When I was a kid, I swear Tic Tac candies/mints/whatever were skinnier.

Anyone know the real story here?

I also mentioned this on Twitter. The Wikipedia page doesn’t currently state a difference in size, although there is a comment on the discussion page that claims they are 30% bigger in the USA.

The challenge was fun because I played with and gained respect for JQuery and the Eclipse WTP. I think it took me longer than Eva because I first looked for tiny AJAX examples in Ruby on Rails and Django. After a couple of aborted attempts, I decided to use JSP after finding this nice example.

I’m sharing my result since I wasn’t able to find one quite as succinct. You can throw the war file in a Tomcat “webapps” directory or import it into Eclipse (ideally the Java EE version with WTP) to hack it. The WTP even has a nifty HTML WYSIWYG design view.

:) [adamm@snax ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a)\
{print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
79 svn
68 vim
57 cd
35 ls
32 pwd
25 ant
20 s
19 mysql
19 find
12 mv

“s” is aliased to “cd ..”.

Here’s how to set up a Freenode IRC account in Pidgin:

1. Open Pidgin; click Accounts -> Add/Edit.
2. Click the Add button.
3. Change the protocol to IRC and enter
   irc.freenode.net as the server.
4. If you have a Screen name (called a “nick” or “nickname” in IRC
   parlance), type it (e.g. MrOpenSource) in the Screen
name field. If you don’t own one yet, make one up.
5. Click on the Advanced tab, and fill in the Real
name field.

Now, register your nickname. This helps people recognize you, protects your
identity, and allows you to send private messages.

1. Click on Buddies -> New Instant Message.
2. Fill in NickServ for Name.
3. Change Account to the Freenode account you just created,
   and click Ok. Now you can “talk” with the
   NickServ robot.
4. The first message you send should be register PASSWORD
   (where PASSWORD is one of your choosing).
5. Next, set an email address. This will give you a way to reset your
   password later should there be a need. Send set hide email on
   to NickServ.
6. Next message should be set email ADDRESS (where
   ADDRESS is your email address)

Then, join #mifos. :)

One problem sometimes occurs when you have connection problems. You may be disconnected from the internet and the IRC server may not realize you’ve dropped off. When you reconnect, you may see what appears to be two of your username in the channel with slightly different names. Like: USERNAME and USERNAME_. Send help release to NickServ, and NickServ will tell you how to release the original, correct nickname.

Further instructions can be found here or by saying help to NickServ. Commands like /msg NickServ help do work in Pidgin.

This guide was heavily inspired by the following article on freesoftwaremagazine.com.

One more final tip: enable the “Join/Part Hiding” plugin to supress the many “so-and-so joined the room, so-and-so left” messages that will likely show up in the channel.

Kasper and Hauser are a comedy team. They’re hit or miss, but when they hit, they really hit. They have a podcast, and a book. Haven’t seen the book, but here are a few hits from the podcast worth checking out:

• Holiday Gift Guide
• Phone Call to the 14th Century
• Mundo de Perros!

rotfl.

I agree that it is basically vandalism in that the reason everyone is there is to see the what’s on the TVs, but it’s still funny as heck.

Like a couple of the commenters, I’ve found the TV-B-Gone indispensable in airports, bars, restaurants; any place where the management seems to think people need a TV playing in the background (or foreground) at all times.
Here’s the thing they probably used to turn off the TVs.

(via Patrick)

Thank you, Eva!

It was nice to have someone I trusted doing the assembly and mounting.