stoney

But Open Source!=Free Software, as I'm sure RMS would point out if he was reading this.

Apple do contribute to open source software, but you certainly don't have freedom when using their products, which is what RMS is all about.

I've often thought about something along these lines - not to run a whole marathon as was originally suggested, more like: "I'm going to run 4 miles after work tonight at an 8:00 min/mi pace, anyone want to join me?"

I definitely think this idea's got legs...

Out of interest - how accurate do you think the distances are? Between my bike computer, Garmin footpod and Google Maps I get three different distances.

The elevation plot is fantastic - it will help avoid any unpleasant surprises when I'm planning new routes! Would be even better if you could somehow link the elevation plot to the position on the route - e.g. if I hover over a point on the elevation chart (or click on it) it will highlight that bit of the route.

I used to use mapmyrun.com for this kind of thing, but they've added so many adverts to it that it's practically unusable now. This is much better.

It might be worth asking about how easy it is to take unpaid leave. Some companies have no problem with employees taking off one or two weeks per year unpaid on top of their regular holiday. Or time off in lieu might be another option.

It's also not obvious that the orange banner won't come back next time you visit the site. I've never closed it before today because I assumed that it would just come back next time, so there was no point in closing it.

Ask yourself what's the Minimum Viable Product? How long would it take you to produce it? Would you learn anything by producing it or would it enhance your CV/portfolio? Would you enjoy producing it? If it doesn't sell could you open source it and either gain some reputation for yourself or help some people out?

Maybe it's worth just doing it regardless of market size/opportunity?

The great thing about const is that if you don't like it you can pretty much ignore it. The only time it might be necessary to deal with it is if you are using a library that returns const objects.

If you do like const (which I do) then you can put it in pretty much everywhere, except if you are dealing with a library that isn't "const correct", but then a bit of type casting will save the day.

That's a big advantage of lots of the C++ features - if you don't like them you can often just ignore them.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter what WordPress considers to be GPLed or not, what matters is what it says in the license.

So what defines a public API? The Wordpress internals are all public so why doesn't that count as an API?

I don't understand why just because something requires Wordpress to work it is a derivative work? Surely anything designed to work on any platform would be a derivative work by that argument? The GPL talks about containing the original Program, not requiring it.

Looking at the quote below from the Software Freedom Law Center, if you replace "PHP" with "VBA" and "Wordpress" with "Excel" it would imply that all Excel macros are derivative works of Excel and so only Microsoft can distribute them.

The following is taken from http://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/, bits in [] are my addition:

The PHP[VBA] elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress[Excel] code. The template[macro] is loaded via the include()[whatever] function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress[Excel] code in memory to be processed by PHP[VBA] along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress[Excel]. The PHP[VBA] code consists largely of calls to WordPress[Excel] functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress[Excel] functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress[Excel] because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress[Excel] functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress[Excel] into a larger work.

Go and speak directly to a potential target user if you can, see what they have to say about it.

The old content is still there, you just need to know where to look: http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/training/2009day01.php

You can probably guess the URL for the next 30 days from that.

That was quick!

Was it a deliberate design decision to make it easy to access other people's reports (by just changing the number in the URL)? Obviously anybody could run any website through the tool, so there's not really anything private about it, but it still feels kind of weird. I've just had a fun 5 minutes seeing what everyone else has been running through it, which I'm not sure they'd all be happy about.

Possibly you could use a long random string instead?

Seems to come up with an error if you accidentally put white space in front of the URL. Otherwise looks like a useful tool.

I don't search this way normally, but if I'm struggling to find what I want I will resort to this sometimes (in the hopes that a suitably titled blog post will appear somewhere).

Derren Brown did a stunt where he flipped a coin and got heads ten times in a row, which is even less likely than Paul the Octopus's 8 in a row success. How did Derren do it? He made lots and lots of attempts. The point is that while Paul the Octopus was improbably successful, how many other world cup predictors tried and failed very early on? Selection bias in action.

Steve Pavlina has a couple of interesting blog posts about this kind of thing, possibly worth a read if you haven't seen them already:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/09/how-to-go-from-intr...

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/09/a-question-for-intr...

[EDIT] The second link is more something for you to think about than useful information

And I suspect that in a world with no more musicians and a frozen archive of music, you would see a strong market demand for new music, so people would become musicians to meet that demand. Eventually it will reach a new equilibrium, with fewer musicians than we have today making less money than they make today. Their income would come from their new music, their back catalogues would be worth much less than they are today.

A different music scene, but not necessarily a worse one.

"You're only as young as the woman you feel" -- Groucho Marx

Well being younger is sort of inherent to her - obviously her absolute age will increase, but her age relative to fleitz is fixed - she'll always be X years younger than him.

But as mentioned elsewhere, there was (and is) no one "British" accent - so the immigrants would have had quite a mix of accents.

I think you meant mean not mode...

Yeah, Posterous are playing a little bit rough, but Twitpic shouldn't respond to that by making it look like they want to make it difficult for users to export their data. If something Posterous have said is untrue (maybe the dying platform part) then call them on it - post growth stats, demand a retraction, whatever. Don't alienate your users to get back at another company.

Which if I was a TwitPic user might be the thing that provokes me into leaving their service.

"Oh, they're trying to crack down on users exporting their data? Better export mine now then..."

I guess that this relates in some way to cases where newspapers complain about companies like Google indexing their sites and effectively repackaging their news stories - and where violating terms of service (civil issue) crosses into unauthorised access (criminal issue).

It all comes down to what precisely am I allowed to do with a publicly available web page? I'm allowed to use a web browser to access it (presumably), but when does something stop being a web browser and start being an automated tool? I'm not familiar with the tool in question here, but could it be argued that in some ways it's no different than a web browser that pre-fetches linked content?

Whether or not it's a good idea to incorporate some kind of cardio depends on what you want to achieve - fat loss? strength gains? larger muscles? better performance on the soccer field? aesthetic improvement? all round fitness?

Being fit means different things to different people. Personally if I can't run 10k in under 50 minutes I don't think I'm fit enough (but that's not my only threshold for fitness), but other people will have their own idea of what they consider to be fit.

Sorry to say that if your exam is tomorrow you've probably left if too late to guarantee doing exceptionally well. Personally I always preferred intense study over one or two weeks to prepare for an exam, but I think that is a personal preference.

Here are some things that I learnt from doing exams. This is aimed at university exams more than high school - the difference being that at (my) university exams typically consisted of a small number of long questions on a particular area, whereas high school was often a large number of small questions.

- Make sure you have good exam technique: work out roughly how long you can spend on each question and still finish the exam. Stick to that timing leaving questions unfinished if necessary (unless you are writing essays, probably better to submit 2 complete essays than 4 incomplete essays). Read the paper through at the start to work out which questions you think you can do well on. Do those questions first. If you get to a hard part on a question don't waste time, skip to the next question and come back to it. You don't have to do the questions in the order that they are given to you. It's a game - score as many points as you can by tackling the easy bits first.

- If it's a math type paper then you might be able to pick up the odd mark here and there by explaining what method you would have used if only you had the time.

- Past papers are the best study tool. If you have them or can get them then do so and work through the questions. Ideally work through one or two past papers with your study materials, then do one or two under exam conditions.

- If you're really out of time to study then you can gamble: pick the bits of the syllabus that you already know well and focus on mastering those bits, ignore the rest. Then hope like hell that the questions that come up on the day are on the bit that you studied. This can work really well or can turn into an utter disaster.

I suggest you start with the "when" part of things - most places have a peak tourist season and a bad weather season. You will probably want to avoid both of those!

That said, I'd give a big +1 to the Australia suggestion. I'm a Brit, but I've emigrated to Oz after I came on holiday here a few years ago. It's definitely a relaxing place to live and there's loads of nice locations (the typical travellers route is down the east coast with a detour to the outback). There shouldn't be much of a language problem (once you work out what Ozzies mean when they talk about their thongs), prices can be anything from fairly cheap (shared dorms in a youth hostel, but not as cheap as SE asia) to very expensive. There's a huge variety of stuff to see.here (beaches, mountains, deserts, weird animals).

I guess this is to do with the sample of users, but I'm very surprised at how low PowerPoint comes out - more or less 0% of users use it? Given how often I have to suffer through one of those presentations I'd have expected more.

I'd also have expected Word to come higher (it's shown as something like 2-3% of users) given that most professionals probably use it to write a report from time to time.