Should I chase a Straight or Flush?

Question: If I am one card away from a straight or flush after the flop, should I keep chasing it even if others are betting? Then fold after the last turn if I end up having nothing?
I am pretty new to poker and right now my biggest struggle is knowing what to call/hope for a big hand and what to fold.
Also, does anyone have a good strategy for calling or raising when you have two pair? I have gotten excited with a 2-pair a few times and staying in and losing to three of a kind.
Comment: "Two pair" is not a meaningful way to describe your hand in hold'em. If you have a small pocket pair and there's a larger pair on board, you have a very weak hand; if you have a large pocket pair and there's a smaller one on board, you have a mediocre hand; if you have XY in your hand and there's XY on board, you have a strong hand--even stronger if X and Y are high-ranking.
Answer: As far as calling with a straight draw or flush draw, I suggest familiarizing yourself with the concept of Pot Odds.  It's an important factor behind making the decision to call or fold with a draw, but it's also something that drives the decision-making behind almost every hand.  If you search this site for Pot Odds, there are quite a few questions with answers about it; alternatively, there are many poker books and instructional sites that explain it.
As you're new to poker, one of the things you'll learn about it (which is enticing to some, and frustrating to others) is that there's rarely an easy, "correct" play--there's many factors to take into consideration.  For example, even two different hands where you have a flush draw can be completely different.  If you have the ace of a suit with the flush draw, that's a stronger draw than when your highest card is a 6, because the 6-high flush can still be beaten if you make the flush, whereas the ace-high flush could be unbeatable.  A flush draw when there's no pair on the board is better than a flush where there is a pair on the board, because if you hit a flush when the board has a pair you can still potentially lose to a full house.
As for what to do with 2-pair, again every hand is different and there's lot of things to consider which you'll learn with time if you keep studying.  Also, like the flush draw example, not every two pair is equivalent in strength.  Having 75 when the board is Ace-7-5 is not as strong as having Ace-7 on the same board--when you have 75, anybody with just an ace can end up getting a better two pair, whereas having Ace-7 is less likely to end up getting beat.  Also, you have to ask if there is a flush or straight possible--if so, your hand isn't quite as strong.
Very generally, two pair is usually a good hand to have after the flop and you should be comfortable betting with it.  But when people start raising your bet and/or if a lot of better hands are possible (higher two pair combinations, straights, flushes), you need to slow down and be cautious of putting in too much.
Answer: Way different questions.
2 pair is a good made hand.  With 4 outs to be a very good hand (full house).  If one pair is on board you cannot count that as your opponent also has that pair also.
Chase a 4 (straight) or 9 (flush) outer draw is way different.  Too much for one question.  Lots of math available free on the Internet or books (check out Sklanksy).
On the flop 4 outs is 41 / 4.  You should call if you are getting 10:1 - call a bet of 1 into a pot of 10.  Any decent bet will price you out.

Should I chase a Straight or Flush?


Are there existing automated approaches to reverse engineering the data types in a binary data stream?

Question: Consider a stream of data packets of a known and consistent size, i.e., N bytes per packet.
Are there existing tools that automatically detect (or estimate) the various data types present and their arrangement in the packet?
My goal is to convert the data stream into a handful of time-series data signals by

deducing the arrangement and types of the data in the stream and
extracting each variable into its own signal array.

For example, the packet might consist of:
[double double int32 single int8 int8 int8 int8]

but all I know is that the packet is 28 bytes long.
Let's assume that the only possible data types in the stream are: double, single, int32, int16, or uint8.
(I don't particularly care if I can disambiguate between char, int8, or uint8.)
Let's also assume everything is stored in bytes (no single bit flags or anything).
Some ideas
Basically what I've tried so far is to exhaustively try every possible combination and arrangement of data types and then apply some heuristics to eliminate possibilities.
For example, I'll cast each set of 8 bytes as a double, shifting over 1 byte at a time, and then compute the variance of the resulting signal.
If the variance of the signal is >1e100, then we can probably safely say we've misidentified the type.
The problems that this approach runs into are that:

the heuristics are hard coded and not dependent on the data
the algorithm can easily mis-classify things, e.g., it can't necessarily differentiate between an int32 and a pair of int16.

I'm also aware of these two related questions: How to analyze binary file? and Tools to help reverse engineer binary file formats,
but these answers seem to only give manual tools that require the user to then play around with the data and make some guesses about its configuration.
So, my question is particularly interested in automatic approaches or tools for this job.
This seems related to this question and its answer, but the methods mentioned there seem to be aimed at a more general task of inferring the communication protocol, and not necessarily(?) the datatypes of the packet's payload, so I'm not sure how suitable these programs are to the task I've described.
Comment: I'm working on this. Please post more specifics. If you have a capture of the packets that would be helpful (the more the better).
Answer: IMO there is not much to add to the linked answer (even though it's focused on network protocols, your task sounds pretty similar).
One more thing you can try is to look at papers citing the mentioned tools to find more/related approaches or tools.


what does `deploy.link` exactly do in `truffle`

Question: Please explain use cases for deploy.link() function in migrations in truffle framework.
How would you use it and for what.
Answer:
EDIT: As stated in the comment by @feihcsim autolink has been deprecated

Let's say ecosystem of your dapp has a library and a contract that calls functions from that library. So you have:
library Converter {
    function weiToEther() returns (uint256) { //return ether value }
}

Then you have contract:
import "Converter.sol";

contract MainContract {
    function getBalanceInEth() returns (uint256) {
        return Converter.weiToEther(this.balance);
    }
}

So, in order for the MainContract to work, you will first need library deployed on the chain and also MainContract needs to know address of that library. To explicitly do this, you use:
module.exports = function(deployer) {
    deployer.deploy(Converter);
    deployer.link(Converter, MainContract);
    deployer.deploy(MainContract);
};

or you can use:
module.exports = function(deployer) {
    deployer.deploy(Converter);
    deployer.autolink();
    deployer.deploy(MainContract);
};

You can also find lots of useful information in this video
Comment: `autolink` has been [deprecated](https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle-deployer/commit/52e63189453e078f64b84aa3a50a2c7991b022b4)
Comment: Wouldn't it be better to use promises by waiting for Converter to be deployed?
Comment: The way it works is that actual address of the deployed library have to be inserted into contracts bytecode before deployment of that contract. So you can wait for async response and than insert it on the right spot. Look at both answers on next question, you can see how it works and how it can be linked in web3 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/6927/what-are-the-steps-to-compile-and-deploy-a-library-in-solidity . My opinion is that you don't have to do it manually since you are using truffle, except you have a valid reason.
Answer: This function adds the given library to the links property of the destination contract.  This ensures that the location of the deployed library can be found when the contract's bytecode is generated.
It also merges all of the library's events in with the destination contract.
API docs here:  https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle-contract#mycontractlinkinstance
See source here:  https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle-contract/blob/develop/contract.js#L539
As mentioned above by @feihcsim, this has to be done manually now:  https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle-deployer/commit/52e63189453e078f64b84aa3a50a2c7991b022b4
Answer: Take the default metacoin project that comes with truffle for example
// deploy ConvertLib into the network
deployer.deploy(ConvertLib);
// Take the deployed ConvertLib address and link it to MetaCoin contract in bytecode
deployer.link(ConvertLib, MetaCoin);
// Now deploy the linked metacoin contract to the network
deployer.deploy(MetaCoin);

Answer: From documentation:

Link an already-deployed library to a contract or multiple contracts. destinations can be a single contract or an array of multiple contracts. If any contract within the destination doesn't rely on the library being linked, the deployer will ignore that contract.

Example:
// Deploy library LibA, then link LibA to contract B, then deploy B.
deployer.deploy(LibA);
deployer.link(LibA, B);
deployer.deploy(B);

// Link LibA to many contracts
deployer.link(LibA, [B, C, D]);


Close gap between bathtub border and wall

Question: In my bathroom, I have a bathtub with a showerhead. The bathtub is diagonal, one side is a semihigh wall, behind is the toilet. The other side is attached to a wall. Problem now is that there is a gap between the upper border of the bathtub and the wall. When I shower, then the water runs there and on the floor, which is annoying to clean. Attached some pictures, because I find it hard to explain. How can I close the gap in a way that I still can remove it easily later? First thing I did was putting cloth on there, but after a year it rotted. Right now, I use some bottles to fix the shower curtain in place, but the curtain now also rots a bit.
Comment: To my eye that tub was never intended to be used as a stand-up shower. Those raised edges are all wrong for the job.
Comment: I also think that, you can see that the previous tenants did a rough job and did not close the drill holes for the previous shower head, and the shower curtain is attached not to a beam, but to a lamp. Sadly, I have to work with what I have. I have to mention that I live for rent.
Answer: It's a bit hard issue to handle, because, as @isherwood indicated, that tub's destiny has been changed.
I can think of two groups of 'fixes' depending on how much You are motivated:
a. change of usage - bathing while standing must go, fix the shower head lower, try to use it kneeling or so, check if sutiation changes, consider using the tub as a bath tub
b. change of environment - consider changing the cloth, but this time let it start under the showerhead to let water be gathered by it before it reaches places You want to avoid getting wet; this must include change of cloth's suspension


Passenger woul'nt install apache module through rvm

Question: I have a server which has passenger working with apache2 and ruby 1.8.7 as system default.
Now I have to upgrade a rails 2 app to rails 3.
so I installed rvm and its installed in /usr/local/rvm/bin/rvm.
Then I used rvm use 1.9.2@global.
Next I installed passenger with rvmsudo gem install passenger. It got installed.
Whenever I run rvmsudo passenger-install-apache2-module, It would give me this message.
Checking for required software...

GNU C++ compiler... found at /usr/bin/g++
Curl development headers with SSL support... found
OpenSSL development headers... found
Zlib development headers... found
Ruby development headers... found
OpenSSL support for Ruby... found
RubyGems... found
Rake... found at /usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p320/rake
rack... found
Apache 2... found at /usr/sbin/httpd
Apache 2 development headers... found at /usr/sbin/apxs
Apache Portable Runtime (APR) development headers... found at /usr/bin/apr-1-config
Apache Portable Runtime Utility (APU) development headers... found at /usr/bin/apu-1-config

Compiling and installing Apache 2 module...
cd /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p320/gems/passenger-3.0.12
/usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p320/rake apache2:clean apache2 RELEASE=yes
/usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p320/rake apache2:clean apache2 RELEASE=yes
/usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p320/rake: line 6: /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p320@global/bin/rake: Success

It looks like something went wrong
Please read our Users guide for troubleshooting tips:
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p320/gems/passenger-3.0.12/doc/Users guide Apache.html
If that doesn't help, please use our support facilities at:
http://www.modrails.com/
We'll do our best to help you.
I don't know what went wrong. Help!!!!
Answer: Never mind. I updated yum and everything works like butter now.


Is there a faster route between Milton Keynes and Cambridge, England than taking a train via London?

Question: It's ridiculous to find that Google recommends taking a train to London then to Milton Keynes. This really looks like a roundabout route. But I can't find any bus services that are faster than this route. Does anyone have a better idea?
Comment: Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/126513/discussion-on-question-by-dr-hope-is-there-a-faster-route-between-milton-keynes).
Answer: Short answer: no, there doesn't appear to be a faster route.
The main bus route from Milton Keynes to Cambridge is the X5 followed by the 905, operated by Stagecoach. Until recently this was a single bus route, the X5, but it seems this no longer runs the full route.
Google Maps puts this journey at around 2h30, including a 30-minute connection in Bedford. That's slower than the train (1h40) but probably a lot cheaper.
Neither of the two main intercity bus operators, Megabus and National Express, seem to operate this route directly. National Express suggest a 5h connecting itinerary, while Megabus don't seem to serve Milton Keynes at all.
Some time in the future, the East West Rail project may lead to faster trains on this route, but as of 2021 that's nowhere close to completion.
Comment: Train from Bedford to MK is an option, but there are no direct trains - change at Bletchley.
Comment: the X5 is also famously unpleasant (at least among residents of Cambridge)
Comment: Its worse than this. The route existed until the 1960s. It was then closed down, and parts of the route just East of Bedford were sold off to housing develoipers, so it cannot be reinstated. Blame the infamous Dr. Beeching, and transport ministers of that era.
Comment: If you get to Bedford presumably continuing by train to MK is an option.
Comment: The trains from MK to London are frequent and fast (some as little as half an hour). Trains from Kings Cross to Cambridge are also quite fast. London Euston to London Kings Cross is walkable, or a short hop on the tube. So all in all, it's not quite as stupid as it looks. But closing the direct Oxford to Cambridge rail line in the 1960s was!
Comment: Great point @mdewey - I found the bus times by filtering Google Maps to only show buses, so I completely missed that.
Comment: I am not that much a fan of google maps for travel planning but traveline.info does not find better options.
Comment: If you are determined you might get from MK to Hitchin by bus, from where you can catch trains to Cambridge. Faster? I rather doubt it. The connections won't be timetabled, even if you can rely on a bus being on time.
Comment: I was in Oxford a few weeks ago and found it absolutely incredible that I could not get a train to Cambridge without going into London.
Apparently there was a scheme at one time to build the line but it was cancelled.
To link these two cities by rail would seem more than obvious to me!
This would fix the MK issue as well :-)
Answer: There used to be a direct bus on this route, the X5 (Oxford - Bicester - Milton Keynes - Bedford - Cambridge), but it was apparently withdrawn in August 2020. I haven't travelled this in quite a while, but I used to take the X5 a lot when I was younger.
The replacement route seems to be Milton Keynes to Bedford on the X5 (about 25m), and then the 905 from Bedford to Cambridge (about 1h30). The X5 arrives at 15m past the hour and the 905 leaves at 15m and 45m past, so the perfect journey would be about two hours (straight from one to the other) and the longer journey would be about 2h30.
Google Maps suggests the two trains are about 1h45, depending on exact timings, so it does sound like that's the faster option. (The old X5 would have been about 1h50)
Comment: Ironically, the X5 from Cambridge to Oxford was an hourly service that was increased to 30 minutes due to demand, before Covid-19 reduced that demand. The competiton with rail, though, wasn't on journey time but on ticket price.
Comment: Worth noting that the route is particularly unpleasant on a coach if you're prone to motion sickness as there are what seems like endless roundabouts
Comment: Depending where in the city the OP actually wants to go, it's possible there's a 10 -15 minute advantage (or disadvantage) arriving at  Parkside versus the station, but it doesn't affect the overall message.
Comment: @aucuparia Milton Keynes is famed for its many roundabouts.  My experience of Bedford is limited but I seem to recall plenty there too.
Answer: Have you considered a taxi?
I'm not sure if that would be considered Public Transport, but there is at least one MK based company offering a connection 'from 75 GBP'.
This seems comparable to a full-priced, off-peak day single, which is 60.40 GBP [edited; see comment for details] according to Trainline. If multiple people are travelling, a taxi may actually be the cheaper option.
As a public transport, and especially trains enthusiast, this would not be my preferred option, but for convenience it may be hard to beat.
Comment: For the prices referenced, both trips are a single. I'd guess you may be able to negotiate a return fare with the taxi firm if you only need a very brief time in Cambridge (it'd probably be worth the driver's time to wait 30 minutes and have a fare home than drive back 2h without a fare), but if it is a short-medium length trip (a few hours to a month) then a train return is likely to be cheaper.
Comment: Not mentioned here is that the day return rail fare is 10p more, making it effectively £30 per direction if you're coming back same day. And the 1-month return is £75.20, which is still a significant saving over two singles. Walk-up singles have traditionally been poorly-priced in the UK for a long time now.
Comment: my God, is it 70+ quid to go from M.K. to cambridge these days on the train?  amazing eh
Comment: @Fattie much closer to £60 for an off peak walk-up fair, but as the question points out, the route suggested is effectively a long dog-leg through London, and thus close to pessimal for pricing purposes.
Comment: It's an interesting point to compare the prices. Does 75 GBP cover a round trip?
Comment: Closely related option is other private car services, in particular ones that specialized in airport pickup/drop off as they are used to long journeys, including often being one way. I did cambridge<->oxford this way for a company event, and the company organized it exactly this way (OTOH, that might be because they hard a relationship with that airport shuttle car company, having used them many times for airports. But I don't think so, the driver seemed unsurprised at the trip.)
Comment: Go go gadget Tory focus on public transport!
Comment: I've edited my answer to include the correct ticket price for MK-Cambridge Off-Peak. I'm located in Berlin and the Trainline website was showing me prices in EUR, not in GBP (!)
Comment: The slower bus route is probably the cheapest alternative after all (but the question was fastest, not cheapest).
Comment: @origimbo  *. . . close to pessimal . . .*  What a lovely touch, that word. Almost a Cambridge maths don word. I take it we all agree on the restoration of the old Varsity Line as soon as possible ? Think of the convenience of it for many informal consultations between Oxbridge researchers !
Answer: In addition to the taxi suggestion, depending on how long you're planning to spend in Cambridge, you may be better off actually hiring a car.  If you book in advance and spend some time searching, and don't need a large car, you may be able to get a car for under £40 a day. Even adding the cost of petrol, if you're going for a day, i.e. returning the within 24 hours of pickup, that may be fairly cheap and fast, too.
EDIT: To expand on Willeke's comment, liftshare.com is a good resource too. Have a look: https://liftshare.com/uk/search/from/milton-keynes - put "Cambridge, UK" as the destination and see if you can find a reasonable match. If you're going the other way, then start with https://liftshare.com/uk/search/from/cambridge and put Milton Keynes as the destination.
EDIT 2: To address the second of Willeke's comments, there are also car share schemes that you may be able to utilise.  Zip car is the most popular one, but there are also Virtuo, EasyCar club, E-Car club, Hiyacar and a number of others.  I haven't check which ones are available in Milton Keynes.
Comment: Are there car share services around there? Might be easier than rentals and can work out cheaper, especially if you need to do it more often.
Comment: I did not mean liftshare, but it is a good method. I meant a kind of rental cars which you can book, rent, unlock and pay for on your mobile phone, without having to go to an office to pick it up.
Comment: @Willeke it's not clear the OP can drive (in the UK).  As the question is locked I can't ask that, but I don't think it was in the comments before.
Comment: Those comments are still available, click on the link to the chatroom.
Comment: @Willeke that confirms my recollection: no one asked directly, and the OP didn't volunteer that information. .  They did however ask for public transport (which is also why I only commented about cycling part of the way, a solution that isn't great in this case anyway)
Answer:
This really looks like a roundabout route.

The UK rail network is pretty London-centric and that area is particularly bad, In particular, once you leave London, there are no connections between the east coast and west coast mainlines until you reach the line that goes from Nuneaton to Peterborough (and on to Cambridge via Ely). From Milton Keynes that is an even more roundabout route than going via London. By rail Milton keynes to Nuneaton is around 47 miles, Nuneaton to Cambridge is around 116 miles, Milton Keynes to Euston is around 49 miles and Kings Cross to Cambridge is around 53 miles.
You can in principle get between the West and East coast mainlines in north London by taking the Watford DC line to Willesden junction, followed by the North London Line to Highbury & Islington and then the Northern City line to Finnsbury Park, but the extra interchanges and slower trains mean it is not a good choice compared to going into the city center.
Trains move significantly faster than even the fastest buses/coaches (both because of higher top speeds and because they don't have to deal with traffic), so even with a fast bus/coach service a roundabout train route can be time-competitive with a more direct bus/coach route. Add to that it appears from other answers that the fast direct bus has been cut back leaving only a regular local bus service for part of the route and it's not surprising that the train wins even with the roundabout route.
There is a currently ongoing project called "east west rail" which if/when it is eventually completed will link Oxford (served by a branch of the Great Western main line) to Norwich/Ipswich via Bicester (on the Chiltern main line), Bletchley (on the West coast main line), Bedford (on the Midland main line), Somewhere on the East coast main line in the St Neots/Sandy area and Cambridge effectively linking all the main lines north of London.
The Oxford to Bicester section of the route reopened in 2015, and the sections from Bletchley to Bedford and Cambridge to Norwich/Ipswich never closed. The section from Bicester to Bletchley is currently under construction.
However the Bedford to Cambridge section (referred to by east west rail as the "center section") is still in the consultation stages and is intended to be built on a completely new route because key parts of the old route have been lost to development, so don't expect it to open any time soon.
Comment: In France the rail network is pretty Paris-centered. (No surprise with such large, dominating capitals.) E.g. Villers-Cotterêts to Compiègne, a 27 km distance, is going through Paris according to Google maps and takes about as much time as the direct bike trip. Unfortunately the OP's route is too long (a bit under 80 km) to be competitive or even desirable with a bicycle.
Comment: @Peter-ReinstateMonica Not just rail. Air travel too.


Boza beverage recipes and experiences?

Question: Anyone to share recipes and experience on brewing Boza beverage?
Comment: "experience on brewing" is definitely not off-topic.
Comment: This should be Community Wiki.
Comment: @Jeff yes, or off-topic... recipe exchanges are off-topic, but discussing a style is not... this falls in the gray area.  I won't vote to close, since we don't have a problem with too many recipe requests, but I just wanted to note this.
Comment: Bob Beer
Good comment. But you need to say the exactly quantities that you use when you start making boza(2 tablespoons and how much water, what temperature the water?) And after 2-3 days.... When appear tge bubbles, and you repeat the process..... What are the exactly quantities that you use again, especially quantity for the older bubnled boza that you add. Thanks a lot
Answer: I come from Turkey; I live in Istanbul at the moment and I like boza very much. I have had some notes on brewing boza, but I've never tried it myself.
The reason I didn't try is mainly that the recipes for the general public calls for bulgur as the main ingredient. (Bulgur is traditionally a very popular food in Turkey and very abundant, so its easy to reach for the general public. Nowadays it has some popularity in Western world as well.)  I'm sure that this is not the case for the boza made by special boza houses, i.e. relatively big industrial firms of the day or by the artisanal shops in the past.
As far as I know genuine product is made from proso millet as the main ingredient. (Here in Turkey, in metropolitan cities the only way to obtain it is to shop from a pet store. Its sold as a bird food. But even if you buy it there's a problem to mill it in order to get rid of its shell. Apparently it needs some sort of milling to use for boza and I don't know how to do it without having special equipment. Because of this obstacle I believe, the recipes for the general public do not mention proso millet.
Some producers seem to add some amount of rice as well.
As those being said I am translating a recipe I found on the Web:
Ingredients:

3 water glasses of bulgur
2 small cups (Turkish coffee cup or espresso cup, lets say) of rice
3 water glasses granulated sugar
1 water glass old (previously made) boza or a match box big of yeast (apparently it means bread yeast in paste form)

Preparation:

Bulgur is soaked in abundant amount of water previous night. (Means that it should be soaked for about 12 hours or so.) The day after, bulgur and rice is boiled to the degree that they are mashed thoroughly. Its treated with a mixer and mashed through a strainer.
That mixture is put on top of a stove with low heat. Sugar is added and stirred until it dissolves. Then taken away from the stove.
It is let to cool to a lukewarm degree. Stirred from time to time. When its lukewarm, the old boza or the yeast which is dissolved in lukewarm water is added to the mixture. Its stirred thoroughly.
The mixture, closed with a lid, in a place around 20-25 °C, is left to ferment for 2-3 days. Its stirred from time to time. When you observe small bubbles in it, its done. Then, its transferred to a cool place.
It is served cold. Up to taste you may sprinkle ground cinnamon on it.

Some comments:

For the yeast: As its the case in most of the world, here in Turkey general public has no refined knowledge of yeasts. The recipe calls for bread yeast which is very easy to obtain and it mentions a glass of old boza as an option which is obviously can serve as yeast to some degree. Most probably traditionally it was prepared with such a way from the point of the yeast. However, I'm not sure if the big producers of the day use some other yeast or not. You may do some experiments if you have some different types of yeast at hand.
For the bulgur-rice and water ratio: The recipe above is blurry for that. You should have tasted a genuine boza before to adjust it. A recipe calls for 2 cups of bulgur and 21 cups water. That may give an idea. I'll write my ratio in concrete terms when I try.
Under any condition, if you have never tasted boza before, its very hard -if not impossible- to tell that what you obtain resembles to genuine boza or not. I'll try the recipe above for myself -beginning tomorrow- and I hope I can say something in a week or so.

Hopefully I may add some other recipe(s) as well. The one I already wrote is a very basic one.
Comment: @Ross I've just realized that you are from Sofia. We are neighbours! That means you have already tasted sufficient amounts of genuine boza. That should make things easier for you. Lets keep on the subject.
Comment: It seems I have never tested this particular kind of "genuine boza". Every country have similar but slightly different set of ingredients and it this makes boza different from country to country and question about the "recepieS" is still valid. I remember some years ago (15) the recipe of boza sold here was different, and tastes different. It was more "proso millet" but now more "wheat". You are right that general public do not know more about exact ingredients and the way it it prepared.
Comment: I know what is bulgur but seems this ingredient to be typical for Turkey, I never saw to be used here. Thanks for you detailed answer.
Comment: @Ross By "genuine boza" I mean boza made by producers with reputation. There might be differences from country to country (Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and so on) and even from producer to producer, but I'm really not sure that the product made from only bulgur will be the widely known boza. So most probably it won't be a "genuine boza". However, today I started an experiment with a bulgur-rice mixture. Its my feeling that the main thing lacks here is proso milet. I'll report the result of my experiment.
Comment: @Ross depending on your observation that nowadays boza is more "wheaty" in Bulgaria, I suggest that still the best form of wheat to be used might be bulgur. Bulgur is a wheat product and its physical and chemical charecterictics is more suitable to brew than the plain (raw) wheat, in my opinion.
Answer: The best boza in Turkey (Vefa, for example) is made from millet. Traditionally, the millet is boiled till it is very soft and mushy, then it's pressed through a sieve. This gets rid of the hulls. In the US you can buy hulled millet; I'm not sure what Vefa does but it's hard to imagine them sitting around rubbing millet mush through sieves by hand. :)
The other issue is "yeast." In Turkish, the word for yeast (maya) refers to anything that's used as a starter, whether it's for cheese, yogurt, boza, bread, etc. But they are all different things.
If you use store-bought bread yeast, your product will be heavily alcoholic, and that's not what you want. (The Greeks and Armenians of Istanbul did make a more alcoholic version but it wasn't considered halal by Muslims.) This may eventually go acidic because of secondary fermentation, like vinegar production, but I think the best way is to start your boza with already established boza. If you don't have that, you can make your own starter as follows:
Soak, then boil a small amount (say 2 tablespoons) of bulgur or millet till very soft, and blend or run through a fine sieve. Add equal parts sugar and water till you get something the consistency (or a little thicker, it doesn't matter) than boza. Cover with a cloth and let it sit out at room temperature for a couple days. In 2 or 3 days it will get sour and bubbly, but if you use this, your boza might not taste quite right. Repeat the process, but this time, after the mixture is cool, add some of your first starter batch. This time the fermentation will go a lot faster, and it should taste like boza - sweet and tart. Now you can make a large batch, and use your starter. Each time, save some of your boza to start the next batch. Once your starter is established, it should only take a day or so to make.
Afiyet olsun!
Scientific info for the biology geeks: :)
What has happened is, the mixture was "colonized" by wild yeasts, some of which produce lactic acid, others of which do not. But lactic acid kills the other bacteria, and the bacteria that produce it "win" the battle. When you start your second batch, you then have a more active culture of lactic acid producing bacteria, and they ferment the batch before the "wrong" bacteria can take hold.
Answer: sour dough bread as a boza starter ?
Answer: You could probably use a little bit of sourdough starter to start Boza. It has all the right microorganisms. I haven't tried it, but I would imagine that you could use vinegar "mother" as well.

Boza beverage recipes and experiences?


Bug with likes and dislikes on careers profile edit page

Question: On the careers profile edit page (http://careers.stackoverflow.com/cv/edit/), if you are editing your technology "likes" and "dislikes" using IE 10 (on Windows 8/F12 reports IE10 "Standards" mode), the suggestion functionality is over-aggressive on the second and successive technology and will overwrite the first choice instead of updating the current one.
For example, if I were to type "per" in either the like or dislike boxes, and then mouse click on "perl" in the suggestions, and then begin typing "jav" and then click "java" - the box will overwrite the first entry with java and the control will contain "java jav ".  If I had typed "java perl linu" and clicked linux in the dropdown, the control will contain "linux perl linu "
By the way - this doesn't appear to happen with the Tags functionality on meta stackoverflow.
Comment: Yep, I see it. Will work on a fix.
Answer: Just tidying up some old bug reports - this one seems to be fixed now.


What's the best software for DJing and mixing?

Question: I've seen Mixxx seems to be one of the few that's not proprietary, but I'm having a hard time choosing what to at least start out with What choice are there? What are some of their strengths and weaknesses?
Comment: Very augmentative and subjective.
Comment: Welcome to Audio.SE and thanks for your question. But [I have to close some of these "product recommendation" requests](http://meta.audio.stackexchange.com/questions/20/what-do-you-think-about-shopping-recommendations/23#23) while we're still early in beta. What we are looking for is users to elaborate and **get *very, very* specific** about the situation you are trying to solve. You can see by all the *"it depends"* answers on this system why "expert answers" will come from very specific questions that can be answered at least somewhat objectively. Please feel free to try again. Thanks.
Answer: VirtualDJ
VDJ is mostly the industry standard and is extremely easy to use. It has almost every feature you could want, its customizable with different skins, and easy to find your way around.
Comment: Free for home use and the sync function takes beat mixing virtually out of the equation
Answer: NI DJ Traktor Pro
TRAKTOR PRO is the new benchmark in DJ software. Mix digital files on four decks, using the high-quality internal mixer or external hardware, and the best effects suite around. Fully primed for professional use, TRAKTOR PRO redefines the art of DJing.
The downside, it costs money...
Comment: Traktor looks absolutely amazing. This would be my first choice.
Answer: The major players seem to be Serato, Traktor, and Virtual DJ.  I hear a lot of people like Mixxx and Deckadence, although they don't seem to have quite the user base.
There's also Ableton Live if you don't necessarily want to use something that looks like turntables.  It's sort of a fundamentally different way of DJing though.  It's like having a giant looper instead of decks.
Comment: +1 There's no right answer to this. It really depends on your style of DJing, what kind of tracks you're playing and what gear you want to use. (i.e. Decks->Serato.[newer]CDJs[withmidi]->Traktor.Controllers->Live/Traktor.etc.)
Answer: This is like asking Windows vs Mac. Both have their pros and cons and their fanbase is also strong.
The best way would be to find what DJ software is ideal for a specific requirement.
Personally I can find all major features in Traktor pro and this list has good comparison of all major DJ software.


Alternative to "Get well soon" card for terminally ill?

Question: My children would like to make a "get well soon" card for a family member. However, this person is terminally ill. What's an alternative message that conveys a similar sentiment?
Answer: As a cancer survivor, who was looking death in the face, I can tell you that the most valuable thing for me was friendship.  Ask your children to make a card expressing what a great friend and companion this family member is and how great it is to have them in your life.
Answer: A "We love you!" card is great. It's honest, direct, and it doesn't rub the terminal condition into the person's face.
Whatever you do, be in the moment, because that's where the patient/person should be. Share the sadness (if she's sad), share the pain (if she's in pain.) Don't be afraid to be funny if something funny has happened that you want to share. Be there for her emotionally.
Good luck. It's hard to know what to say to someone who is terminally ill. Just being there to share the experience is valuable.
I've taken care of terminal patients. In my first year of residency, I had to spend most of my hours in the hospital, and could visit with my dying patients when I wasn't busy. One patient just wanted me to hold his hand and tell him things we were going to do when he got out (he never did). Another wanted me to lie down on her bed with her and let her express her fears (terribly unprofessional, but I just closed the door and climbed in, we would lie shoulder to shoulder and talk.) I took my cues from my patients. The wife of the hand-holder sent me a beautiful card after his death.
Answer: As no one else has suggested it:
'Thinking of you' - lets them know they are in your thoughts.
'Hello!' - simply let someone know you're ready to be there for them, when they need you.
'Pretty picture' - literally something pretty the children have made, as with all of these it shows you and the children have spent some time thinking of the person.
Answer: Maybe a "thank you" for the joy they've brought to your life, including "best wishes" for making the most of the time they have left, or "blessings" if the recipient follows a religion.
All of us (human readers) are going to die at some point.  It's just that some of us can see it coming sooner than others.  So you can reflect on the message and its sentiments with some empathy.


How to check if client has .net 3.5 Client Profile (or any version of .Net) from web site?

Question: Is there anyway to check from a website if a client has a specific version of .Net installed and which one it is so you can offer them different downloads based on it?
Answer: Some browsers include this information in the User Agent header, eg. from the log files on a machine with IE8 installed:
Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+8.0;+Windows+NT+6.0;+Trident/4.0;+SLCC1;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;+.NET+CLR+3.0.30729;+.NET+CLR+3.5.30729;+.NET4.0C;+.NET4.0E)

However this information is not included in IE9's user agent string.
In general: without trying something on the client you cannot be sure.
Answer: You can parse the user agent. There is MSDN page that describes the format, especially, take a look at the .NET CLR <version> token.
However, you can guarantee the information will be present and accurate :  non MS browser, customized user agent string, paranoid user agent, etc. can be factors for users to remove such information.
[Edit] Probably not an easy things to do, but you can use a setup bootstrapper which will detect the installed version to download the actual setup. Microsoft use this technique for some of their products web installers.
Answer: I discovered this issue recently and IE9 when standards mode doesn't include the CLR versions in the User Agent, as noted in Richard's answer. It seems the only way to get this information server-side is setting compatibility view mode. Alternatively if you wish to preserve standards mode then you will need to get the information via java script.
if (navigator.userAgent.match(/\.NET CLR [234].[05]/)) {
    // do stuff depending on presence
}

You can adjust the version numbers or drop off that bit depending on your needs.


How can I launch an Automator workflow upon import in iPhoto?

Question: I use iPhoto to import images from my iDevices and the photos go to the iPhoto library folder.
When I import from my DSLR, I place photos in a folder I organize myself by date and events.
I would like to automatically copy the imported photos in iPhoto to my folder so that all my photos can be found in the same place.
Is is possible to launch an automator workflow upon import in order to perform this task?
Answer: As you don't seem to use the iPhoto library at all, you should use Image Capture instead. It allows you to put your picture directly in a given folder.
You can also create a "transfer module" with automator which can be set to run after an import using Image Capture with imported pictures as input. Thanks to this, you can create an automator process to arrange them in folder as you want.
Image Capture is also scriptable with AppleScript, you might want to take a look at its dictionary if the GUI or Automator don't provide enough flexibility for you.
If you want your pictures both in iPhoto and in your folder, you can configure the automator process to add them in iPhoto once imported in your folder with Image Capture. Lots of workflow are possible, it depends and what you exactly want to achieve.


fft of a complex signal

Question: I am new to dsp and just have a vague understanding of fft process. i know fft is used to convert time to freq domain.... i need to generate a sequence of frequencies such that F=[F1,F2,.....Fn-1] where n=16 and then need to do the ifft of it.... i need these freq sequences to be random... My friend told me that the sequence should have both Cos and sin wave making up (a+ib) an complex waveform.... Because i chose random signal in matlab using command rand and he told it generates random signals but only in positive x axis... he said something about choosing any random points from a circle.. i didn't quite understand what he meant by circle... can someone pls explain in simple words... I browsed all over and found fft only for sin or cos wave... how can i input a complex waveform to the fft so that i get a complex freq sequence becoz i read a fft returns a complex value... so am i supposed to input either sin or cos wave and get a complex output or should i input a complex wave... can someone give me a brief code in matlab since i'm trying to implement on matlab so that i can build on the code.. Also i know we input a time domain signal and th signal is sampled and we get bins which builds the freq.. i'm not quite clear in wat way we r supposed to sample and how it is build.. can someone also give an explanation not involving too much maths... Thank you
Comment: First generate the signal s(t) via an iFFT process from a sequence of frequency values: f = [f0, · · · , fn−1.] Choosing n = 16, set up a matlab script that computes the iFFT, add a pulse waveform to its output, and computes the spectrum of s(t) .Chose F such that |fn| = 1, which gives a flat frequency response. This signal s(t) is a pseudo random sequence... and i need to convolute this s(t) with my pulse waveform (binary seq) to see if i'm getting a shaped spectrum.... this is wat i am trying to achieve
Comment: this is my matlab code------------------------------------%generating uniformly distibuted random frequencies between 1Mhz and 2Mhz

x=1e6+(2e6-1e6).*rand(1,16);

%calculating ifft of frequencies
y=ifft(x);

%generating a pulse wave form with 2Ghz freq with a sample rate of 20Ghz

fc=2e6;
fs = 4e6; % sample freq
t = 1 : 1/fs : (1/(2*fc))-(1/fs) ;
p(t*fs) = 0;
l =  1/(2*fc): 1/fs : 1/(fc);
p(l*fs) = 1;

%adding pulse to the IFFT
for i=1:1:16
data(length(p)*(i-1)+1:length(p)*i)=conv(abs(y(i)),p);
end
Answer: The FFT converts a time-domain signal, which is a series of real numbers, into the frequency domain, as a series of complex numbers.  The IFFT converts back again - from the frequency to the time domain.
If I understand correctly, you are trying to produce a series of random amplitudes in the frequency domain, so that you get a random signal back in the time domain when you apply the IFFT.  However, convential random numbers are all real-valued, not complex.
The result of an FFT is a sequence of complex numbers of the form (x + iy).  This is equivalent to the Cartesian coordinates (x, y).  However, it is often easier to think of the FFT results in terms of polar coordinates (r, θ).  Here, r represents the amplitude and θ the phase.
So one way to do what you want is to generate a random amplitude r, and a random phase 0 ≤ θ < 2π.  Then convert that from polar to Cartesian form.  Convert the Cartesian pair to a complex number.
As for the circles - once you've picked your amplitude r, then picking the phase θ is effectively picking one point at random around a circle of radius r.
Aside: The only difference between a sine wave and a cosine wave is the phase.  If you feed a pure sine wave into an FFT, you will get a particular complex number out.  If you feed in a cosine wave of the same frequency and amplitude, the FFT result will have the same amplitude but a different phase.

fft of a complex signal


Difference between Webparts and user controls?

Question: Difference between Webparts and user controls?
Comment: Asked: Can you give some more context for your question? A little Web research would tell you the basic differences, but are you trying to solve a specific problem? M.
Answer: Hopefully others will reply to this, too, and share their experiences using both.  In my opinion, user controls are easier to develop and web parts are easier to deploy.
You can allow a user to add a web part to his/her page via the web part gallery if you want to give them permission to do so.  To make that possible with a user control you would need to put a wrapper around it.
There are some cases where you must use a user control.  One example is when you want to override a delegate control (e.g. you want to create a custom search control to replace the native search control).
Answer: I feel the most important difference is that the webparts supports personalization which means that changes in the personal view will be stored per user basis. Also as Rob said, the user has the freedom to add/remove as per his need.
On the other hand a usercontrol is more of a kind of static one. So you need to provide a functionality that is not required to be added and removed every now and then.


Can I use Blender in a slow-motion video workflow?

Question: I am capturing video on my Canon 7D at 60fps with the intent to play it back in slow motion at 24fps. There are some Linux-based programs that will do this, but they are usually kind of buggy and I'm running Windows mostly now. How can I convert a 60fps video into a slower (2.5x longer) video at 24fps?
Comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrX1sK_ZQqs&index=27&list=PLjyuVPBuorqIhlqZtoIvnAVQ3x18sNev4
Answer: You can import the movie into Blender and then export it with a different framerate using this technique:
1. Import the movie
Open up a "Video Sequence Editor" in a fresh Blender-scene. You should see something like  below:

Click on Add > Movie and select the movie you want to convert. Make sure that the Blend-option (open the panel on the right with N) is set to Replace and Start Frame is 1 (see picture).
2. Export the movie
Then you go to Render Settings:

Make sure that you have selected the correct Resolution (the one of the video) and the slider is at 100%. Set the End Frame to the same as the Length of your video (seen in the picture 1 below Start Frame). Select the correct Frame Rate (24?) and the right format (I selected AVI Raw but it can be everything you like). Hit that Animation-button or Press Strg+F12 to render.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Comment: The blend option is in the vse properties sidebar (press N) the blend mode is only important when you have multiple strips in the vse. Also of note is that blender will adjust video strips to match the render settings but it doesn't re-time audio strips.
Comment: Where is the Blend option located? I couldn't seem to find it. Nor did I seem to need it.
Answer: First, You need to Output your video as a Image Sequence.
This is a simple walkthrough for your.
Start a new blend file.

Go to Compositor (Shortcut)Ctrl + Leftt Arrow.
Check Use Node.
Delete the Render Layer.
Add Movie Layer by going to INPUT>>MOVIE CLIP.
Load up your movie.
Add a Viewer Node.
In Properties, Select Scene>>Output and set a Folder for your
renders.
In Properties, Scene >> Render Frames , set End Frame option to the
length of your video.
Also make sure, you are using the resolution which matches your video
resolution.
From Render Menu, Select Render Animation or press
Ctrl+f12.

This will render out your video.

Now, Change Your View to Video Editing.
Since you are using the same blend file, you don't need to change the resolution or end frame length. However, change the Frame Rate to lower number (it is just beneath the End Frame below Fram Range Option.

IN VSE press Shift+A and select image.
Go to your Renders Folder.
Press A to select all the render images.
This puts the Sequence in your VSE.
From Render Menu, Select Render Animation or press
Ctrl+f12.

This will output your video to a desired fps with desired encoding at your chosen folder.


Are there any cases where quantum has given insight for classical algorithms?

Question: To be more specific, has it ever happened that we've made some kind of significant improvement to a classical algorithm or problem as a result of some "trick" or insight gained from looking at quantum algorithms?
Comment: cf [classical computing embraces quantum ideas](http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20121218-classical-computing-embraces-quantum-ideas/) Wolchover/Simons inst
Answer: There is at least one example that I can remember, but there are probably more that I am not aware of.
Recently, Maarten Van den Nest and Wolfgang Dürr found a  new classical algorithm (arXiv:1304.2879) to approximate certain types of partition functions (of 3-body classical Ising models on two-dimensional lattices.  Their algorithm is completely classical, but several connections to quantum physics are employed in the design (read below). The algorithm was found to be exponentially faster than previously known algorithms that solve the same problem, at the time of writing*.
*I am ignorant of whether better classical or quantum algorithms have been found a posteriori.
So, there are at least two quantum ingredients used in the design of the VdND algorithm. On the one hand, the authors use a classical-quantum connection between classical Ising models and topological quantum systems (precisely, some color codes). On the other hand, the authors use classical techniques to simulate quantum systems in the derivation of the algorithm: in their proof, they first write a small quantum algorithm for the problem of interest; then, the authors show how to simulate the former quantum  algorithm efficiently on a classical computer, obtaining a classical algorithm (this is rather remarkable, in my view).
Answer: Quantum Proofs for Classical Theorems by Andrew Drucker and Ronald de Wolf is a very nice survey on this topic.
One of the first classical results obtained by thinking about the problem quantumly was a communication complexity lower bound for the inner product function by Cleve, van Dam, Nielsen and Tapp.
Answer: A couple more links on connections and analogies between quantum physics, quantum computation and (classical) computer science (to the already posted answers).
The survey paper of Drucker and de Wolf is already mentioned.
A presentation on simulating quantum computers with (classical) probabilistic models (and references thereof).
A somewhat older paper on $PP$, $BQP$ and $PostBQP$ computation classes (arxiv, 2004).
Quantum Computing, Postselection, and Probabilistic Polynomial-Time
Relations between (classical hard) computation and renormalization techniques in statistical and quantum field theory (arxiv):
Renormalization and computation I: motivation and background
Renormalization and Computation II: Time Cut-off and the Halting Problem
Renormalization group approach to the P versus NP question
Further connections in this direction in Baez, Stay (arxiv):
Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone
A (thermodynamic) Turing Machine which can compute (quantum) Hadamard transforms (arxiv):
A Thermodynamic Turing Machine: Artificial Molecular Computing Using Classical Reversible Logic Switching Networks
Finally a review on Quantum Annealing and Computation connections (arxiv, 2013):
Quantum Annealing and Computation: A Brief Documentary Note


Can Japanese voice actors watch anime for free after an anime episode is finished?

Question: Can Japanese voice actors watch an anime episode for free after an anime episode is finished because they did contribute their efforts in it?
Comment: hentai is anime as well and it's reasonable to assume what answer this question has might also apply to hentai as well
Comment: Well, anime is Japan is basically free on TV and legal online streaming (or internet TV)...
Comment: i don't know but i would figure it's something similar to any games development (which seiyuu are hired for aswell) in which they see a very different product from what the public see, for example a rough version of it as shown in in the NSFW Spoilers in [this answer on hentai voice recording](https://anime.stackexchange.com/a/41653/1587)
Comment: Please, no "hentai" allowed. I would like a fresh and reasonable answer (♡).
Comment: Maybe you should change the question into do they get a free copy (DVD or BR) of the anime?
Answer: Voice actors usually only see the parts of the anime/movie and script, which they record. Their might be special occasions, when they are able to see the complete episode, but that is definitely rare.
Comment: Although what you mention might be true in a general case, it'd be nice if you could also provide some references.
Comment: I used my knowledge to answer this question, because it is something, which I knew. Sadly I am not able to provide references for everything, that I know. But then again, if I would be able to do that, I probably would only know half as much as I do now.
Comment: The "additional references" from the SITE on this answer is bull <_<
Answer: Voice Actors get paid. That is their compensation. And per se, voice actors aren't cheap. To specifically give them only the episodes they appeared in seems to be too much of a hassle. Just think how many side roles there can be in an episode.
That aside, occasionally special voice actors (main roles or special guests) can get gifts from the company they work for. E.g. the German voice actor Gronkh received a "LEGO Batman" Joker plushie for his work of speaking the Joker in the German Translation of the movie, ADDITIONALLY to his payment.
OP asks if watching the episode for free is something NORMAL Japanese voice actor get FOR their work. I say no, because Japanese have a special attitude towards their work. Being allowed to work for your company is something to be honored in Japan, almost as important as getting the money. If a company is especially grateful towards an actor, they may bestow him with additional honor. But that would be something of emotional value, not an episode of their own production everyone can buy. (At most, something like the first item of a collectors edition, and that's more of a gift for the producer. Voice actors would get something tied to their person or the role they spoke.) In addition Japanese are very polite, so it seems out of place to ask for free episodes if one really wants some.
And finally, it is work. Who has worked for a time, knows it is not always your wish to revisit your past work.


How can I measure how effective my testing is? What metrics should I use?

Question: I am working as SQA and mostly do smoke testing and regression testing manually. But I think it is consuming more time and I am not certain about if it's completely tested or not.
Comment: Possible duplicate of [What is a good KPI for software QA?](https://sqa.stackexchange.com/questions/3381/what-is-a-good-kpi-for-software-qa)
Comment: Are you looking for an absolute measure of how effective your testing is? In that case the question Prome linked is close to a duplicate. If you're asking how to *use* metricts to decide if you need to use automated smoke testing and automated regression testing, that's a different and equally important question
Comment: Additionally to that Prome said, I would say that this question is "Too Broad". Context and goals are essential to any useful answer here - there are no best practices, only good practices in certain contexts.
Comment: As usual @KatePaulk asks the best questions. Thank You Kate.
Answer: Measuring test effectiveness is a great question.
So many in our industry focus on "Tests, number of tests, how long they run, how often they fail", all without looking at the key question "How effective is my testing?"
In order to evaluate tests, start with the business value.  Ask questions such as:

What is the software release cycle?
Once every 6 months vs once every two weeks vs. many times a day will require dramatically different strategies to testing and test cases
What failure level does the business consider acceptable?
In some businesses, such as banking there may be little tolerance for failure which may require more testing.  In others such as a startup, consumer growth is everything and even if 10% of customers have errors, this is ok for the business model under operation

Actual KPI (measures) of test effectiveness are hard.  Immature organizations (in terms of quality) will tend to look more to

number of tests
number of bugs*
failure rate

A more mature organization (in terms of testing and QA) may tend to look more at measures for:

Revenue affected
Customers affected
Production testing
AB and Canary testing
Speed to market of new features
An appropriate test pyramid
Mean time between failure in production
Mean time to Recover from failure in production
An appropriate division of Unit, Integrated and UI tests

* the problem with number of bugs is that it can easily end up being a very objective measure, easily gamed and manipulated within the desire of showing improvement.  Measure of quality should be relevant to the development process at hand.  Measuring outcomes by number of bugs found later by other people can lead to fixing individual issues as they come up but not necessarily the underlying processes that need improvements and lead to these issues being able to happen in the first place.
Comment: Thanks for edits.  Note that some rejected as they changed meaning.  When I write 'mean time' i mean the average time between failures.  I do not mean 'meantime' as in  "in the meantime" that is different.  Thank You.
Answer: EDIT: This answer is better suited for measuring automated test suites. But I will keep it here anyways as the question has the automated-testing tag

One concept which blew my mind when I heard about it is Mutation Testing:

Mutation testing involves modifying a program in small ways. Each mutated version is called a mutant and tests detect and reject mutants by causing the behavior of the original version to differ from the mutant. This is called killing the mutant.
Test suites are measured by the percentage of mutants that they kill.

Depending on your compilation cost, this metric can be very expensive to calculate, though.
Answer: Below are the testing efficiency metrics used in qa testing company to evaluate QA team:

Number of defects reported in each stages of application
Percentage coverage in functional testing
Number of defects validated
Number of automated test cases written
Comment: Do you consider these good metrics? I guess it depends on the people as well, but what if this becomes some sort of competition of who can fill in more bugs (because well we have such a metric, right?); similar with the automation tests - just a number doesn't say much about how appropriate they are (do they check what they should?).


ReFit background image?

Question: Is there a way I can set a background image in ReFit boot loader?
I'd like to use my 1280X800 desktop wallpaper, is that possible?
Answer: No. There is no option to change the background to an image, but you can set the color of the background to anything you like.
This involves changing the 'banner' image (rEFIt logo by default). The background color will be set to the color of the top-left part of the banner image.
Changing your banner image involves changing the rEFIt configuration file. Instructions for this can be found at http://refit.sourceforge.net/doc/c3s3_config.html. Hope this helps.

ReFit background image?


Different kinds of editors

Question: I've noticed references to different kinds of editors such as copy editor, line editor and development editor. I'd like to know the different categories of editors and their job descriptions.
Comment: @Standback - You will find much disagreement about the exact definitions.  *Chicago* (#15, I haven't looked at #16's chapter 2 yet) mostly avoids talking about copy-editing and proofreading because of the assumptions about publishing workflow that those terms make.  I think this is a very valuable question for this site to have.
Comment: I originally downvoted this as an unfocused, apparently aimless question which could have been answered by a simple Google search on the question title. I'm not sure the rephrasing is enough to change my mind on this.
Answer: A copy or content editor is the main editor for a project. They're the one looking at the big picture. Are there plot holes? Are the characters consistent throughout the piece? They also do editing for grammar, spelling, typos, etc. but they focus mainly on the story itself.
Line editors edit the piece line by line. They're looking primarily for grammar and spelling problems. They're generally paid less than copy editors since their job is usually easier.
A formatting editor does all the formatting for the book. They do the headers and page numbers, line spacing, and any special formatting that the publisher wants for their manuscripts.
A proofreader is usually the last person who goes over the book. They're looking for anything the others would've missed. They'll look and see if a page number got messed up some how, a typo that got missed, a sentence that got cut off, etc. They're generally unpaid interns or people who are paid with a free copy of the book.
Comment: "Unpaid interns or people who are paid with a free copy of the book"? Sir, you cut me to the quick. Proofreading is your last line of defense before the child of your mind is released into the wild, uncaring world. Good proofreaders catch the big mistakes and the little ones, and polish everything in between. I work as hard at proofreading as I do at content editing, and frankly harder than I do at DTP. And if I were paid in free books, I couldn't pay for my groceries.
Comment: *Line editors [are] generally paid less than copy editors* - It depends on the brief and the skill set.  It makes economic sense, and is common in academic publishing, for the project editor to delegate a line edit to an editor with subject expertise, and leave it to a less highly skilled copy-editor to work with the author to get the final copy.
Comment: *[P]roofreader[s] [are] generally unpaid interns or people who are paid with a free copy* - This made me smile, and yes, it is probably true most of the time.  Of course if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, and this valuable quality step won't work so well.  I rather think the *Harry Potter* books got a higher class of treatment than this.
Answer: Formal definitions vary. Here are some resources explaining various versions of the distinctions:

An editorial services guide.
An editor's blog.
Another editor's blog.
Comment: I updated your link, and here's another one: [How Editing Works](http://neilfein.com/how-editing-works/)
Answer: The different kinds of editing come about through differences along two dimensions: first, the role of the edit in the journey from author's first draft to final typeset; second, the constitution of the editing as a process.
An answer of mine to a different question explains a difference in terms of role:

There are different kinds of editing. Proofreading is traditionally the last check of a text that has been prepared by typesetters, where it is assumed that the text is pretty much ready for publication. Then it is a matter of "fix spelling errors and very minor grammatical errors", but calling attention to the author of wider difficulties is entirely inappropriate. This is because time is usually very tight, because the publishers has a deadline, and large fixes cause costly work for the typesetter.
With editing before that stage, generally called copy-editing or developmental editing, bigger changes to the text are appropriate, and discussion with the author becomes useful.

The next big difference is in terms of what activity the edit unit is.  The most important difference here is between line edits, which means the activity starts with the editor receiving the manuscript, who then works through the text and ends when the edited manuscript is handed back.  The alternative is an edit which involves some kind of interaction and iteration.  Proofreading almost always consists of a line edit, but earlier editing might follow one or other form.  Cheapskate publishers might have a "copy-editing" process that consists of the project editor delegating a first line edit to someone, passing the edited version back to the author to correct, and then perform a second line edit themselves.  Such a minimalist editing process would not be called developmental editing, which is more of a collaborative, exploratory process between editor and author.  Developmental editing generally is a kind of high-grade copy-editing.
Note that there's lots of hedging words, like "traditionally" and "generally", excepting only the definition of line edit.  That's because the variously named roles are not fixed, but evolve as the publishing workflow changes, as it inexorably does.  For instance, the proofreading activity is quite different now, where electronic formats allow much more automation in the typesetting process, than was the case thirty years ago, when proofreading most often meant a demanding reconciliation of the final draft approved by the project editor to the original version submitted by the author, to eliminate the many errors that the editing process was sure to have introduced.  So it is no surprise that there is difficulty finding crisp, widely agreed-upon definitions.
Comment: This answer has received a downvote: I'd like to polish this answer, and I'd be grateful to know the objection to what I wrote.

Different kinds of editors


Time Series Forecast - Complex seasonality

Question: I have a daily time series that I am having issues forecasting accurately.The time series is stationary and it looks  I have tried ARIMA(3,1,1),(0,1,1)- 7 Period, auto.arima(D=1), Holt-Winters, nnetar, tbats, hybridModel and accuracy(RMSE) of test dataset is about 4 which is not good at all. Seasonality in time series looks like  and I can see in acf and pacf  plots that there is weekly seasonality. Is there any other method/technique I could use to forecast this daily time series more accurately? I can send the data if needed.
Comment: send the data .... in a csv file ... show first date and country also take a look at https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/313810/simple-method-of-forecasting-number-of-guests-given-current-and-historical-data/313852#313852
Comment: Information such as national holidays should be treated as exogenous not endogenous and should therefore be included in the model as external regressors. . This is also true of day-of-the-week ... day-of-the-month ... week-of-the-month ... month-of-the-year ....AND of course any level shifts or seasonal pulses or time trends or pulses ...   In addition there may be the need to include arima structure. ARIMA modelling by itself is useless for data that is driven by HABITS .
Comment: simple solutions that ignore detecting anomalies and level shifts and time trends while assuming that day-of-the-week factors are constant over time and also require the user to input the window of response around each holiday should be studiously avoided.as it is important to fully extract/detect latent structure..
Comment: Thanks for the reply IrisgStat. Would you happen to have an example of timeseries prediction with external regressors?. Also, how/where do i attach my dataset?
Comment: I sure do .. a couple of hem . I just don't know how to upload a csv file to a SE post.. Please either tell me how to do that or contact me offline and I will email it you.
Comment: via my posted email address
Comment: Just emailed you. If you don't mind please email the examples of time series prediction with external regressors after you get my email.
Answer: Your series is not stationary - by definition a seasonal series is not stationary. If it were stationary then the d order in your ARIMA model would be 0.
For complex seasonalities, your best option is TBATs. You can also try Facebook Prophet if your time series is daily or above (based on your plot I assume that it is).
Comment: Alex - Facebook Prophet turned out to be very helpful. Did not increase accuracy as much but I will take advantage of the capability it has to add holidays and see if that helps. I appreciate your help.
Comment: Hi Alex, thanks for they reply. I guess I was misinformed about a seasonal series properties but it does make sense what you say. I already used TBAT and it it did not do so great. I will check out Facebook Prophet and come back to you about outcome.
Answer: I took your 1461 daily values http://www.autobox.com/dave/moroni.csv representing visits to a particular lab/clinic for the 4 year period 2014-2017.
and predicted the next 31 days.    . The Actual/Fit and Forecast is here ...     with a less busy picture here
showing actual and forecasts without limits . The residuals from the model suggest randomness ..
 and here
. The model is here in 3 parts   and here  some more pulses were identified leading to this  with an ar(1) component
here are the stats for the model ..
Comment: .............................................................................................................
Comment: Thank you for the insights IrishStat. Your quick reply took me for surprise(less than 10 minutes). I will try a machine learning technique to be able to incorporate variables that could impact prediction.


Sephardic Recordings/Melodies of Asheth Chayil

Question: Does anyone have any links or recordings of Asheth Chayil in the Sephardic/Mizrahi tradition? I'm sure there must be some out there, but i'm not having much luck finding any.
Answer: My usual source of melodies from various traditions is: http://www.piyut.org.il/english/
For Eshet Chayil they don't have many sephardig/mizrahi recordings. I could find the following: a Tunisian melody and a Yeminite melody.
There is a iraqi melody on youtube that is close to how I have heard it being sung in my own family
Comment: Close huh? Considering that in all the Sefardi minyanim I've ever been at, people in the same minyan singing along with the hazzan all sing differently than each other, this tune might actually be the same exact one as yours:)


How can I view "or 71 others" in Fitocracy quests?

Question: There are some quests with a wide variety of exercises available, eg. the "Hello, Sports!" quest. It shows only some of the exercises by name and displays only the amount of the others.
I have not found a way to find out which other activities are in this list, even though the first exercises seem to rotate randomly every time you refresh the exercise tracker.

Is there a way to view those other activities?
Answer: From the website go to:
www.fitocracy.com -> click "You" in header tabs -> Click "Quests" in sidebar -> Click "Available" in content area.


How can I as beginner learn Sound Design cheap?

Question: I want to make a short animation video with some terrific 7.1 audio. Let that be my goal. Now where can I even begin to learn how to create small to big cinematic sounds, record good dialogue and how to mix everything so you feel as you're transported? I don't have 60k to pay for the university, so what can I do to to learn Sound Design for cheap?
Comment: Youtube, free. Search a little.
Comment: What about paid courses?
Comment: Of course it is always an alternative to pay for a courses. But which of them are worth it for you? I have no idea. Regardless, I and most of us and probably you, only learn from mistakes. So make many and learn a lot.
Comment: There are no short cuts - to be good at anything you learn it, you practice it, and you move from being terrible at it to perfecting it. That takes time, money or both.
Answer: The best advice I can give is to make a lot of mistakes. And learn from them.
So, if you really are serious about this:

start today. Select one animation, any animation already there, download it to your computer. Import it into a video editor -- I personally like Davinci Resolve as it is extremely complicated and very free. (Sorry should say extremely competent and free of cost).
record sound using any microphone you have, maybe in your computer or your phone or anything really.
combine the sound and video and admire the disaster. First mistake done, only about a few thousand left to do.

So, once you have done your first disaster, take millimeter steps forward towards getting better. The point is not to take mile long leaps, but to take small, small, miniature, baby steps. Every day. Make one new full recording + editing every day. Every day. In a year you have made about 365, most of them total disasters, and has learned a lot. You will probably have upgraded your software and hardware a bit -- but remember it is not the equipment that does it. Never believe the equipment makes the difference. Never believe that equipment makes it. When upgrading equipment go dirt cheap and when possible used and learn exactly what really makes a difference.
So after about one hundred mistakes and a thousand Youtube videos on how to make sound for video, you may now be ready to take the next step. The big point is that you now have invested not a lot of money but a lot of time, and now know more than anyone else in the whole world where you want to go next.


Tattoos and after work events

Question: I have tattoos covering the upper portion of one arm. I of course keep these covered during work and would not consider letting them show in an event where I was representing the company to the public. I am curious, however, if it is appropriate for my tattoos to show in after work events that are purely social in nature. For instance, next month the firm will be taking the employees out to a baseball game. Being that it will be the middle of July and I live in the southeast, I would prefer to not have to wear a long sleeve shirt to keep my tattoos hidden. I have just begun at my job (I am actually an intern) and haven't learned what the culture is regarding tattoos. What is the most commonly accepted etiquette when it comes to tattoos and work sponsored events?
Comment: This is not a duplicate of the linked question, I'm really not sure why people think so. There is a distinct difference between interview etiquette and after-hours events such as a baseball game.
Comment: This is going to vary wildly by region/culture. I don't think anybody would blink in most major cities.
Comment: Tattoos are so mainstream these days. Within a generation, the employee who **doesn't** display a Celtic Japanese Koi pond weave on rolling up a sleeve will be the one considered weird! That said, ask your colleagues or your employer.
Answer: Tattoos get reacted to on an individual level not a group one, although a common group consensus can be derived, by the majority of individuals.
As an example, I work in the City of London, for a very old school financial institution. I made it clear at my interview that I have tattoo's but do not expose them in the workplace as it may cause offence to others. The consequence is that, I can never roll my sleeves up or undo my collar, I have a three quarter Japanese Style Suit and Sleeves (from knees to throat and full arms). People at work have noticed my tattooed wrists when I'm doing whiteboard presentations and my shirt cuffs ride up. We never mention it.
I would suggest that you err on the side of caution and assume everyone will be offended and keep covered. The tattoo etiquette is currently very confused as more and more people in mainstream society are revealing body mods that hither too would never have been shown. Act as though it is normal, treat others with respect and consider their feelings in regard to this.
Answer: A generally sound idea is - "don't be the first".
As several here say - the reaction is individual by individual, although it does play into the overall corporate ecology.  In other words - if the person that is put off by the tattoo is someone without a lot of impact, no big deal... but it's just as likely that some senior executive is going to react badly, and that's a bigger deal.
For almost anything unusual, my tip is - don't be the first.  Let someone else take the first step on this.  For the super-cautious, keep an eye out for tattoos, wait for any fall out and if there's none, show your tattoos at the NEXT corporate event.  For the less cautious, keep an eye out at this coming event, and if you see others display tattoos, feel free to follow along.
This is particularly true where you are new to working this job, new to the company, and thus potentially more dispensible than other employees might be.  In general for unusual body/fashion choices, my rule of thumb is:

I break the norms more often when I am more certain that I am awesome and indispensible.
Be sure that whatever you show, it's PG - tattoos of nude people, or violence, or anything particularly negative or gory are a higher level of risk than something relatively benign.
Know the culture first - there's no one right answer, so have a sense of the culture.  A nice test balloon might be to raise the concept of tattoos in a lunch conversation, and get a test of the reaction.
In the US - the coasts are more liberal of unconventional dress, and urban culture tends to be more liberal than country/suburban culture.  Tattoos are particularly funny, as certain cultures react very differently - not just ethnicities - there are quite a few tattoos in the military, for example.

The absolute safe bet is not to sport them.  As with many things - you can't retract knowledge, so if you are really worried, find yourself a light, long sleeved shirt.  There's some great loose cotton shirts out there.
Answer: I don't think "most commonly accepted etiquette when it comes to tattoos and work sponsored events" exists, and even if it did, would be pretty irrelevant. You don't live with some "average" or idealized company but  a very concrete one.
Therefore you shall figure out the local rules. If you have an ombudsman position in the company I suggest to consult there first. If not, I'd suggest starting with colleagues who you trust, then possibly the boss or some HR folks.
(In general I would not think it be a problem of any kind, but the fact you feel for asking here raises suspicion.)
Answer:
What is the most commonly accepted etiquette when it comes to tattoos
  and work sponsored events?

In my many years working, I haven't found a "most commonly".
The culture regarding tattoos is very contextual, and likely varies depending on your company and the the individuals you work for and with. Where I work today, it would be frowned on. Where I worked about 10 years ago, it wouldn't have been surprising at all. Different people, different company cultures, different contexts.
While many people and many companies wouldn't think anything of a tattoo, others wouldn't be as tolerant.
Until you learn the specifics of your situation, err on the side of caution and keep it hidden. If you see no tattoos at all during this event, that's a strong sign. If you see may others in similar roles as yours with tattoos, that too is a sign. If you see the CEO with a tattoo - Bingo!
Good luck!

Tattoos and after work events


performing load test for encrypted application using Jmeter version5

Question: how to do load test for encrypted application using Jmeter, where the application is encrypted across all pages? The application is developed in angular JS technology.
Comment: "Encrypted application" can be 300.000 things under the sun. Could you explain better your stack and security schemes?
Comment: Please edit your answer with more information. I assume by "encrypted application" you mean that it uses https and maybe also encrypts traffic between the web server and the data store. What have you tried? What were your results? Without more information we can't help you.
Comment: while recording the encrypted using jmeter we are not able to view the actual data after recording it displays in encrypted mode while do playback we are getting the empty response though we have added SSL certificate.As it has  random encryption keys where it generates the certificate   while accessing page.
Comment: The data has been encrypted using RSA token on this application.
Answer: If by encrypted you mean SSL or TLS then you don't even need to do anything, according to SSL Encryption chapter of the JMeter documentation

The JMeter HTTP samplers are configured to accept all certificates, whether trusted or not, regardless of validity periods, etc. This is to allow the maximum flexibility in testing servers.
If the server requires a client certificate, this can be provided.
There is also the SSL Manager, for greater control of certificates.


switching from windows 8 to Ubuntu. A few questions to ask before hand

Question: I have the microsoft office applications and am wondering if I will still be able to use these. If I want to switch back to windows will I be able to do so? I have an Acer ultrabook with a 30gb ssd. It has a 5 second start up time because of this I am told. Will I be able to still have this quick start up time if I use Ubuntu? thanks.
Comment: Consider asking two separate questions.
Comment: "It has a 5 second start up time because of this I am told" Because of what?
Comment: Because of the SSD.
Answer: It is not necessary to switch directly from Windows to Ubuntu - you can install Ubuntu next to Windows if you want, having the ability to choose which one you want to boot at startup.
Ubuntu will not by default install itself to the SSD, rather it will make room on the larger HDD and install itself there. You will still be looking at pretty darn fast boot times - my guess would be under 20 seconds on that hardware. However, if at some later point you want to erase Windows, it is possible to install Ubuntu on the SSD and probably get even faster boot times. Using the SSD to get fast read/write speeds for a normal data partition is also an option.
Microsoft Office 2013 will not work on Ubuntu. However, if you have the installation disk and product key for Office 2010, it is likely to work using Wine, which is the software we sometimes use to install Windows applications on Linux. Linux has an alternative to Microsoft Office called LibreOffice that you may want to try. It comes preinstalled.
Do test out all the hardware using the "Try Ubuntu" option when you boot the live DVD/USB. You want to check the graphics and WiFi, especially. If the keyboard or LCD backlight is not working, check online to see if there is a guide to get it working.
Comment: You can even download Libreoffice and try it out on Windows:http://www.libreoffice.org/download/system-requirements/
Comment: Thank you so much. I will download it and I'll see if it is for me.


The opposite of "one size fits all"

Question: Is there a neat word or phrase that summarizes the opposite of "one size fits all"? "One size does not fit all" is not an option. What am looking for is something that means "different sizes for anybody, for every occasion etc.".
Comment: There is [made to measure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_to_measure) and [tailored](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tailored) which are both also antonyms of [off-the-rack](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/off-the-rack).
Answer: Here are a couple possible opposites:

"Made to order" — the product is customized each time to a new specification. This is the extreme opposite.
"Available in a variety of sizes" — there are several sizes available for the given product.
Comment: For the record, I do also like "custom-fit" and "bespoke". Bespoke has made it into the American lexicon, if not broadly.
Answer: Consider custom-fit

personalized with regard to shape and size

A Britishism that is sometime heard in the US is bespoke

(Of goods, especially clothing) made to order:
  a bespoke suit
Comment: Bespoke is rather obscure.  Most people in the US would not figure it out even from contextual clues.
Answer: context specific

Implementation of software solutions are typically context specific. The implementation depends on the amount of data used, hardware available, the business user's priorities, the level of ability of the users etc.
Answer: This may be venturing away from English usage and into slogans, but maybe you could write "Our Sizes Fit All"? Realistically, it might be best to specify which sizes instead of groping for a single generic word to say "various sizes," although that phrase might work.
You could call it "sized" clothing, however it's much more common to use the word in a combination: an average-sized insect, an awkwardly sized package.
Answer: You could also consider bespoke (definition from http://www.merriam-webster.com):

made to fit a particular person
custom-made
dealing in or producing custom-made articles
Answer: There are a couple of idioms which cover the basic idea that everyone's needs or wants are not identical:

Horses for courses
To each his own

The adjectives/adjectival phrases custom, customized, fitted, tailor-made, individually made, configurable and unique-fit also exist.

The opposite of "one size fits all"