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Search found 9 results on 1 pages for 'balpha'.

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  • Letting search engines know that different links to identical pages stress different parts of the page

    - by balpha
    When you follow a permalink to a chat message in the Stack Exchange chat, you get a view of the transcript page for the day that contains the particular message. This message is highlighted in yellow, and the page is scrolled to its position. Sometimes – admittedly rarely, but it happens – a web search will result in such a transcript link. Here's a (constructed, obviously) example: A Google search for strange behavior of the \bibliography command site:chat.stackexchange.com gives me a link to this chat message. This message is obiously unrelated to my query, but the transcript page does indeed contain my search terms – just in a totally different spot. Both the above links lead to the same content, and Google knows this, since both pages have <link rel="canonical" href="/transcript/41/2012/4/9/0-24" /> in their <head>. The only difference between the two links is Which message has the highlight css class?. Is there a way to let Google know that while all three links have the same content, they put an emphasis on a different part of the content? Note that the permalinks on the transcript page already have a #12345 hash to "point" to the relavant chat message, but Google appears to drop it.

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  • How do I disable microphone volume auto-adjusting?

    - by balpha
    My coworkers started yelling at me today because apparently I started screaming in their ears during a Google hangout. And sure enough, when I go to the Microphone settings dialog, I can see the level being auto-adjusted constantly; sometimes way too high. I don't think this has happened previously; at least nobody ever complained. Can I find out who is doing that auto-adjusting, and more importantly, can I turn it off? I couldn't find any related setting in the recording device settings. I'm using Windows 7 64bit, and (I'm mentioning this because the theory has come up that it may be related) I don't have Skype running.

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  • What's wrong with closing applications on Windows Mobile?

    - by balpha
    As far as I can tell, this annoys the crap out of people that do notice and (at max) gives no real benefit to people who don't notice: Why did Microsoft decide to make the "X" on Windows Mobile (or CE before that) not close, but only hide the application, and thus keep cluttering up your memory? WM wants you to go to the Control Panel - Memory and "Do you really want to" shut down the app. Pretty much every WM application I've seen that did not come from Microsoft has a "Quit" menu choice. The number of task managers out there that let you quit programs is larger than the count of emails from African bank managers that want me to take care of some millions of bucks that belonged to a deceased customer of theirs. My new HTC even comes with a close-able (not closeable, though) task manager pre-installed. But still today, Word Mobile just wants to hide, not be closed. I don't want to get a "That's M$hit, get used to it" answer; I really want to know: What in the world is the reason for this decision, and even more, for still sticking with it?

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  • Handling close-to-impossible collisions on should-be-unique values

    - by balpha
    There are many systems that depend on the uniqueness of some particular value. Anything that uses GUIDs comes to mind (eg. the Windows registry or other databases), but also things that create a hash from an object to identify it and thus need this hash to be unique. A hash table usually doesn't mind if two objects have the same hash because the hashing is just used to break down the objects into categories, so that on lookup, not all objects in the table, but only those objects in the same category (bucket) have to be compared for identity to the searched object. Other implementations however (seem to) depend on the uniqueness. My example (that's what lead me to asking this) is Mercurial's revision IDs. An entry on the Mercurial mailing list correctly states The odds of the changeset hash colliding by accident in your first billion commits is basically zero. But we will notice if it happens. And you'll get to be famous as the guy who broke SHA1 by accident. But even the tiniest probability doesn't mean impossible. Now, I don't want an explanation of why it's totally okay to rely on the uniqueness (this has been discussed here for example). This is very clear to me. Rather, I'd like to know (maybe by means of examples from your own work): Are there any best practices as to covering these improbable cases anyway? Should they be ignored, because it's more likely that particularly strong solar winds lead to faulty hard disk reads? Should they at least be tested for, if only to fail with a "I give up, you have done the impossible" message to the user? Or should even these cases get handled gracefully? For me, especially the following are interesting, although they are somewhat touchy-feely: If you don't handle these cases, what do you do against gut feelings that don't listen to probabilities? If you do handle them, how do you justify this work (to yourself and others), considering there are more probable cases you don't handle, like a supernonva?

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  • Accurately and securely measure the time spent viewing a web page

    - by balpha
    Suppose the following: You have a web page that presents a simple game to a user (e.g. a quiz, a puzzle, etc). The user solves the puzzle, submits the result, and you want to measure as precisely as possible how long they took to solve it. Assume it's quite simple, so we're talking seconds, not hours. Also assume JavaScript is required anyway, so there's no need to think of JS-disabled browsers. Finally, assume we don't want to use anything like Flash, Silverlight, or the like. I can think of several techniques: Simply take the time between the points when the data was sent from the server and when the submission arrives. Since this is exclusively server-side, there's no chance for cheating. However, issues like network latency and page rendering time might make this unfair for users with slow computers / browsers / internet connections. On the first request, just send the page without the actual game data. When everything is loaded so far, retrieve the game data through an AJAX call and populate it into the page. This is similar to 1., but reduces some of the caveats introduced through time spent on overhead. Have the time measured on the client side using JavaScript and submitted alongside with the solution. This would theoretically be the most accurate, but it introduces the possibility of cheating, because you're relying on client data. Use the request time headers of a "ready to play" AJAX call and the result submission request. Same caveat as 3., as it is still client data. A combination of server side and client side measuring with some kind of plausibility analysis. I can't think of a good way, but maybe you can. Thoughts? Other ideas?

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  • Asking browsers to cache as aggressively as possible

    - by balpha
    This is about a web app that serves images. Since the same request will always return the same image, I want the accessing browsers to cache the images as aggressively as possible. I pretty much want to tell the browser Here's your image. Go ahead and keep it; it's really not going to change for the next couple of days. No need to come back. Really. I promise. I do, so far, set Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400 Last-Modified: (some time ago) Expires: (two days from now) and of course return a 304 not modified if the request has the appropriate If-Modified-Since header. Is there anything else I can do (or anything I should do differently) to get my message across to the browsers? The app is hosted on the Google App Engine, in case that matters.

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  • Does SQL Server guarantee sequential inserting of an identity column?

    - by balpha
    In other words, is the following "cursoring" approach guaranteed to work: retrieve rows from DB save the largest ID from the returned records for later, e.g. in LastMax later, "SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE Id > {0}", LastMax In order for that to work, I have to be sure that every row I didn't get in step 1 has an Id greater than LastMax. Is this guaranteed, or can I run into weird race conditions?

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