring nations with a long history of conflict. At least in this case there were no minor religious disagreements involved otherwise hundreds of lives might have been lost

@OleksandrR. religion doesn't really come into it (luckily! imagine if they also noticed that they're christians/muslims...). But the whole thing is unspeakably stupid. and on a practical level the expenditure (both in money and in lost productivity due to compulsory military service) is mind-boggling.

it's just stupid

"it's just stupid" <--- can be said for all conflicts :)

but if they're over lots of oil, then at least there is something to fight over

@OleksandrR. They did not disappoint

what are greece and turkey fighting over? not in theory, in practice? (it's a rhetorical question...)

@rm-rf -16!

haha

"No girl wants a Java app for valentines day, you'd have a lot better chance of getting back together if you gave her something shiny and gold"

"I would suggest that if your course of action in response to a relational issue with your girlfriend is to ask programmers on the internet for java app ideas that -- rather than being part of a solution, that might be the problem"

@rm-rf oh dear... this poor user! I like the suggestion of using jQuery instead. Although I would have suggested either ALGOL 68 or Prolog. Those are clearly the most romantic languages.

@P.Fonseca Oh, this is just weird. If I restart Mma, sometimes I get the same, sometimes I get different times. If I've Import'ed in a working time zone, then Import'ing in Paris works fine; if I import Paris first, it's wrong. Cairo usually works fine, though a couple of times, I got the same as Paris. I never what you got for Cairo, though.

@rm-rf I'm going to put in a test for whether the engine is open or not, okay? It may not be open for two different reasons: 1. the mEngine executable is not running (it has not been started or it crashed). This we can detect from Mma. 2. MATLAB itself is not running. It may have crashed or someone has sent a quit command. I need to detect this in mEngine itself, so now I'm going to make a new function for it and expose it to Mma. Sorry for writing here, I' m not at home.

@MichaelE2 And more strange is the fact that I have 10 years of flow rate registers, every 15 minutes, exported to Excel from an automation unit (that is, nothing to do with Mathematica). And the excel files, when opened in excel, are totally OK with the exception of those same dates that were written in excel with repeated values for a group of four 15 minutes in a row (if you try the dates I gave you plus 15, 30 or 45 minutes, you have the same problem).

I then corrected the excel file, and still got the Mathematica import error. I thought that Mathematica was recovering the old value (I think there's and old value stored in the excel cell object), so I did some tests with a new file... All this to say that the error is either on the API that both Mathematica and the automation unit use to create and read the file, or it is an easy mistake (don’t know how, since dates are since Excel doubles formatted).

mma shows me why I shouldn't go for the immediate cheapest option! i.imgur.com/0H3DJZa.png <3 math

@AdamDreaver just be careful not to drop your $300 phone in your beer before 7 months are up

@OleksandrR. Oh gawd! I hope google gives me a warranty :( Good advice though

I'm going to have treat this thing likke a newborn, the warranty is terrible. I must askmyself, am I ready to be a father?

@OleksandrR. You haven't ever done that... have you?

@AdamDreaver no. I also don't have an expensive phone (I make a point to buy the cheapest one in the shop since I rarely use it)

@OleksandrR. I wish I could that, but I feel I need a decent phone for android development which will hopefully one day pay of this investment; at least that's what I tell myself for giving $300 to foxconn management and corporate CEOs and shareholders.

@AdamDreaver yes, fair enough. An interesting question will be whether different phone brands work similarly enough to be useful. If so you might as well install Android on your PC... Also, it's mainly the Apple phones that are made by Hon-Hai, isn't it? I think the other makers either do the assembly themselves or use different contractors

Hmm, my 2 minutes of research is inconclusive, but I would bet you're right that LG doesn't manufacture their products through Han-Hai.

@OleksandrR. I'm definitely testing out my software on an emulator as well as display phones at various stores :D But will it be nice to test my product on my own phone while I'm on the bus or what have you, so I can be in the shoes of the consumer.

@AdamDreaver if it's just for testing then you don't really need a SIM card anyway. just use it as a small computer

(also try to get LG to tell you if they offer some sort of warranty on the nexus 4; I did not manage to make any sense of my communications with them here, a month or so back, so in the end went with another phone--although who knows if the warranty actually means anything)

@acl that's a great idea, and with wifi, I can use VOIP if I do want to make mobile calls if I'm within open wifi(or closed depending on good the phone is for wardriving). If I buy directly from google play, they offer you a 1 year limited warranty ( dropping it in beer voids the warranty )

what was your other phone?

@AdamDreaver indeed, but I did not manage to get anybody to explain to me who'd actually honour it (google or LG--I'm in germany). I figured that if before selling it to me they were unresponsive, I'd rather not have to deal with them if there's a problem

@AdamDreaver samsung s3...

well not unresponsive, they responded. But I literally did not understand what they were telling me to do (and it was not consistent--they seemed to each point me to the other)

After seeing the Samsung hard disk warranty terms I decided it was easier just to buy new disks than hope for a warranty exchange of my two failed ones... moral of the story was don't buy Samsung products if you expect something to last

Hopefully LG would be better

@OleksandrR. google telling me to ask LG and LG to ask google did not make confident at all... I just want to have a well-defined entity to scream at if it breaks.

(I paraphrase, neither told me to ask the other literally!)

@acl for Samsung they said they would handle the warranty, but it turned out that you can only return the disks in lots of 50 in the original crate that they are supplied in, and also the web form to get an RMA number didn't work at all. Some warranty that turned out to be.

@OleksandrR. that is at least disingenuous...

@acl that and two out of three Samsung disks failing (I was lucky: a friend had four fail simultaneously, and lost his data as a result) convinced me to always buy WD disks in future

@acl oh yes, I nearly forgot... the terms also state that when Samsung receives the disk, it and all of its contents immediately become their property and they can do whatever they want with it while being under no obligation to replace it

@OleksandrR. that is incredible actually

@OleksandrR. yeah well I had 3 WD disks fail over the years, none of any other brand. so...

However Samsung's business was bought by Seagate now so nobody should suffer this indignity in the future

@acl I think it highly depends on the model. It seems all manufacturers go through stages of producing more or less reliable designs... Seagate 7200.11 was known for its failures, for example

@OleksandrR. it's possible but as I have no way of judging these things, I just make sure there is a well-defined entity, close to where I live, which I can attempt to force to fix the problem. it's more or less worked so far

the only time I did not manage to get my way was with fixing a minolta lens. they left fingerprints on an inner element (!) and then argued with me that they do not affect the image quality.

@acl that is just awful. What are they doing touching optics with ungloved hands anyway? Hardly inspires confidence in their choice of materials and quality of design

@OleksandrR. indeed...

well, minolta is now dead, so that's that.

fingerprints show incompetence, but to have some random guy lecture me (incorrectly) on how lenses work is what enraged me. oh well. this stuff depends on the specific person you're dealing with generally. the guy was a jerk. can't predict this sort of thing

@acl no, but that's the kind of unquantifiable thing that gives a company a poor reputation amongst consumers. Hire too many jerks and you'll go out of business...

it's certainly true that I never spent another euro on minolta equipment. so now I have around 15 lenses and 2 bodies, all nikon. it's not much money to a multinational but I like to think I did my bit to kill them

(I also badmouthed them at every opportunity)

Seems that Canon and Nikon are the only game in town these days. Although I bought an old Vivitar (Nikon-mount) lens from ebay for my experiment :)

Vivitar is dead too now, but some opportunist bought the name and they churn out cheap crap

@OleksandrR. I don't really keep current, but form what I see Sony is producing SLRs that take AF minolta-mount lenses. a photographer I know bought one and got rid of the nikon stuff he had acquired (by selling it to me for 20% of what he bought it for :) )

Vivitar mainly produced cheap crap to start with, from what I have seen of 3-4 of their old lenses that I've tried

well-made, but pretty bad optically

but maybe it's just the ones I used

(plus they're old, so maybe the coatings were worn off, somehow the baffles degrade or whatever; but they were indisputably flaring where even my phone didn't)

@acl I bought this one kenrockwell.com/vivitar/70-210mm.htm which seems fairly good

@OleksandrR. never seen it before. do you use it mounted normally or in some other configuration in your work?

@acl Nikon EF mount seems to be the standard for scientific work so you can buy the mounts from any optical supplier. I connected it to a few lens tubes with my own additional optics. Though it's not ideal from a transmission standpoint, it was much cheaper and faster than building my own zoom lens out of fused silica optics, and given that I'm not an optical designer, probably provides better image quality too

@OleksandrR. no doubt it was cheaper, faster and better than building your own zoom lens :)

@acl unfortunately all-quartz lenses are far too rare to be able to pick them up on ebay like I did this one. :)

hrm, i see new feed items here in chat, is the site up for only some people?

@ssch seems okay to me

@acl I'm applying for a visit to MPIPKS for this summer. If it works out we can meet up.

hey @rm-rf

hey

Did you see my meta post? Maybe I should have made it an answer to yours ... What I want to push through creating some guidelines and then organize a cleanup day.

Yeah, I saw that. Good initiative

Sometimes it takes as little as a single upvote.

Yes, but there are only about 20 such questions... the vast majority have no answers

Let's take e.g. this: it'd take a bit of time to read through Nasser's answer and decide if it should be closed by that single upvote.

@rm-rf Yep, that's useful. I think often there's not "answer" but there's a comment which is "good enough". After a week or two and no reply from the OP it may be okay to post them as answers.

I personally don't favour doing that, because if it is solvable and not localized, but no one's interested, it should remain "unanswered" until someone (possibly new) comes and answers it.

The reason I suggested this is that I have the feeling that on this site people always expect working code as the answer. On SO most often the answer is "you can do it this way, now go and try to implement it", and that is considered acceptable. Here I have posted an answer before which was sufficient to solve the problem but didn't give full code. It got zero upvotes.

(I'm not complaining about no upvote, I don't care about rep any more. It's just an illustration)

It is true that someone later came and posted full code though.

I understand... I have upvoted such answers in the past, so I'm not averse to them. On the other hand, I also only upvote answers that show a clear logical path forward for the OP to accomplish the goal themselves. Answers like "try to modify X to your needs", where X is complicated either gets no vote or in some cases a downvote (only to keep the question still "unanswered")

@Szabolcs send me a mail

@Rojo Found my code for the square spiral:

Sounds convoluted, but it's just trying to turn always right. If it can't, it goes straight ahead

@belisarius Similar: spiral[n_] := Graphics@Line@Flatten[{{-#, -#}, {#, -#}, {#, # - 1}, {-# + 1, # - 1}} & /@ Range[n, 1, -1], 1]

@ssch Not exactly, he wanted all intermediate coordinates, not just the corners. Check the result of my spiral@100

ah yea, I see all axes intersects

Not too far, anyway. I think your result can be transformed into mine with a minor effort

@ssch Not just the intersects. Each point is at Euclidean distance 1 from its predecessor

that they are

mathematica.SE is still down for me while Except[mathematica].SE all work, wonder what cache is causing this. They all have same IP so I doubt it's DNS, and same behaviour in links2, so it's not browser cache

@ssch try using 198.252.206.16

@belisarius Thanks! That's what host was resolving to, but thought I'd put it in /etc/hosts just to be sure, and saw I had the old IP fixed in there >.< weird that host didn't display the old so I could have realized it sooner

@ssch There are so many layers of indirection nowadays that checking where you are really pointing to is hard

@Rojo Somewhat better

How can I make Wolfram Alpha define variables at the bottom of the result when I solve an equation (for example x+y=10, where x=X Axis and y=Y axis)

@belisarius Sunny day, huh?

@Rojo Here in Hawaii is pretty good, yes

@belisarius Oh, nice

Sudden incredible amounts of rain in here :)

Thanks for the spiral

@Rojo You're welcome

@belisarius You've got a nice tan already

@Rojo Not to mention my silk groiner

How can I label wolfram alpha output?

@LukeAllen label in what way? assign to a variable?

just to annotate a variable for explanation, such as x+5=10, so x=5, and then have wolfram alpha just textually output "Where X is the answer"

or any text

or "Where X is the answer in Feet"

I don't know if it's possible without first extracting the answer and putting it together yourself

SetAttributes[waEval, HoldFirst];
waEval[input_] :=
 "Where " <>
  ToString@WolframAlpha[
    ToString@Unevaluated@input, {{"Result", 1}, "ComputableData"}] <>
  " is the answer"?

waEval[2+8]

sigh... @Rojo :)

@rm-rf Hey fellow spelunker